The strategy, announced today, has seen the government commit to:

• Building a dedicated ethnic minority programme to improve the representation of ethnic minority staff at the most senior levels across the Civil Service
• Creating a diverse leadership taskforce reporting to the Cabinet Secretary
• Publishing a data dashboard tracking progress on diversity & inclusion targets by April 2018
• Establishing a new framework for measuring inclusion
• Embedding a diversity and inclusion in single departmental plans.

Providing an update on the Civil Service’s progress with increasing the diversity of its workforce, government revealed:

• While 42% of current senior civil servants (SCS) are women, in 2017 49% of all new recruits into the SCS were women. The proportion of women at SCS level (42%) is now higher than the representation of female executives and board directors in FTSE 100 companies (26%)
• The proportion of ethnic minority civil servants has increased from 9.4% in 2012 to 11.2% currently
• Representation of disabled people within the civil service has increased every year since 2010, from 7.6% to 9.9% in 2017.

• Want to comment on this story? Email us at [email protected] or tweet us below to tell us your thoughts. We will run comments online in a round-up at the end of the week.

Email story to a friend