Two Whitehall departments have confirmed they held a series of panicked meetings debating how to quit Stonewall’s controversial (and lucrative) Diversity Champions programme. Rather than solving the housing crisis or reducing the NHS backlog, new FoI responses reveal both the Department for Levelling Up and the Department for Health had a total of seven meetings – two at DLUHC, five at DHSC – trying to hash out the terms of their divorce with the group before eventually announcing they were pulling out. A Civil Service source described the discussions to Guido as “crisis meetings”…

FoIs were also sent to the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Justice, BEIS, and the BBC. The Cabinet Office and the Ministry of Justice both issued Section 12 notices, claiming it would simply take too long to determine how much time they spent debating the issue. BEIS and the BBC ignored the requests altogether. Guido can only assume it was because the meetings were so brief they just forgot to record any minutes.

TaxPayers’ Alliance research director Duncan Simpson said:

“Civil servants should be spending their time delivering high quality but cost-effective public services, not on navel-gazing discussions about the minute details of the diversity agenda.”

This all emerges in the wake of the government’s new Civil Service Diversity & Inclusion Strategy, which is supposedly designed to “ensure value for taxpayers money.” Although the MoD was still busy tweeting definitions of ‘queer’ and ‘questioning’ as Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine…