Cash-strapped NHS Wales Networks and Planning—which racked up a staggering £183 million deficit last year—seems to have found a pot of gold after all. They’re splashing out on an Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Champion for the Women’s Health Network, with an annual salary that ranges from a jaw-dropping £105,504 to £139,882. Meanwhile, a Senior Biomedical Scientist, responsible for conducting vital tests to aid in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, is only pulling in a paltry £44,000 a year….

“Taxpayers in Wales are sick of seeing their hard-earned cash wasted on pointless non-jobs.”

The lucky DEI hire will be tasked with crafting “inclusive”  leadership and services. The position offers a generous array of benefits, such as the option to work from home as desired and a 42% discount on a new bike for those who prefer cycling to the office. Nice work if you can get it…

While Rachel Reeves goes on about making savings in government, over at HMRC the nation’s tax overlords have been busy designing more “learning products” to enforce the agency’s equality and diversity goals. If only they could be bothered to pick up the phone…

HMRC’s 25-strong Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion team spent 2023 putting together an optional “Building an Inclusive Workplace” training module to “allow colleagues to upskill themselves in inclusive practices.” That’s £4 million in salaries for woke jobs well spent…

It turns out the training is so boring that the EDI team itself can’t even be bothered to do it. Guido can reveal that as of last month a measly 4 out of 25 had bothered to complete it. A completion rate of 16% – no inclusivity here…

The government is making noises, as it often likes to do, about clamping down on public sector woke wastage. New guidance to civil servants instructs them to “cease all external Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion spend in the Civil Service unless signed off and cleared by Ministers.” This comes as research by the TaxPayers’ Alliance today reveals spending has more than doubled in the last four years on “staff networks”, which take up civil servants’ time and waste taxpayer funds on events. Examples include Black History Month’s “All about hair – an insight to afro-textured hair” – hosted by the DVLA…

£652,000 in taxpayer cash has been spent by quangos on these networks since 2020 and the amount of staff time taken up by their running is equivalent to around 80 average full-time employees. Transport for London is the worst offender with a total of £120,000 spent and 140 events hosted, followed by the House of Commons at £96,000. £104,248 in taxpayer cash was spent in 2019/20 – that’s now ballooned to £229,767. If this trend continues, by 2040 these networks will cost the taxpayer approximately £2,511,610 annually…

The actual cost is likely to be higher. HMRC admits it does “not ask that colleagues centrally report time spent engaging with Staff Diversity Networks”, so staff time spent on them remains untracked. New figures this week reveal trust in the civil service has fallen by 6% in a year. Guido wonders if the two might be connected…

John Glen is speaking at the Institute for (Big) Government’s annual conference today to announce plans for a ““lean, keen and productive” civil service that include increased use of AI and new line management to “help tackle rare instances of unchecked poor performance or serious issues with agreed office attendance“. The government is pointing to surveys that show “learning from others” and staff interaction works better in the office compared to at home. The phrase “No sh*t, Sherlock” comes to mind…

Only 54% of tax overlords at HMRC were in the office this month according to the latest data, all while 64 civil servants in that department alone spend time running woke “diversity networks” of every stripe. HMRC even admits it does “not ask that colleagues centrally report time spent engaging with Staff Diversity Networks” so it cannot keep track of them. The government’s answer is to force them to meet outside of working hours or on lunch breaks…

Jeremy Hunt vowed to cut civil service numbers at Tory conference last year when its ranks actually grew by 3.2%. Adding 15,400 more pen pushers to the blob…

Former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell popped up on the Today programme this morning to tout his new book, and in the process of plugging the dossier, the Rest is Politics host dealt a characteristic jab at the Tories: 

“One of the problems we’ve got with politics is that the gene pool for politics is getting narrower and narrower and narrower. Particularly at the top levels. Particularly, having had 13 years of this Tory government. And I think we’ve got to broaden the gene pool. That means getting more young people interested in going into politics. It means getting people from different backgrounds going into politics.”

Indeed, back in the good ol’ Blair days, under Campbell’s watch, surely Labour were leading the charge on diversity? Not quite. Credit where credit is due, in 2002 Labour brought in the first black cabinet minister, Paul Boateng. Yet, for Tony and Alastair’s first five years at the helm, the cabinet was precisely 0% ethnically diverse, and the pair soon ran out of steam on the issue. Only two Black and Ethnic Minority (BAME) individuals would ever make it to Blair’s cabinet. Quite the war room on diversity. 

In comparison, Sunak’s cabinet is 16% BAME, Truss’s was 30%, and Johnson’s 18%. The average age of Blair’s revolutionary 1997 cabinet was 51, whereas Johnson’s was 47.7, Truss’s 49.3, and Sunak’s has risen incrementally to 52. Of course the Labour Party has never elected a woman leader never mind Prime Minister. Thirteen years of Tory government with younger and more diverse cabinets than Blair ever had. Bad Al’s lying again…

Guido has crunched the numbers and Liz Truss’s Cabinet just pips Labour’s with a higher proportion of ethnic minority members on their front bench. The Big Four do a lot of heavy lifting, with Liz herself, James Cleverly, Suella Braverman and Kwasi Kwarteng leading the Cabinet, meaning for the first time in Britain’s history there’s not a single white man in the great offices of state. Ranil Jayawardena, Kemi Badenoch Alok Sharma and Nadhim Zahawi take the Cabinet up to seven BAME members: 23% of the total. 

By Guido’s reckoning, Labour’s shadow cabinet has six ethnic minority members, or a mere 20%.

Meanwhile, Labour continue thrashing the Tories on gender and state school educations. All completely irrelevant, but nonetheless, interesting to note …