Much was made during the last government of the need to reduce civil service headcount. Jeremy Hunt specifically targeted useless diversity roles plaguing Whitehall. Guido thought he would see how much progress has been made on that front this year…

Guido fired Freedom of Information requests to all major departments to inquire about the headcounts of their central Equality, Diversity and Inclusion teams. It will surprise no one that far from cutting their diversity staff the civil service is actually increasing their numbers. One agency is now offering pay rises to those who ‘champion diversity‘…

DSIT, the Cabinet Office, DBT, MoJ, HMRC, and the Home Office have all expanded their diversity teams since the start of the year. More staff are of course needed to organise further George Floyd struggle sessions and meetings with witches...

The Home Office takes the inglorious first prize with a whopping 37 staff in its central DEI team. Only the DWP has honourably cut more than one DEI staff member since the start of the year, getting rid of about ten Higher Executive Officers. The rest have maintained their numbers. The woke blob marches on…

It’s a new dawn for work-shy civil servants. The proportion of them actually working in the office was published on a weekly basis from the summer of 2022 as the government pushed to get pen-pushers to show up for work. No wonder they were to elated to see the back of the Tories...

That data hasn’t been published since May before the election campaign. Now Guido is told by the Cabinet Office, after weeks of delay, that “ministers have not yet given a view on this matter“. Amid Starmer’s gushing “respect” for civil servants, trying to get the blob to actually do some work is a task that’s fallen to the wayside…

UPDATE: The government has revived the work from home data, now published less frequently than before on a quarterly basis. 4 months later…

While our tax overlords at HMRC desperately try to shut down their phone lines, they’re happy to funnel taxpayer cash into other priorities. A Freedom of Information Request has discovered that the department’s central Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Team has grown by a fifth in just six months since the start of the year. HMRC has always sought to be as inclusive as possible in its tax collection…

HMRC stresses it has “not included staff elsewhere in HR whose role may include an element of equality and diversity work within their overall duties.” Under a Labour government desperate to prove its “respect” for the blob expect those numbers to keep ticking up…

Another day, another case of the Civil Service’s obsession with diversity and inclusion. Over at the Information Commissioner’s Office, which is responsible for information rights and data privacy, that obsession has a price tag…

The around-1,000 staff at the government body are given pay rises within their job “grades” based on how well they adhere to its core “values“. They have this year been changed from “Ambitious; Collaborative and Service-focused” to “Curious; Collaborative; Impactful; and Inclusive“. Staff must now display their devotion to the woke cause to climb up the greasy pole…

To get to Career Band 2 they have to demonstrate that they “promote a culture that values diversity” and “pro-actively role model and promote and inclusive workplace.” A promotion to Band 3 requires that they must “champion diversity in practical ways”, “take a keen interest in expanding knowledge of inclusion” and “focus on achieving a wider equality, inclusion and diversity goals [sic] rather than individual tasks.” Whatever any of that means…

Guido hears staff at the ICO are concerned these new word soup-based requirements are another way for pay rises to be kept to a minimum, by claiming that diversity goals haven’t been met. The body is currently in the middle of a 12-month pay freeze, after all. Taking woke cynicism to new lows…

The ICO tells Guido: “We have nothing to add.“ Better get brushed up on your wokespeak, folks…

It wasn’t difficult to guess the mood of the civil service on welcoming their new left-wing overlords. They rolled out the red carpet…

The renamed Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government (formerly DLUHC) internal news page has plastered on its front a blog post all about Rayner’s entry as Secretary of State, breathlessly titled “Come Rayner, Come Shine” – her words in the all staff call. Was the mask ever on for it to slip off?

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…