Black and minority ethnic civil servants who put themselves forward for senior jobs are still “significantly less likely” to be interviewed than their white colleagues, according to the latest figures by the Civil Service Commission.
While the proportion of black and minority staff in the wider civil service has almost doubled since 1998, with just shy of 11% of the workforce now hailing from a BME background compared to under 6% at the turn of the century, they remain under-represented in Whitehall’s most senior ranks.
The proportion of senior civil servants from BME backgrounds currently stands at just 4%.
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The latest annual report from the CSC, which regulates appointments to senior civil service posts, finds that while 553 BME officials put their names forward for roles at Whitehall’s top three grades in 2015-16, just 27 made it through to interview stage.
But, of the 4434 white candidates or those who did not declare their ethnicity, 584 went on to be interviewed for top jobs.
According to CSW analysis, that means that while BME civil servants represented just over 11% of all applicants to senior jobs, they made up just 4.62% of those who were chosen for interview.
Publishing its findings, the commission said: “Even if part of this phenomenon is explained by higher levels of under-reporting in relation to these matters than in relation to gender and even allowing for the fact that this is aggregate data relating to a number of different competitions among which there may have been considerable variation, this is still a serious matter of concern.”
The commission also found that 21% of the senior-level competitions held across the civil service in the past year appeared to have attracted no BME applicants at all, and, at shortlist stage, the CSC said the problem was “even worse”.
“There were 35 competitions (27%) where the shortlist contained no-one who had declared themselves to be female, BAME or disabled: nearly a third of all the senior competitions appear to have had non-diverse shortlists. The Commission is very concerned about this.”
"Old boys' network"
A report commissioned by the Cabinet Office last year found that BME officials were “still disproportionately represented in lower staff grades” compared to more senior roles, with one participant telling the study that the top tier of Whitehall could still feel like “an old boys’ network”.
That report fed into the formation of a new, cross-government Talent Action Plan, which includes annual, bonus-linked objectives for permanent secretaries to improve the diversity of their departments, and promised to bolster staff networks and increase the use of unconscious bias training to force officials to confront entrenched prejudices.
Richard Heaton, the civil service-wide race champion acknowledged the scale of the problem facing BME officials when he spoke to CSW late last year.
“We are beginning to recruit a good number of talented individuals from black and minority ethnic backgrounds into a range of different professions,” he said.
“Our Fast Stream is more diverse than it’s ever been, for example. But we seem to harbour a persistent obstacle to talented black colleagues staying the course, getting on, and reaching the senior grades.
“So we have focused on development programmes, role models, how we do promotions, and so on. But I have also tried to promote the cultural aspect of all this.
“We need to get better at recognising why and in what way we make things harder than they need to be for BAME colleagues. We need to challenge easy, who-you-know temporary promotions. We definitely need to get more comfortable talking about race.”