Question to the Department for International Trade:

To ask the Secretary of State for International Trade, with reference to the Written Statement of 15 December 2020, HCWS652, on Unconscious bias training, what steps she has taken to phase out unconscious bias training in her Department.

The Department for International Trade (DIT) stopped mandating completion of the Cabinet Office supplied Unconscious Bias (UB) digital (e-learning) training for all staff (including UKEF) in November 2019 when they replaced it with Diversity and Inclusion (2019) training. This was later superseded in 2020 with Inclusion in the Civil Service training.

All the above digital training is/was owned and supplied by Civil Service Learning (CSL) who are an expert service function of the Cabinet Office.

The DIT internal intranet site and Learning Hub were both updated in 2019 to remove reference to the standalone UB training and replaced with the new alternate recommended training. In addition, steps were taken to ensure relevant DIT policies and processes were updated to remove and/or replace reference to the standalone UB digital training as appropriate.