Department for Work and Pensions: Staff

(asked on 21st July 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what recent estimate he has made of the number of Black and ethnic minority staff employed in his Department.


Answered by
Guy Opperman Portrait
Guy Opperman
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Transport)
This question was answered on 6th September 2021

Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) overall and managerial Ethnicity Data as at 30 June 2021:

Ethnicity declaration

DWP

Managers

Ethnic Minority

14,168

15.3%

1,015

7.1%

White

68,179

73.6%

12,170

84.7%

Prefer not to say

4,327

4.7%

567

3.9%

unknown

6,016

6.5%

616

4.3%

Total DWP staff

92,690

14,368

To further support ethnic minority career progression, we continue to actively promote Civil Service development opportunities, which include:

  • Early and Summer Diversity Programme
  • Beyond Boundaries Development Programme
  • Race to the Top Shadowing Programme
  • Future and Senior Leaders Scheme
  • Minority Ethnic Talent Association programme

We are also building our internal pipeline through internal development schemes such as the Aspire Programme, which specifically targets development of Black and Ethnic minority staff.

We have built a number of improvements into our recruitment and selection including:

  • Developed and introduced a new strengths based approach to our recruitment
  • Implemented permanent recruitment as external applications by default
  • Implemented anonymised recruitment applications to minimise bias
  • Improved marketing of DWP as a diverse and inclusive employer of choice
  • Increasing our pool of ethnic minority recruitment panellists
  • All senior recruitment panels include an ethnic minority panellist and we have piloted panels of all grades featuring an ethnic minority panellist

These actions are supporting DWP commitment to the Civil Service ambition of becoming the UK’s most inclusive employer, by improving representation of ethnic minority colleagues across all levels.

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