Health Secretary wants NHS quangos to consider removing diversity officers

Steve Barclay has written to the heads of NHS quangos insisting they review membership of charities, including Stonewall, and consider removing diversity officers.

The Health Secretary said bodies including NHS England should report on whether inclusion schemes were value for money, and stop employing full-time diversity and inclusion officers.

Mr Barclay recommended conferring their duties on existing managers, the Mail on Sunday reported.

The letter was sent to the chief executives of 10 NHS organisations, including the Care Quality Commission, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence and the UK Health Security Agency.

Mr Barclay said the Department of Health and Social Care had not renewed its membership of Stonewall, the largest LGBTQ+ rights organisation in Europe, headquartered in London, since 2021. He said the membership did not represent good value for money, and set a deadline for the bodies to report by May 1.

Review ‘value for money’

“In these times of financial pressures, and wider societal concern about these issues, I would ask that you, as a member of the wider health family, now review whether your organisation is getting value for money from your diversity and inclusion memberships and, if not, consider any steps that you could take to address that, such as following the Department’s example and allowing any association/subscriptions that you have to lapse or be cancelled,” he wrote.

He also said diversity and inclusion is “everyone’s responsibility” and should be included within normal management procedures, rather than through the use of external consultants or specific roles.

The letter comes after new guidelines were issued to NHS staff, asking them to treat all patients as gender-neutral until they have confirmed how they identify.

The guidance was produced by researchers who received a £164,964 government grant from the National Institute for Health and Care Research.

Mr Barclay ordered an investigation into the move after learning taxpayers had funded the guide, and is said to be planning a series of interventions aimed at scrapping the number of targets that hospitals are expected to meet, as part of a review agreed with Chancellor Jeremy Hunt.