Black and Minority Ethnic People: Workplace Issues

Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone (Con)]

My Lords, I applaud my noble friend for introducing this debate and, even more greatly perhaps, my other noble friend for agreeing to chair this vital taskforce. This is such an important subject and I am delighted to be able to make a contribution in the debate. I need first to declare all my interests, personal, political and professional, in the register. Many will know that this topic has been close to my heart for coming on 50 years.

I am pleased that our workplace is a lot better than it used to be. When I was first a Member of Parliament, there were 22 women out of 600 MPs—and women, after all, were the majority of the population. There are now darn near twice that number of minority ethnic Members of Parliament in the House of Commons. I am pleased about that because I do not know all their names; if there are so few of you that one knows all your names, you really are an endangered species. In this House, we have made good progress. It is not enough, but we should give the credit that is due. It is interesting to see the degree to which the police, fire and rescue and many other groups are realising that this matters.

The noble Lord, Lord Morris—I would like to say my noble friend—will speak after me. When he became General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, I well recall that it was a time when many trade unions had an appalling attitude to race and to black and ethnic minorities.

We have learned a lot from the debate about women. I was against quotas, targets and all the rest of it, but there is no doubt that we now have a toolbox, and it has gone well. I am even more resentful of the fact, but recognise, that one had to have white men to really make this happen. My other noble friend, although on another Bench, the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, was an early campaigner for the role of women and their contribution. I spent a lot of time when I was Health Secretary saying, “This is the biggest employer of women in the country. We should do much more in terms of women’s development”. Our colleagues, the noble Baroness, Lady Fritchie, and my noble friend Lady Cumberlege, were my great allies. Then I realised that, of all the employers where the black and minority ethnic people are not on the shop floor but in the professions—in the NHS you had doctors, pharmacists, psychologists and nurses—how much more deplorable it was that those people were not being developed on an equal basis. I think it was the noble Baroness, Lady Fritchie, who coined the expression “stale, pale and male”. Neither the women nor the black and ethnic minorities were getting through.

My advice to anybody who does an intolerable job is to decide on two things that they really care about. I decided when I became Secretary of State that the BME issue really worried me. I convened a working group; we had lunch together every two months—people throughout the NHS from black and minority ethnic backgrounds. I was shocked by the experience. It seemed that the Patient’s Charter enabled patients to say exactly what they thought to people from black and minority ethnic groups—we know that black doctors get at least four times as much harassment and difficulty as other groups.

We then turned that into an action plan. I was pleased to hear the noble Lord, Lord Adebowale, say that he is involved in the important NHS programme that is under way, but I would not mind referring him to my 1993 statement, when I said:

“The programme I am … launching aims to address the barriers which face … ethnic minority staff … I want to stress that taking action to promote equality in employment is not just a matter of moral justice or of fairness to people from minority ethnic groups. It is good, sound common sense, and it makes business sense too … A workforce which is multi-racial at all levels is best placed to deliver the best possible health care to all sections of the community”.

I always took the view that, as a taxpayer-funded service, the NHS should reflect all taxpayers, particularly when it is available to all. The key issues were training, racial harassment, appointments to NHS boards, service delivery—and a particular programme relating to doctors. The noble Lord mentioned name-blind recruitment. The now Sir Sam Everington—then a rabid leader of the junior doctors—talked me through a programme in which junior doctors called Patel had eliminated their names and had received much better priority in the rotation. It was really shocking evidence that could not be avoided.

I remember in about 1992 asking all the presidents of the royal colleges to come up to the very grand room in which the Secretary of State lives at the Department of Health. I said, “There’s something I want to talk to you all about. Not once has there been a black or minority ethnic president of a medical royal college in this country”. It was not causal, but I am very pleased that our colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Patel, then became a president, along with my noble friend Lord Ribeiro and others. They were all first-generation, and these are all issues that matter. There is no job that a woman cannot do, and there should be no job that someone from a black or ethnic minority cannot do. I used to have great battles with the overseas doctors association. I said, “Well, you may be black doctors, but you’re not overseas doctors”. Eventually, they changed their name to the British International Doctors’ Association.

Why has more not happened? I want to endorse the importance of the Workforce Race Equality Standard—Simon Stevens chairs the diversity council within the NHS—and the work being done to a high professional standard building on the lessons that we know but must be repeated and reinforced.

Perhaps an area closer to the Minister’s responsibilities is the situation in universities. How good it is that we read that, now, a black student is more likely to go to university than the equivalent white student or pupil from school. Progress is being made, but I am not talking about access to services, whether it is the NHS or education. What I feel very strongly about is the career development of black and minority ethnic academics within the system. The noble Baroness, Lady Amos, has just been made the head of SOAS. She would be the first to say that she did not come up through an academic route, but at last we have one black—and female—head of an academic institution.

My first love is my role as Chancellor of the University of Hull—we are very privileged to have the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, as one of our most distinguished professors; he has been there a long time and may be able to add more about this. Work is under way to try to understand why there has been such a lack of progress in academic staff. It is not a monolithic picture; it is a heterogeneous picture of the highest people on the pay spine. Twenty-two per cent are Chinese—19% are white—15% are mixed race and 8% are black. All the relevant groups are put together in “black and minority ethnic”, but the high proportions of black and minority ethnic academics are in chemical engineering, clinical dentistry and electrical and computer engineering. There are very low rates in archaeology, marine and environmental sciences, agriculture, forestry and food sciences.

I ask my noble friend to give all the support she can to the Equality Challenge Unit, a charity funded by the UK higher education funding bodies, because of the work it is taking forward. Again, it is developing its own charter to recognise those institutions that meet the standard, just as we have seen with women. I am very pleased for the noble Lord that Staffordshire University meets that standard, as does UCL, King’s College London and Kingston. Eight universities in all now have the bronze standard, but we need the Athena SWAN programme to deliver this in practice. Why are we not seeing the advancement of more black and minority ethnic staff?

In her opening remarks, my noble friend referred to some of the work done by McKinsey. The McKinsey team in London, led by Vivian Hunt, herself a magnificent, formidable, deeply impressive black woman, has done a lot to throw light on some of the issues. My noble friend referred to this encouraging people to be customer-centric and to create a better workplace, but diverse teams also lead to diverse solutions. Monoclonal teams create monoclonal solutions. If the problems of the world today are the pace of change and the interconnectedness of the world, it is essential to have teams of people from different backgrounds, all of whom feel they can be themselves at work. Whether they are female, LGBT, black or ethnic minority, individuals need to feel at work that they can be free and liberated to be themselves, in order to give their employment and their tasks all that they can.

Mention was also made of Business in the Community. I hope noble Lords will read about that work, which has been undertaken in conjunction with YouGov. There are many familiar themes, but the most interesting thing was that 42% of the white people and 34% of the black and minority ethnic people interviewed felt that people were not comfortable talking about race in the workplace. That differentiates the debate from that around women. When I am trying to explain to a limited male about the issues around women, I simply say, “Don’t talk about girls and don’t talk about ladies. On the whole, if you stick to “female” or “woman”, you are fine”. But when it comes to black, Asian, minority ethnic, ethnic minority or BAME, people are nervous about the terms. I was talking to a leader in industry who was tremendously committed, but started to talk about coloured people. I said, “You cannot talk about coloured people. You mean people of colour”. Many people are nervous about how to even begin to get into the conversation.

Then there is the difference between different ethnic groups. There are huge differences of history and culture, attitude to work and attitude to families. In my humble view, the more you can create a debate and discussion, the better. On the female side, a lot of men became mentors to women—terribly patronising, in my view. But whatever the men taught the women, the women taught the men a huge amount. I am in favour now of mentoring and having leaders to develop people from black and minority ethnic groups, so that they can explain and help to highlight the issues that matter—unconscious bias, employee network groups and so forth.

Sandra Kerr at the Race for Opportunity team said:

“The terminology is part of the barrier, but not starting the conversation in the first place is the biggest barrier of all”.

The Nationwide has done a great deal—I do not work for the Nationwide and have no interest to declare. It has been a great role model. It says:

“We all own and shape organisational culture, but it’s led from the top. It therefore has to be us as leaders who set the tone. Any culture change programme, including work to advance race equality and wider diversity and inclusion, must be championed and delivered from the top. Having an active race champion is a powerful signal in any organisation and having one who also provides thought leadership and speaks publicly about race equality issues, even more so”.

I welcome this debate. We have reached a time when there is a critical mass of both achievement and dissatisfaction. It is imperative to ensure that we increase our productivity as a nation, drawing on the talents of all the citizens of the country, and I wish my noble friend well in her critically important taskforce.