Baroness Neville-Rolfe
Main Page: Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Conservative - Life peer)Black and Minority Ethnic People: Workplace Issues
Baroness Neville-Rolfe Excerpts
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
That this House takes note of the issues faced by black and minority ethnic people in the workplace in Britain.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and Department for Culture, Media and Sport (Baroness Neville-Rolfe) (Con)
My Lords, the driver for this debate is that earlier this year the Secretary of State asked my noble friend Lady McGregor-Smith to lead a review into the issues faced by business in developing black and minority talent from recruitment through to the executive level. We will be hearing from my noble friend shortly, and I know how much she will value noble Lords’ input into her review.
We need to move towards a world where ethnicity and indeed gender are not issues and only skills and experience count when it comes to assessing suitability for appointments. We are not there yet and there is much to do, but I believe that we have made progress. Consider my Secretary of State: the son of a bus driver in Rochdale and then living in a deprived part of Bristol, he rose through hard work to become a vice-president at Chase Manhattan at the age of 25 and the first BME Cabinet Minister at the age of 44.
My noble friend Lady McGregor-Smith herself is another extraordinary role model, the only Asian and female CEO of a £2 billion FTSE 250 company. She has championed change in the workplace by making the best use of female and ethnic minority talent. She has done that through her generous public contribution as a role model, first as chair to the Women’s Business Council and now as chair of the new BME talent review. Having a debate to gain insights into the issues she is addressing in this review, with secretarial support from BIS, at this early stage in her work is an excellent one. The review is looking at the business and economic case for employers to harness the potential from the widest pool of talent. I believe that we need to reach a situation where the prospects for BME individuals who want to progress at work are as good as those for their white counterparts in the same situation—neither better nor worse.
My noble friend’s review will look at obstacles to progress, including cultural and unconscious factors. I would like to make a small diversion to tell a story about how culture and attitudes can change for the better over time.
Richard Stokes MC was a brave and talented engineer who became a managing director of Ransomes & Rapier, the Ipswich engineering firm, at the age of 30. He tried to join the Conservative Party to fulfil his political aspirations, but it would not consider him as a candidate because he was a Roman Catholic. Wounded but not bowed, he joined the Labour Party instead and became MP for Ipswich, where the votes of his 2,500 employees were very useful in keeping his seat. He had a successful career, running the firm part-time and campaigning on important issues such as the inadequacy of Allied tank design; the justification—or lack of it—for the bombing of Dresden; and the ghastly forced repatriation of Yugoslavs after Yalta. He even served briefly in the Cabinet as Lord Privy Seal, before an early death. That man was my great-uncle, Uncle Dick. But the important point of the story for today’s purposes is that discrimination against Catholics, which he suffered from so acutely—in his case in the Conservative Party—has totally gone. A similar change in attitudes to BME is taking place, and that will continue.
There is evidence to that effect. I quote from the House of Lords Library Note of 29 April, produced for this very debate. It notes that the employment rate gap between the overall population and ethnic minorities is still at 11.1 percentage points. It goes on to add, significantly, that the gap has been decreasing, albeit gradually, since the series began in 1993. I believe that that accurately summarises where we are—moving in the right direction but still with a way to go.
Looking at our own House, it is a great pleasure to see my noble friends Lord Popat, Lord Sheikh and Lord Polak in their places today, each with a long history of serving business and their communities—they are role models for us all. The noble Lord, Lord Taylor, has also had a career full of challenging and high-profile roles. I am also delighted to see the noble Lord, Lord Adebowale, in his place today—he has campaigned tirelessly to improve the life chances of the homeless and unemployed—as well as the noble Baroness, Lady Hussein-Ece, who is a role model in community health. Moreover, no debate on the subject would be complete without the noble Lord, Lord Morris of Handsworth, whose passion for cricket I share. I also see the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, in his place; he and I used to work together on the UK India Business Council. Our debate today shows that ethnic minority talent is there for all to see on all sides of this House.
The review will also look at data and their role. I am opposed to quotas but I know that when the industry-led review by the noble Lord, Lord Davies, started to collect data and articulate good practice, it changed attitudes in companies. At Tesco, where I sat on the plc board as an executive, we used to monitor our top female talent and look out for opportunities to advance them. We also identified top talent of non-British origin. For us as an international company, it was important that we reflected, and were seen to reflect, the diversity of our operations. In an international company, a diverse board inspires a greater degree of solidarity within the company and a sense of fair play. One of my sons works for a French bank in the City of London, and I can tell noble Lords that that illustrates globalisation in action.
Another strand to the review’s work is promoting best practice. Sharing ideas is a great way to secure results and promote innovation, as we have seen with the Business in the Community Race Equality Awards. This year is the 10th round of annual awards, and some of the previous winners have truly inspiring stories.
Another important feature of best practice is understanding what does not work, which certainly leads to improvement. I know that my noble friend will be interested to hear of any examples that have not had the desired effect or, even worse, have hampered opportunities for ethnic minorities. As we know, the key to understanding what works and what does not is to monitor the impact of that activity and ensure buy-in from all levels of the business—something I know my noble friend is driving in her own company.
BME entrepreneurs can be rich sources of growth and of British success. In a recent debate in the other place, the Culture Minister Ed Vaizey spoke with great passion about the changes taking place in broadcasting and the opportunities it brings. This will no doubt be reflected in the BBC charter White Paper, which is due later this month.
However, for success we need better education and better training outcomes in this country. That is the best way of achieving opportunities for all. Quality apprenticeship schemes are an absolute priority for the Government. They will give us an opportunity for employer-led development and a route to success for people who do not want to go to university or who have not done well enough at school.
Improving our schools by a relentless focus especially on English and Maths means that all pupils, regardless of their background, are engaged and challenged to make the best use of their abilities. I was therefore glad to read that, for example, 81% of black African pupils achieved the expected level of attainment in reading, writing and maths at key stage 2, which is slightly above the national average of 80%.
Another important strand of the Government’s work is to encourage integration so that communities are brought together, celebrating our shared British values rather than focusing on what divides us. Work led by DCLG on cohesive communities is important. Louise Casey was asked to carry out a review of how to boost opportunity and integration in these communities, and that includes how we can ensure that people learn English. This is vital. In England and Wales, over 750,000 people have only poor or even no English. Unsurprisingly, migrants with fluent English are much more likely to be in employment and earn 20% more than those without such skills. Poor English appears to be a particular problem in Muslim communities. In 2011, 22% of Muslim women in England spoke poor or no English, compared with 2% of the overall female population.
Finally, fair recruitment matters, so that people do not feel discriminated against when they apply for a job. The announcement by the Prime Minister last October regarding the adoption of name-blind recruitment by a number of public and private sector employers is an important step in ensuring that this fairness exists and is seen to exist. Organisations such as HSBC, Deloitte, Virgin Money and KPMG, which are responsible for employing a combined 1.8 million people in the UK, joined public sector employers to show their commitment to fair recruitment.
This is an important debate and I look forward to learning a great deal from the experience and expertise of those assembled here this evening.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
My Lords, I am glad that this debate has been so widely welcomed. Today, we have heard some extraordinary insights into the important business of developing BME talent and those will feed into our review, which will be a great opportunity for us all. It was particularly good to hear from my noble friend Lady McGregor-Smith, who has taken on the new burden of leading the review. In response to the point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, she will have good resourcing to assist with that process. My noble friend Lady McGregor-Smith said that success would come when the world had moved beyond talk of quotas and targets. I agree. The talent is out there. We need to reach out to it in many different ways and we need to use this review to find ways through.
This evening there have been a number of themes, which I thought I would pick up in summarising the debate. First, there was the theme of role models, which, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, said, apply at every level. I have been very struck by how everyone, including the noble Baroness, Lady Howells, and my noble friend Lady Bottomley, has had different stories to tell and has made different suggestions about how to promote role models in this area.
A second theme was personal contribution by individuals. My noble friend Lady Bottomley talked about the two things that she had really cared about when she was a Minister in the health area. It seemed to me that the kinds of things that she was talking about, dating back to the 1990s, would lead to a good conversation with the noble Lord, Lord Adebowale, on what could be done in that area. I will of course write to the noble Baroness, Lady Hussein-Ece, about appointments in the NHS, because I do not have the information available to respond to her various questions.
Another important strand was diverse teams and their value in terms of success, growth and productivity. London is a vibrant example of their success. I should also add my congratulations to those of my noble friend Lord Taylor on the brilliant success of Leicester City. It is another example of diversity in teams.
The fourth theme was the importance of avoiding discrimination at interview and more generally in recruitment. My noble friend Lord Polak gave us examples from a Jewish perspective, which I found very interesting. Many spoke of the value of the use of blind recruitment, which I mentioned in my opening speech, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, made some other suggestions in the area of recruitment. My fifth theme was unintended prejudice, which will be part of the McGregor-Smith review. The same was true of data, a sixth theme. Data as an agent of change was mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, who rightly mentioned the example of women on boards. I agree with her that that business-led initiative has achieved a lot.
I was particularly struck by the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Howells, who has had such an amazing career—in Grenada, in Washington and in Paris—and who contributed to work on equality to such an extent.
Perhaps I could add some wider context. The labour market is thriving and we have record levels of employment. The employment rate for October to December 2015 was 74%, the highest on record. The number of people in employment is the highest on record at 31.4 million and it has increased by over half a million compared to a year earlier. Both the number of men and the number of women in work have hit record levels, and unemployment is at 5%, which is the lowest rate since 2005. That is a positive context. But what about the future demographics? The proportion of people in the labour market from BME backgrounds is steadily increasing—indeed, at a record rate, according to my noble friend Lady McGregor-Smith. This reflects long-running and deep-seated changes that will lead, of course, to a more diverse society. The potential of these individuals must be harnessed as they make their way through the education system and into the labour market. It is the right thing for the individuals concerned, the right thing for business and, more importantly, the right thing for the country. It is partly to look ahead to this changing Britain that the Government have set up a new inter-ministerial group under my BIS colleague Sajid Javid, Secretary of State. The group met for the first time on 8 March.
Over the course of the last Parliament we created 2 million more jobs: that is 2 million more opportunities for people to go out and earn a living. This included a 20% increase in the number of people in work from black and minority ethnic backgrounds. The Prime Minister is therefore right to expect more progress in this Parliament and announced his ambition to further increase the number of ethnic minorities in employment by 2020. That is a challenge accepted by the Department for Work and Pensions. The noble Lord, Lord Adebowale, mentioned that 20%, and he feels that our record is not good enough.
Lord Adebowale
I hesitate to interrupt the Minister in full flow, but Adebowale is a good old Yorkshire name, and pronounced differently from how the Minister said it.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
I am so grateful for that. People will know that I have a bit of a problem with pronunciation. That had foxed me, but now the noble Lord has taught me the way forward, for which I thank him. The noble Lord said that our record is not good enough. That is, of course, why we have set up our review.
As the noble Lord, Lord Morris of Handsworth, said, people are key to our success in this country. I know this from my experience as a huge employer working in lots of local communities. Our values included treating people equally and with respect. Frankly, that is what leads to success and, indeed, to productivity improvement. We are lucky in this country to have had race equality legislation for 50 years. But of course racism is unacceptable, and this Government are determined to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to get on in life, free from harassment and fear.
It is good news that 237,000 people with a BME background started one of the 2.4 million apprenticeships that began over the last Parliament. In this Parliament, we will go further, committing to 3 million starts. Of these, we aim to ensure that a greater proportion comes from black and ethnic minority backgrounds. This is a challenge that my colleague the Skills Minister has accepted.
For those who want to be their own boss, the introduction of start-up loans has made a huge difference, with more than 20% of loans in the last Parliament going to those with a BME background. We have set ourselves an ambitious target of 75,000 new loans over this Parliament, of which a greater proportion should go to ethnic minorities.
But it is not just getting a job that matters; it is ensuring that young people have the education they need to fulfil their potential. On this, there is a good story to tell on the progress of BME students into higher education, but we can do more. We will take action to increase the proportion of BME students progressing to higher education by 20% by 2020.
My noble friend Lady Bottomley rightly drew attention to the opportunities in universities among academics and in university appointments more generally. I join her in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Amos, on her appointment as head of SOAS. I was interested to hear about the Equity Challenge Unit. The noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, mentioned GEEMA. I will pass on these thoughts to the Higher Education Minister, Jo Johnson, who is engaged on this issue.
I do not have the figures for Parliament, but I think that we agree that there has been a change here and that that is reflected in this House. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Parekh—forgive my pronunciation again—both for his kind words and for pointing out how the situation has improved on the Conservative Benches. I was glad to hear from my noble friend Lord Sheikh that he has encouraged this trend, as I know have other noble friends.
The public sector is working hard, from efforts to increase diversity among the police and Armed Forces to initiatives to improve diversity in the Civil Service. Following research published in March last year, the Talent Action Plan has been launched, focused on building inclusion across the Civil Service and ensuring that groups that historically have been underrepresented are fully supported in the workplace and given support to progress. This includes an expansion of the Summer Diversity Internship Programme and widening the Positive Action Pathway. The senior leaders race network, launched earlier this year, will also make a difference, with role models—again that theme—inspiring the leaders of the future.
My noble friend Lord Sheikh asked about minorities in prisons. He will now be aware from what has been said that David Lammy MP’s inquiry into criminal justice issues has recently launched and put out a call for evidence. Perhaps my noble friend would be kind enough to feed in his concerns to that inquiry.
Many of us have touched on board-level work, which is closer to my own ministerial responsibilities. Sir John Parker’s group on BME representation on corporate boards, mentioned in the excellent and varied Library Note for this debate, has been looking at this issue. Sir John chairs Anglo American. His group includes David Tyler, who chairs Sainsbury’s, Trevor Phillips, president of John Lewis—both huge employers—and Ken Olisa, a non-executive director of the IoD who is also the first black Lord-Lieutenant of Greater London and another role model. The group’s aim is to end mono-cultural boards in the FTSE 100 by 2020, which may please the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter. The group will report in the autumn. Currently, 5% of CEOs and chairs in the FTSE 100 are from ethnic and minority backgrounds. The successes of these individuals reflect the entrepreneurial skills that we heard about from the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria—again, a role-model point.
Only last week, as it happens, following a meeting with Sir John, I met members of his group and others including leading headhunters to look into the issue of data protection. Noble Lords will know that I have a taste for the practical. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Morris, that I tend to like action as much as words, which can be a problem when you are a government Minister. However, I discovered from Sir John and Trevor Phillips that recruiters were saying that they could not keep databases which allowed them to present lists of candidates without running into data restrictions. We met and agreed that in the short term the ICO—the Information Commissioner’s Office—in consultation with search firms and others should produce a practical guide on what to do that can be used by interested parties.
In closing, I add a few words about fundamentals—the philosophy of the subject if you like. What underlies everything that I have said is the desire that merit and accomplishment should be the only criterion for all appointments in public and commercial life. In other words, everyone’s attributes will be judged against the same criteria whatever their background. Sex, skin colour, social background, disability, religion and other irrelevant differentials should have nothing to do with it. In the reasonably near future—I hope not in the long run—that is the society we hope and expect to achieve. In such a society, there would be no need for special investigations to look at appointments against this or that social criterion nor to consider special measures to counteract barriers to labour market changes. One measure of our success as a society will be how quickly we can reach that position.