Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what progress Tech Nation has made in improving diversity within (a) within the tech sector and (b) its own organisation.

Tech Nation is committed to improving diversity and inclusion within the tech sector. Within their growth programmes, the percentage of non-London companies they support has risen from 32% to 68% since 2018 and they have been collecting ethnicity data from applicants since 2020.

They have also taken a proactive stance on improving representation in the sector through a number of initiatives such as the successful ‘female founder hours’, improving inclusivity of online resources and developing a diverse speaker database.

Their annual Tech Nation Report has included detailed diversity statistics on the UK tech sector since the organisation was established in 2018 and they released their Diversity & Inclusion Report in 2019 which delved deeper into this topic.

For the past two years, they have collaborated with the TechTalent Charter on the data collection which supports their work driving inclusion and diversity in tech recruitment. They have partnered with Extend Ventures in a research capacity for their in-depth report, Diversity Beyond Gender. They have also acted as a delivery partner with OneTech - an organisation dedicated to challenging inequity in the digital sector.

Tech Nation are committed to fostering a culture of inclusivity within their organisation and to implementing diverse hiring practices, including using job boards such as Black Young Professionals Network and Disabilities Jobsite UK. They are also currently collecting thorough diversity data internally. This uses a newly-developed framework which they then plan to extend to cohort companies and the wider industry, via an external toolkit.