Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to improve the diversity of NHS senior management.

The Department recognises more work needs to be done to encourage and improve diversity in the National Health Service.

The NHS People Plan publication of 30 July committed to measures which will contribute to improving diversity of NHS senior management. These include every NHS trust, foundation trust and clinical commissioning group publishing their progress against the Model Employer Strategy goals to ensure that at every level, the workforce is representative of their overall black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) workforce.

Work continues on the Workforce Race Equality Standard and the Workforce Disability Equality Standard which have led to progress across a number of areas - for example increases in proportion of BAME very senior managers – and shone a light on the difficulties that colleagues with disabilities and long-term health conditions face.