The Police are spending your taxes on EDI

[Birdsweepsin]

... to the tune of £10M a year.

And

The £10.2 million spent on salaries for equality, diversity and inclusivity roles and the £3.6 million spent on training programmes does not include the cost of the outside organisations that run the sessions. Essex police spent £167,000 on one company.

Yay. 🙄

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/a8778b9a-74d3-11ed-8dd6-146590878cf8?shareToken=fe960c0a492b4ccca6956d73832dc67d

How have they even got enough (of our) money for all those EDI roles?

I'd like to know what those people do all day, and why that can't be coveted by general HR staff. That is, assuming that public services should have such roles in the first place. Let's face it, it's likely to be ideological grooming.

Well it must cost a fortune to spraypaint police cars to look like something Noddy would be happy to drive.

I worked for the police in a staff role and we had an EDI manager. It was actually a really interesting role, supporting members of police who had been subject to abuse based on their protected characteristic (usually black officers, or female officers who had been harassed in the workplace). They dealt with any EDI complaints, helped with recruitment, gave advice to other management, oversaw publications etc. Was definitely utilised but can't see any justification for 10m and unbelievable outsourcing costing £££££££.

Well, it doesn’t seem to have been money well-spent given the continued misogyny and racism in the police. Or is the money going towards just one aspect of diversity?

I think these are roles / training that are needed as historically the police has not been diverse at all.

Can't comment on the amounts though.

Where it goes wrong is when the inclusivity role excludes women.

Having these roles sends the message that this is a specialist piece of work and not what should be the norm.

I wouldn't mind if it had actually improved things for people with protected characteristics. Do the statistics show that it has?

With these types of stories you must always look at the sources.
The figures come from a series of FOIs, which in itself is a regular feature for news outlets sending in FOIs then picking through them for headlines (you will also see regularly repeated ones such as ‘the army have lost guns’ which really means ‘we have sent in our usual FOI on accounting write offs, in which ‘losses’ means anything from a lost item to a damaged item beyond repair. Then pick out weapons ‘losses’ and imply that there are missing weapons across the country

But back to this set of FOIs.
They were requested by ‘Conservative way forward’ which was a Thatcher era group and has been revamped in recent years.
Why has a conservative group (which has been in government for 12 years) decided to get this information via FOIs?

They are the current government so why not do this through the appropriate minister?
Or as MPs why not ask Parliamentary Questions to the constabularies?
Is it because FOIs result in publication of the answer?

Diversity & Inclusion is a legal requirement in every business (of a minimum size) and government departments also have additional responsibilities to the tax payer

As a poster has mentioned above a Diversity role is not about all that ‘wokery’ and ‘PC gone mad’
As a minimum it protects a business (or in this case the tax payer) from being sued for D&I breaches. It ensures that the law and policies are publicised across the business / government department and that all management & staff are aware of standards and acceptable behavior

For the police their is also a clear need for their dealings with the public.
Did their FOIs only ask about how much is being spent, or did they also ask for the number of complaints, costs of settlements etc?
Do the figures shown mean that more should be employed with more resources ?

As they are part of the government if they have a problem with it then what have they been doing about it for the last 12 years?