Suella Braverman is planning to impose strict vetting on diversity training courses for Home Office staff after criticisms from right-leaning media that the department has given in to “woke” culture.
Leaked documents show the Home Office has drawn up plans to halt courses that are deemed to promote policies contrary to those of the government, including critical race theory.
Instead, senior managers will be given powers to decide whether diversity and inclusion courses are compulsory, voluntary, can be attended within work time, or must be attended outside work time.
Whitehall insiders are concerned the proposals fly in the face of pledges made after the Windrush scandal to boost diversity and inclusion training for the department’s 35,000 staff. They also believe the proposals followed days of critical headlines about the Home Office being in hock to progressive politics.
The proposals are contained within draft documents entitled “Home Office Guidance: Ways of Working for Delivering Diversity and Inclusion Learning”, which were distributed among staff in late August.
They suggest diversity and inclusion training should in future be signed off by a senior civil servant and a director general who will assess whether it contributes towards supporting Home Office priorities of “reducing crime, strengthening homeland security, legal migration, and the border, and tackling illegal migration”.
“We are taking the opportunity to ensure all the learning provided is relevant, meaningful, and impactful in a positive way, helping to deliver our objectives. We also want to ensure it is consistent with the values of the Home Office and wider civil service,” the document said.
The proposals were distributed on 27 August, days after headlines claimed the Home Office had run diversity courses with staff that showed it was a “soft touch” and “woke”.
On 19 August, the Daily Mail claimed official guidance to asylum caseworkers asked them to “assess the relevance of lies in the context of the evidence in the round and you must give the claimant a chance to explain any inconsistencies in their account”.
The following day, the columnist Leo McKinstry wrote in the Daily Express: “The real danger lies in the progressive sludge that now engulfs the Home Office, drowning every robust policy and swamping every initiative.”
On 25 August an article in the Daily Telegraph reported that Home Office diversity guidelines suggested civil servants who changed their gender identity regularly should be protected against discrimination, a policy that was criticised by a Tory MP and the Reform leader, Richard Tice.
Last August, Braverman backed the then Tory leadership contender Liz Truss’s proposals to scrap diversity and inclusion roles across Whitehall. Braverman said she was “all for a diverse workforce … meritocracy [and] inclusion” but there had been a “takeover by HR teams, campaign groups” that had “propagated a political ideology when it comes to identity politics”.
Describing “thousands of hours” of diversity and inclusion training in government departments as a “huge cost to the taxpayer”, Braverman said: “It’s been divisive, not inclusive. It’s been patronising, not empowering. It’s based on an assumption that me, as an ethnic Asian woman from working-class roots, must be a victim, necessarily oppressed.
“That’s a misassumption. And I think it creates division. It’s tearing up society, breaking down the fabric of our country. And I think it’s a waste of money.”
In June, the Guardian disclosed that the number of Home Office staff receiving diversity training had more than doubled under Braverman’s leadership of the department.
The training was one of the key recommendations made in 2020 by Wendy Williams in her Windrush Lessons Learned review, which outlined the steps the Home Office needed to take to avoid any repeat of the scandal.
Williams urged the department to launch a “structured programme of training and development for all immigration and policy officials and senior civil servants in relation to the Equality Act 2010 and the department’s public sector equality duty and obligations under the Human Rights Act 1998”.
One Whitehall insider said: “The proposals looks like a kneejerk reaction. You have to wonder if the department is ditching Wendy Williams’ reforms to appeal to Suella’s supporters, just in time for Tory party conference.”
The leaked proposals suggested training should in future be placed in one of three categories.
Category 3 training was defined as “diversity and inclusion learning not directly supporting Home Office strategic priorities” and would not be attended within work hours, the proposals said. An example of a category 3 activity would be “external training providers whose syllabus or topic areas do not align to civil service diversity and inclusion strategy and roadmap to inclusion, for example critical race theory”.
Category 1 denoted courses that as “human resources-led” were compulsory, the documents said. Category 2, which was deemed to be in line with the Home Office’s priorities, would not be compulsory, the documents said. “Attending category 2 learning activities counts toward an employee’s contracted hours worked. Examples include asylum caseworker training, workplace adjustments training,” they read.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “It is right that our diversity and inclusion policies and programmes are constantly reviewed. We are looking at our processes to ensure any training meets the needs of the department, our people and delivers value for money for the British taxpayer.
“All Home Office staff are completely committed to righting the wrongs of Windrush and any claims to the contrary are wrong.”
