Home Office diversity training on rise despite Braverman scepticism

Suella Braverman said last August that the ‘thousands of hours’ of diversity and inclusion training in government departments was a huge cost to the taxpayer. Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

The number of Home Office staff receiving diversity training has more than doubled under Suella Braverman’s leadership of the department, despite her assertions that such lessons are a waste of taxpayers’ money and should be banned.

One month before she was promoted to home secretary in Liz Truss’s cabinet, Braverman, then attorney general, fiercely criticised equality sessions across Whitehall, revealing she had blocked officials at the Government Legal Department from attending such courses.