Health Secretary declares war on ‘diversity off icers’

THE Health Secretary has written to the heads of NHS quangos to demand that they review their membership of Stonewall and ban diversity officers.

In a letter seen by The Mail on Sunday, Steve Barclay insisted that organisations including NHS England report on whether inclusion schemes were value for money.

He also said that they should no longer employ dedicated diversity and inclusion officers and instead give these duties to existing managers.

The letter was sent to the chief executives of ten NHS arm’s-length bodies including the Care Quality Commission, the

‘Patient care should be coming before backroom bureaucracy’

National Institute for Health and Care Excellence and the UK Heath Security Agency. In it, Mr Barclay pointed out that the Department of Health and Social Care had not renewed its membership to Stonewall in February 2021 after concluding that it did not represent value for money.

‘In these times of financial pressures, and wider societal concern about these issues, I would ask that you, as a member of the wider health family, now review whether your organisation is getting value for money from your diversity and inclusion memberships and, if not, consider any steps that you could take to address that, such as following the Department’s example and allowing any association/subscriptions that you have to lapse or be cancelled,’ he wrote.

He set a deadline for the bodies to report back by May 1.

In his letter, he also said he believed that diversity and inclusion was ‘everyone’s responsibility and should be picked up through normal management processes and as a part of everyone’s role rather than through the use of external providers or discrete dedicated roles within organisations’.

A Whitehall source said: ‘These NHS bodies should be spending money on patient care and frontline services rather than diversity and backroom bureaucracy.’

Mr Barclay is believed to have been motivated to send the letter after new guidelines were issued to NHS staff to treat all patients as gender-neutral. He ordered an investigation into the diktat after learning taxpayers had funded the guide to ‘inclusive communication’. It instructs doctors not to use phrases such as ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’ or ‘he’ and ‘she’ until a patient has confirmed their gender identity.

The guidance was produced by researchers who received a £164,964 government grant from the National Institute for Health and Care Research to study how clinicians could improve their communication with LGBT patients.

Mr Barclay previously told The Mail on Sunday that he would be ‘ruthless’ in targeting pen-pushers in order to save taxpayers’ money.

He is planning major reforms to slash the amount of red tape and to free up doctors and nurses so they can focus on patient care. He and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt commissioned a review at the end of last year which is likely to recommend scrapping the number of unnecessary targets that hospitals are expected to meet.

Mr Barclay’s intervention comes after pay agreements were struck for some NHS workers including nurses. Junior doctors are still planning to strike.