Transparency data

Annex: Core Departmental Action Plan

Published 27 January 2022

Whilst the increase in gender pay gaps for the DLUHC Group is disappointing, the change is small and we will continue to ensure that equality is integral across the department. Our pay policy ensures that men and women in equivalent roles receive the same pay and we will continue to work closely with our arms length bodies to address the reasons for these pay gaps across the Group.

We go above and beyond our legislative responsibilities, ensuring that equality is at the heart of all our activities, including people management processes and procedures. We take action to close the gender pay gap through a number of interventions:

Recruitment, retaining and developing a diverse workforce

DLUHC’s external recruitment is carried out under Civil Service Commission Principles. All our recruitment must be based on fair and open competition and successful candidates selected on merit. We commit to continue to:

• Ensure all our roles are advertised on the external market by default, which has allowed us to recruit in a more inclusive, open and transparent manner.
• Extend our candidate reach by expanding our use of social media, alternative recruitment, network events, career platforms, ‘we are for everyone’ videos are now part of all our external recruitment adverts.
• Continue to deploy our recruitment platform that removes bias in early recruitment stages. We practice blind recruitment so that names, age, gender, race, educational background or work experience are removed at the sifting stage.
• Mandate gender-mixed panels for all levels of recruitment including at our most senior roles.
• Encourage recruitment and selection training for hiring managers, colleagues who sift, and those who sit on interview panels to promote diversity and inclusion. Managers are required to attend the “success profiles” training course, which works to provide a comprehensive view of “how to recruit”, including inclusive recruitment and the value of diversity in the workforce. So far, we have trained over 800 recruiting managers.
• Continue to offer internships to people from under-represented backgrounds through a Summer Diversity Internship Programme and the Early Diversity Internship Programme to provide people with an opportunity to learn about a career in the Civil Service and to prepare them for a place on the central Fast Stream graduate programme.

Progression

We aim to help women progress in their careers and achieve their full potential through improving the diversity of our participants in cross-government and internal talent management schemes such as:

• Internal sponsorship, championing and mentoring of women has been a contributing factor in the overall representation of women, which in DLUHC is 51%, slightly ahead of the 50% gender parity value. Women make up 53% of our Senior Civil Service posts and most appointments in the last 2 years have come via progression over external hires
• Crossing Thresholds: a 12-month career mentoring programme for women to develop their career aimed at entry level to senior manager grades.
• Careers Workout: an internal programme for ethnic minority and disabled women at Grades AO-SEO
• Women’s Leadership Summit: a programme that helps to create a sustainable pipeline of female talent ready to move into Senior Civil Service roles. In 2019 we introduced a pilot leadership summit specifically for women from an ethnic minority background and 30% of cohort have progressed.

The mixture of internal sponsorship and programmes aim to overcome barriers and help women compete on equal footing for progression or other Civil Service talent schemes. DLUHC promotes, and will continue to support, female applicants in all cross-government talent schemes across the department.

Accountability and transparency

DLUHC has focused on greater accountability and transparency to demonstrate, and fulfil, our commitment to equality. To support this, we:

• Internally publish monthly analysis of diversity and inclusion data to measure the impact of our action plan. This packs include data on declaration and representation, learning and development, performance, engagement, recruitment and promotion by different characteristics.
• Internally publish Senior Civil Servants’ D&I Objectives. Senior Civil Servants commit yearly to at least one personal objective relating to Diversity and Inclusion and at DLUHC, with many specifically committing to supporting women to progress or promoting gender equality within the department.
• Internally publish this gender pay gap report, including analysis of gender pay gaps on a grade-by-grade basis, including those at SCS level.

Diversity, inclusion and equality in DLUHC

DLUHC is fully committed to equality of opportunity for all its people. Our Permanent Secretary Jeremy Pocklington takes pride in his role as DLUHC D&I Champion. We have taken concrete steps within our diversity and inclusion strategy to improve representation and inclusion for different demographic groups, including a focus on gender. DLUHC launched a refreshed diversity and inclusion strategy in June 2021 retaining the 3 strategic aims of ‘Bring In’, ‘Bring On’, and ‘Inclusion’.

The department offers a range of support and development opportunities for women. We have an active DLUHC Gender Equality Network who share regular blogs, support policy development and run events to promote gender equality. The network is sponsored by a Gender Champion who is part of the Executive Team.

Celebrating equality

We will continue to support, fund and encourage the Gender Equality Network to celebrate and champion gender equality. In addition, we have started to encourage opportunities for cross-network collaboration in order to best support the diverse range of staff within our department.

• Throughout 2020 we continued to run our campaign called “We are for everyone”, which through posters and personal blogs, shared the stories and experiences of our people in 2019. In 2020 produced 2 professional videos sharing the experiences of 6 members of DLUHC, 4 female and 2 male staff, from their perspectives, with consideration given to their gender, ethnicity, nationality, disability, working patterns etc. The intention is to promote the message that everyone can have a successful career in DLUHC and that “we are open, inclusive and we listen”, one of our departmental principles. This campaign is now part of all our external recruitment.
• We have now launched a new business deal in 2020 to support staff networks and provide them with further capacity and paid time.
• Our staff network chairs also now regularly meet with DLUHC’s Executive Team amplifying the employee voice on gender matters.
• Our Gender Equality Network now has several new co-chairs bringing a new focus
• We have entered a partnership with Inclusive Employers and are developing an allyship programme to run in 2021 which will focus on allyship across several areas including gender.
• Throughout 2020 we have run events and intranet content to support women in different stages of life and with varying life experiences.

Family friendly HR policy

DLUHC has a culture of supporting and encouraging flexibility for staff of all genders, and continue to challenge assumptions about traditional ways of working, taking account of the needs of our work, customers and employees. In recognition of our family friendly working policies we have placed in the Top 30 UK Employers for families in the Working Families benchmark 2021.

We will continue to:

• Support our Working Parents and Carers staff network groups.
• Promote the sharing of parental leave so that women can best manage their maternity provision where at least one partner works for the department.
• Provide additional resources to support families and working parents including: the Employee Assistance Program (EAP), which provides individual support for carers and managers; special leave, which provides carers with additional leave for important events or emergencies involving a dependent; and a carers passport, to identify problems in the workplace related to their responsibilities and solutions to alleviate these issues.

During school closures due to COVID-19 working parents were able to apply for special leave, this was provided to support staff with caring responsibilities for young children. The special leave was able to be used in a variety of ways according to each individual situation. Our approach and flexibility toward HR policies on supporting staff with caring responsibilities during the pandemic has been an exemplar in practice and contributed to our success in the Working Families benchmark.