Civil service union boss Mike Clancy has slammed comments from Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch that civil service networks should have no say in how their organisations are run.
In a speech yesterday at the Institute for Government on Tuesday, Badenoch announced her party would scrap the public sector equality duty if it won power at the next election.
The duty is non-statutory guidance which requires public authorities to have due regard to certain equality considerations when exercising their functions. Badenoch said scrapping this will “stop public officials from wasting their time on a lot of things that have nothing to do with delivering frontline services”.
During a follow-up Q&A, she was asked if staff networks based on race, sex, gender and sexuality in public service should be abolished.
Badenoch said she has not argued that they should not exist and that she believes in “freedom of association”. But she said staff networks in the public sector should not have “any say in public policy or how those organisations are run”.
Responding to these comments, Clancy, who is general secretary of Prospect which represents technical and specialist civil servants, said: “It is deeply worrying to hear a party leader argue that public sector organisations should not listen to their own staff on equalities issues.
“Much of the progress we have seen in recent years on equality at work has come through the work of equalities networks and through trade union equality campaigning and the hard work of trained trade union reps.
“These networks are not social clubs, they are about making sure that organisations learn from the experience of their staff. Equalities networks should be valued and encouraged, not undermined and denigrated.”
During the Q&A, the leader of the opposition also said she thinks public servants should not be given time off from work to carry out staff network activities.
Badenoch, who was minister of equalities from 2022 to 2024, said her experience of staff networks in the civil service “was that they were actually a way for some people to create a clique or a cabal who were then furthering their own personal careers at the expense of other civil servants, and the staff networks ended up being bad for some of their colleagues”.
She said she “even saw in some cases bullying of other people who didn’t share their views”.
“So staff networks should not be anything more than social organisations,” Badenoch said. “People can go to the pub or play sports or do other things outside work time. We are not as taxpayers paying civil servants to deal with their own self-actualisation and sorting out their personal hobby horses.”
Badenoch also described networks in their current form as “very problematic” and said she thinks “the senior civil service have not just failed to get a grip, they have actually encouraged it, because it was a way of ticking boxes”.
“And there are many good civil servants - many, many good civil servants - who don’t like this but no one speaks for them,” she added. “I am speaking for them now.”