D is for diversity and delusion

David Shariatmadari on the mysterious policy that now pervades the Civil Service, creating thousands of non-jobs

jrob advertisements can be misleading. When I was just out of university in 2001, I sent my details to the Department for Education, lured by the promise of an exciting temporary opportunity in a dynamic and innovative area of education policy. I wanted to work in the public sector and the government website worktrain.com, with its photos of beaming, larger than life jobseekers, had been my first port of call. One year down the line I had learnt to take words like dynamic and innovative with a pinch of salt. In fact, I had been busy only about 50 per cent of the time. Some of my colleagues seemed to have a lot to do, though I can't help but suspect most of them were simply trying to nab a bargain on eBay, or beat their best score on Minesweeper. Our lack of very much to do was balanced by the ability to make work for other people. Often it was the staff of the hapless but hopeless exam boards. Occasionally we got to bully a local education authority.

A year later the novelty of being paid to do not very much had worn off. I decided not to apply for a permanent position. After a couple of months in the wilderness, I found myself with another government job, this time at the Foreign Office. The diplomatic service had never seriously appealed to me; I get nervous going on holiday, let alone actually living in far-flung and occasionally dangerous parts of the world. Still, I had an interesting six months there, which I took as an opportunity to examine a bizarre world I knew I was never going to be a part of — a world of consular emergencies and confidential telegrams.

The contract ended and I was once more left looking for some means of supporting myself. Like a dysfunctional romantic, always making the same mistakes in love, I kept applying for public sector office jobs. I had one final fling before I broke out of the pattern — a short spell at the Cabinet Office, where everybody had the air of being extremely important, high-flyers at the beginning of their trajectories. Before three months had passed I left, unable to stick the daily diet of punching holes in pieces of paper and surfing the Internet. My Civil Service odyssey had come to an end.

All in all, the experience had left a bitter taste in my mouth. It was with some satisfaction, then, that I first heard of Mr Brown's plans to cut a swath through Whitehall, starting with the department whose mantra, 'creating opportunity, releasing potential, achieving excellence' still sets my teeth on edge, as much for its 'innovative' grammar as for as its facile sentiment.

What I noticed most at the Cabinet Office and the Department for Education, though less so at the Foreign Office. was that my job was unnecessary. It was there to lend a kind of structural symmetni to the organisation. Everyteam had to have a certain number of administrators, whether they needed them or not. My boss would often send attachments over to me by email so I could print them off, or leave papers in his out-tray marked with a cross so I knew they needed to be thrown away. Why he couldn't do this himself was a mystery to me. There were other areas of waste, believe me there were, but I'll focus on the one that stuck out, for three reasons. Firstly, it happened in all three departments. Secondly, it's a growth industry. Thirdly, given the climate of moral certainty encouraged by New Labour ministers, it is immune to criticism. Welcome to planet diversity.

The D-word is acutely fashionable. And like many words made popular by management consultants, it embodies not a precise concept, let alone something concrete, but a feeling. It seduces by its very vagueness. Because no one really knows what it means, it has acquired a certain mystique, and now everybody's using it. You can hardly movu

for diversity action plans and diversity monitoring grids in modern public organisations. It's a good example of a modern-day shibboleth, a code used among members of the same clan, a word used to identify loyalty to, in this case, a project to spread niceness to the four corners of the kingdom. And it's fair to say that diversity is often used simply as a synonym for niceness. In order to embrace diversity, an organisation must make sure that 'individuals are valued' and that the office is a place where 'harassment, bullying and discrimination are not tolerated'. Far be it from me to suggest these are fairly obvious requirements of any workplace and always have been. We may ask whether or not they have been fulfilled, but why dress them up and parade them under a new banner, accompanied by laws, taskforces and spurious new roles? If you work in Whitehall and you don't already have an 'office diversity champion', the chances are you soon will.

The reason? It's the unfortunate tendency of the people in charge to want to do something about everything. The assumption that all of society's problems are amenable to state intervention is a delusion that some governments suffer from more than others. The current administration falls into the former category. They look at our miserable lives and feel responsible, feel that something must be done. They rarely ask whether or not they are the ones best placed to do it.

Reams of paper are produced that might as well be burned on an altar to the diversity god for all the good they do. A 'Diversity Feedback Questionnaire' that once landed on my desk asked respondents to rate the importance of various statements from one to five (though it helpfully indicated that if you were unable to provide an answer, entering zero would be fine. Presumably they feel that there is no such thing as a useless statistic). The statements to be rated included these: that 'individuals are valued for the diversity they bring to the work of the unit' or, 'senior management are committed to creating an environment which values diversity' or, indeed, 'individual employees within the unit behave in a way that supports diversity'. Erm . if only I knew what diversity was. Substitute 'niceness', however, and you get a reasonable idea of what these people are hying to find out: are we nice enough?

We may moan and groan, even fall about laughing at these little absurdities. We may persevere in refusing to take the idea of a diversity champion seriously (though we risk being accused of un-diverse behaviour, a phrase I heard used at a workshop I had been forced to attend). But there is a more serious side to all this. Some of these activities may create resentment against the very groups of people they are trying to help. And it goes without saying that much money is spent on training programmes aimed at helping those assumed to be labouring under the burden of racism or sexism. Women just below senior Civil Service level receive 'coaching' and `mentoring', while ethnic-minority fast-streamers are given the opportunity to attend extra classes on how to get ahead that are unavailable to their non-minority colleagues.

The problem with these schemes is that they are open to a very subtle, but ruinous, form of abuse. Like all forms of social engineering, they do not take account of individual circumstances. Who's to say that a woman given the extra coaching she needs to get that promotion to the top stream isn't already in a better position than her male colleagues? She may be rich, or particularly well connected. Similarly, an organisation that automatically sees race as a disadvantage is blinded to the other factors that may be at work. Judging someone by one standard alone and ignoring the fact that they went to St Paul's and their daddy's a heart surgeon tends to favour middle-class people who happen to be black or Asian, rather than those who are really struggling. And do we really believe that someone from Northern Ireland or Wales should be entitled to extra training because of their race? I have seen people play the system in this way, but who can blame them for taking advantage of a free leg-up?

The Civil Service, particularly at senior levels, is not a rainbow community. It does not, by anyone's measure, reflect the proportions of ethnic and other minority groups in the population at large, although it should. However, the extent to which this is a result of recruitment policies, the focus of efforts to promote diversity, has not convincingly been demonstrated. Don't earlier experiences in people's lives determine whether they end up as a permanent secretary or a minicab driver? And is race really the main reason for ethnic-minority underachievement? Call me a hoary old Marxist if you like, but I'd say that class has at least as much to do with it, probably more. Whether you're born into a family of chip-fryers in Hackney or bankers in Horsham is far more likely to influence where you end up than does the colour of your skin.

The diversity agenda is largely concerned with preventing active discrimination, which it assumes is the main reason there aren't more women or minorities in senior positions. Active discrimination, when people make decisions based on negative preju

dices about a certain group, is unacceptable and should be punished severely where it is discovered. But it constitutes only a small part of the reason minorities stay out of senior roles. Most of the time, they decide for themselves not to embark on the road that might lead them to power and responsibility. People, after all, tend to conform to the expectations society has of them. Race is rarely as salient as class in determining aspiration and whether or not we feel comfortable in positions of power and responsibility. A higher proportion of ethnic minority families have lower incomes. It is because of class, then, not race, that they underachieve.

Thankfully, society is changing. Economic growth and globalisation, though not without their own risks and traumas, make it easier for people stuck at the bottom of the heap to work themselves up. Of course, these changes take time to reach the upper echelons. We should make sure that we aren't actively impeding the process, but beyond that there may not be much we can do to speed it up. What is certain is that a meritocracy is made by being blind to everything but a person's ability, not by singling them out as black, female or Welsh.

Constitutionally impatient, like children, civil servants and politicians are left casting about for a role. Just about all they can do is tinker around the edges. And boy, can they tinker! My advice to the bureaucrats: grab your redundancy cheques with both hands, clear your desk into the bin and leave Whitehall with a spring in your step. You'll be helping to make the world a better place.