The steelman case for DEI officers

Rupert Lowe’s groupies are slamming me for criticising Restore Britain but I think it’s necessary. The right should audit its own bullshit and examine it for weaknesses because the media certainly will rip their shtick to pieces. You can regurgitate crowd-pleasing talking points, but they still have to hold water in the real world.

This kind of analysis is really why this Substack exists and I’ve applied the same levels of scrutiny to Reform and Advance. It’s entirely correct that Restore should have equal time under the microscope. Lucky for me, Restore Britain will provide no end of material that reinforces my point. Policy should inform comms, and not vice versa.

As such, I’m still not done with Rupert Lowe’s LinkedIn Post yesterday in which he writes:

All foreign language services in our hospitals would close immediately after Restore Britain is elected, and all NHS car parks would become free. Short term permits for visitors/patients, longer for staff. One caveat. This scheme would not apply to NHS DEI officers, because under a Restore Britain Government, there wouldn’t be any.

That poses some interesting questions. Nobody sane is going to dispute that there are serious problems with DEI. The problems stem from the political priorities and, to a point, statutory obligations. The Employment Rights Bill, which received Royal Assent in September 2025, introduces new mandates related to DEI:

• Large employers (250+ employees) must publish equality action plans to address gender pay gaps, with potential extensions to ethnicity and disability.

• It facilitates equal pay claims for ethnic minorities and disabled workers, strengthening equity provisions.

Additionally, following a 2025 consultation, mandatory ethnicity and disability pay gap reporting for large employers is set to be implemented from 2026, building on gender reporting to require annual disclosures and action plans where gaps exist. This isn’t yet in force but represents an expansion of DEI-related obligations.

This legislation follows in the wake of the landmark Birmingham equal pay case. The case was brought by the unions Unison and GMB, on behalf of members working for the local authority and Birmingham Children's Trust. The two unions had brought claims on behalf of low-paid workers, arguing women working as teaching assistants, catering staff and care workers were not able to earn the same as male counterparts in other roles across the workforce.

The staff held roles such as cooks, cleaners or carers and had discovered they had been denied bonuses given to other employees in traditionally male-dominated roles such as refuse collectors and street cleaners. Birmingham City Council's equal pay liability is estimated to cost between £650 million and £760 million to settle, with liabilities continuing to rise by up to £14 million per month, essentially driving Birmingham Council to bankruptcy.

While the ruling has been panned by the right as “absurd” the Supreme Court decided these different jobs were equivalent because it deemed that the value of the work to the council was equivalent in each case, thanks to things like the skill level required of the workers and the sort of responsibilities they had, despite appearing different. The Council itself conducted a “Job Equivalence Survey” which found that these jobs were equivalent, in line with public sector guidance around pay bands.

This is why we now have DEI officers to ensure public sector organisations are insulated from this kind of disastrous liability. UK law mandates equality through robust anti-discrimination measures and targeted reporting, with stronger requirements for the public sector and large employers. Full-fledged DEI initiatives remain voluntary for most private businesses, though non-compliance with core rules can carry significant legal and reputational risks.

For most on the right, this ruling was completely wrong, but I’m not sure that it is. There was a time when being a bin man was a much more arduous role. I’m just old enough to remember the days before wheely bins, where binmen would have to walk up paths tor retrieve the classic cylindrical rubbish bins and any bin bags dumped by the side. It was dirty, slow, repetitive and often physically damaging work. But it’s not that anymore. Residents themselves have to put the bins out, and machines do most of the heavy lifting.

As such, one can easily argue that a shift out in the open air, moving wheely bins about is actually less physically demanding than working in an industrial kitchen or in care work which is very often more physically demanding. Even teaching assistants have a physically demanding role when dealing with disabled children. Arguably the “equivalent value” criteria upon which the ruling is based is flawed, but any reasonable person can see that the case has merit in its own right.

As such, to avoid future claims of this nature, it necessitates better reporting, and nobody (especially not Rupert Lowe) is going to complain about better public data. That’s why, if you support the general principle of equal pay, you need DEI officers.

In the wake of this case, NHS trusts are now tasked with compiling improvement plans, setting out targeted actions to address the prejudice and discrimination – direct and indirect – that exists through behaviour, policies, practices and cultures against certain groups and individuals across the NHS workforce.

Where it goes askew is when you have captured leadership pushing intensely political agendas such as LGBT+, where activists and tilted the emphasis towards trans rights. This is why we’re seeing so many TERF activists bring their own lawsuits against NHS trusts and councils. The supreme court ruling on single sex spaces will in time bring remedy to this. The trans fad is in its dying days. The problem is not DEI officers. It’s the management priorities and promotion incentives.

As it happens, I think NHS trusts should have a DEI officers with a better remit definition to ensure services are available to people without smartphones, and that parking machines are easy for the disabled to use, and clinics are navigable for the visually impaired, and that new building designs are checked for accessibility, and to ensure there are proper single sex spaces. Last time I dropped my mum off at St Luke’s in Bradford, it was an obstacle course for her wheelchair. I was genuinely surprised at how little thought had gone into wheelchair accessibility in a city hospital.

Regarding the statutory reporting requirements, the legislation does need more definition and precision to avoid ideological capture, but NHS trust do need to insulate themselves from equality cases - unless the plan is to repeal equality legislation, in which case, good luck with that. A government with long term reform agendas would be quite foolish to pick fights with the unions.

DEI officers have become the rage bait of the right, feeding into the narrative that the public sector is rife with non-jobs and political posts, but as Reform’s failed DOGE enterprise discovered, councils run by Reform UK have an average of fewer than 0.5 diversity and equality roles each, calling into question the party’s stated aim to save significant sums of money by cutting such jobs.

Others complain that DEI officers are on salaries of £80k, but this is an upper bracket, and it’s a job that requires skilled analysis and intimate familiarity with the law. The salary is in the right ballpark, and if it insulates councils and NHS trusts from cases that end up costing up to a billion quid, then it’s wise to carry such insurance.

That said, as Prosperity Institute notes, Birmingham isn’t the end of it. “Similar cases are being brought in the private sector, with predominantly — but not overwhelmingly — female staff making claims against retail businesses because they have been paid less than the predominantly — but not overwhelmingly — male staff working in warehouses. So far, Asda and Next have both lost claims on these grounds, and a similar case is being brought against Tesco”. These cases are all being brought under section 66 of the Equality Act and the total claims could run to billions of pounds in back pay. Retail is, after all, the UK’s largest sector by headcount.

Here again, there are legitimate grounds for these cases. As anyone who’s worked in retail (especially supermarkets) can tell you (nobody who’s ever worked at a right wing think tank), there isn’t much distinction between the shop floor and the warehouse. I remember in my student days working at PC World, and when you weren’t on the shop floor flogging Dell desktops, you’d be pushing around trolley cages for restocking. I quit PC World after realising that the sales job was essentially a dogsbody role that was far too much like physical labour for my tastes.

As an aside, I actually suspect this will not be an ongoing issue. With retail dying on its arse, not least thanks to Rachel Reeves’s NI hike, we will see more investment in automation. Equality laws will go a long way to removing humans from the process. I don’t even see the traditional supermarket model lasting forever now that it’s more convenient to book a home delivery.

The point to all this is that DEI officers are a response to a real issue, but there aren’t actually that many of them - and they do serve a function. Throwing this kind of populist chum in the the water might be popular with the party faithful, but it doesn’t constitute policy, and as Reform have found, it opens them up to embarrassment.

As such, the policy work needs to look at why DEI roles exist in the first place, which points to the need for a more fundamental overhaul of employment law and the labour market, but still keeping in mind the sort of country we want to be. The blowhard right winger would happily dump all the equality legislation regardless of the consequences.

While I would gladly undo much of what Blair did, I would not want to see a rollback to where we were, where the needs of women, the elderly and the disabled were completely overlooked in the design of public amenities and services - nor do I think it’s proper or wise to tell women they should be paid less. The able-bodied young men of the right must keep in mind that women, the disabled and the elderly do this thing called voting.

If all Restore Britain is going to do is drop morsels of tabloid rage bait, then it doesn’t do much to persuade anyone that it’s radically different from Reform, or that it meets the seriousness criteria set out by Rupert Lowe himself. Policy tropes such as “scrap DEI officers” may be a general signal of political intent, but the lack of substance opens up its own political liabilities.

Again, rather than sweeping repeals without giving thought to the consequences the real issues can be resolved with precision amendments. According to James McSweeney, if we wish to eliminate problem DEI policies from British life, it would be very easy to do.

If we remove Part 11 from the Equality Act 2010, almost every (political) diversity scheme becomes illegal overnight. With this adjustment, any private or public body pursuing diversity targets would become liable to near-bottomless lawsuits for violating the Equality Act’s prohibition on discrimination on grounds of race, sex, religion, gender identity or sexuality. Overnight, statements of intent to alter any group’s share of the workforce would become damning legal evidence. The entire diversity bureaucracy would be severely damaged.

Instead, though, the right prefers sweeping gestures and magic wands. This is how we know they’re profoundly unserious. As with so much of their policy prospectus, it might get them elected, but they won’t be re-elected.