The Health Secretary has told NHS bodies that they must review their membership of Stonewall and stop employing diversity officers.
Steve Barclay has written to to ten leading national health organisations asking them to question whether their “diversity and inclusion memberships” provided good value.
According to The Times:
The Department of Health had decided not renew its membership of Stonewall’s workplace Diversity Champions scheme in 2021 because it “did not represent sufficiently good value for money”, he added.
Barclay wants other healthcare organisations to follow suit and consider cutting ties with Stonewall, the LGBT charity, which has been criticised for its attitude on equality law and gender.
In the letter, seen by The Times, Barclay wrote: “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.”
Barclay has asked the health bodies to reply to him by May 1.
Several organisations and institutions such as the BBC, Channel 4 and the House of Lords have pulled out of the Stonewall programme, which aims to promote workplace equality and inclusion.
Stonewall has argued for people to have access to single-sex spaces on the basis of their self-declared gender identity instead of biological sex.
It has been criticised for its lobbying over companies’ use of language, suggesting that they replace the word “mother” with “birthing parent” in maternity policies.
Barclay also suggested that the health organisations should no longer employ dedicated diversity officers, with these duties instead taken on by existing managers. His letter follows promises by the government of a war on “waste and wokery” in the NHS.
