Health Secretary calls on NHS quangos to ban diversity officers

Health Secretary calls on NHS quangos to ban diversity officers and review their memberships to Stonewall in crackdown on woke job roles

• Steve Barclay has insisted NHS organisations report on diversity value for money
• Read more: Council officer ‘hounded out of her job amid toxic transphobia row’ 

The Health Secretary has written to the heads of NHS quangos to demand that they review their membership of Stonewall and ban diversity officers.

In a letter seen by The Mail on Sunday, Steve Barclay insisted that organisations including NHS England report on whether inclusion schemes were value for money.

He also said that they should no longer employ dedicated diversity and inclusion officers and instead give these duties to existing managers.

The letter was sent to the chief executives of ten NHS arm’s-length bodies including the Care Quality Commission, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence and the UK Heath Security Agency. 

In it, Mr Barclay pointed out that the Department of Health and Social Care had not renewed its membership to Stonewall in February 2021 after concluding that it did not represent value for money.

Steve Barclay has insisted that organisations including NHS England report on whether inclusion schemes were value for money

People protesting in support of Stonewall. Mr Barclay pointed out that the DHSC had not renewed its membership of the charity in 2021

‘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,’ he wrote.

He set a deadline for the bodies to report back by May 1.

In his letter, he also said he believed that diversity and inclusion was ‘everyone’s responsibility and should be picked up through normal management processes and as a part of everyone’s role rather than through the use of external providers or discrete dedicated roles within organisations’.

A Whitehall source said: ‘These NHS bodies should be spending money on patient care and frontline services rather than diversity and backroom bureaucracy.’

Mr Barclay is believed to have been motivated to send the letter after new guidelines were issued to NHS staff to treat all patients as gender-neutral. 

He ordered an investigation into the diktat after learning taxpayers had funded the guide to ‘inclusive communication’. 

It instructs doctors not to use phrases such as ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’ or ‘he’ and ‘she’ until a patient has confirmed their gender identity.

The guidance was produced by researchers who received a £164,964 government grant from the National Institute for Health and Care Research to study how clinicians could improve their communication with LGBT patients.

Mr Barclay previously told The Mail on Sunday that he would be ‘ruthless’ in targeting pen-pushers in order to save taxpayers’ money.

He is planning major reforms to slash the amount of red tape and to free up doctors and nurses so they can focus on patient care. He and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt commissioned a review at the end of last year which is likely to recommend scrapping the number of unnecessary targets that hospitals are expected to meet.

Mr Barclay’s intervention comes after pay agreements were struck for some NHS workers including nurses. Junior doctors are still planning to strike.

Arts council officer ‘is hounded out of her job amid toxic transphobia row’ 

By MICHEAL POWELL  

A senior official at Britain’s biggest arts funding quango claims she was wrongly branded transphobic and hounded out of her job in a toxic row over women’s rights.

Denise Fahmy said she was ‘harassed and victimised’ in a vitriolic campaign waged against her at Arts Council England (ACE), which received £900 million from taxpayers to fund arts projects last year.

The 55-year-old said staff circulated a petition against her and other ‘gender criticals’ on the quango’s intranet website which was signed by 100 people. She said she was signed off with stress over the hate campaign.

Now she plans to take legal action in an employment tribunal against the funding body where she worked as a visual arts officer for 15 years.

She said: ‘I have seen too many people’s careers and their mental health ruined by spurious allegations of transphobia… there is real fear in the arts.’ 

Denise Fahmy, 55, said she was ‘harassed and victimised’ in a vitriolic campaign waged against her at Arts Council England after defending the LGB Alliance

The LGB Alliance was granted £9,000 by ACE last year to make a film for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee but it was withdrawn after an outcry over claims of transphobia

On a crowd-funding page, Ms Fahmy said the row started after ACE pulled funding to the LGB Alliance, a lesbian and gay rights charity accused of having an anti-trans agenda.

The charity was granted £9,000 last year to make a film for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee but it was withdrawn after an outcry over claims of transphobia from ACE staff who said the LGB Alliance was a ‘glorified hate group’ that had ‘neo-Nazi’ supporters.

Fahmy claims at a meeting of 400 staff last April, a senior executive said it had been ‘a mistake’ to give the funding to a ‘divisive organisation with a history of anti-trans exclusionary activity’. 

Ms Fahmy said she challenged the man, saying his stance went against free speech.

She said: ‘I was deeply shocked at how biased he was, a respected gatekeeper at the very top of a public funding body, one that distributed £943 million to the Arts in 2021-22.’

She complained to ACE chairman Sir Nick Serota and Culture Secretary Michelle Donelan but it was not upheld.

She said she hoped her legal case would show up ‘institutional discrimination from senior public servants, trustees and a government department, against gender-critical people’.

LGB Alliance has strongly denied it is transphobic. 

The organisation, set up four years ago, boasts of being the only UK charity fighting exclusively for lesbian, gay and bisexual rights. But this has left it open to allegations it is ‘exclusionary’.

The Free Speech Union’s Toby Young said Ms Fahmy’s case ‘highlights how captured the arts are by gender identity ideology and how little tolerance there is for anyone who dissents from that dogma’. 

He added: ‘As a taxpayer-funded organisation, ACE shouldn’t be taking sides in what is a highly charged, ongoing public debate.’

Kate Barker, LGB Alliance chief executive, said Ms Fahmy was ‘drowned out by the voices of intolerance who will not accept any disagreement with their cult-like views’.

An ACE spokesperson said: ‘We are not able to comment on ongoing legal cases.’

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