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Buckingham Palace is not currently looking to hire a diversity chief despite reports earlier this year that suggested the Firm was keen to bring someone onboard to oversee diversity issues across all royal households.
The news comes on the heels of the Royal Family publishing the 2020-2021 Sovereign Grant Report which revealed that only 8.5 per cent of Buckingham Palace employees are people from ethnic minorities. The UK’s most recent census from 2011 found that 14 per cent of the population of England and Wales are non-white. This year’s Sovereign Grant Report is the first ever of its kind to disclose numbers revealing the diversity, or lack thereof, of palace employees.
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According to a new report in Harper’s Bazaar, royal sources suggest that the royal household is striving to increase the amount of non-white employees at the palace to 10 per cent by the end of 2022. However, there are no plans to appoint a so-called ‘diversity tsar’ despite reports to the contrary circulating in March of this year to help achieve that goal.
“Her Majesty and the royal family have promoted and embraced the diversity of our nation and that of the Commonwealth, and we recognize that our own workforce needs to reflect the communities we serve,” a palace source told Bazaar. “We recognize we are not where we would like to be and that despite all our efforts to target recruitment, train managers, and build an inclusive workplace, the results have not been what we would like.”
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The source also suggested that the palace has not ruled out the idea of a diversity chief entirely but has rather shelved the idea for the time being.
“We are committed to improving this, hence we have started to publish diversity statistics to ensure we are open and transparent about our efforts to improve,” the source added. “We fully expect to be held accountable regarding our progress.”
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The news, however, is particularly bad timing given recent reports that suggested Buckingham Palace banned ethnic minorities from occupying office roles until the late 1960s.
ET Canada has reached out to Buckingham Palace for comment but has yet to hear back.