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UK Parliament

BAME (2020)

Request

  1. Please state the number of BAME staff directly employed by the Houses of Parliament who left their roles in each of the following calendar years: 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020
  2. Of these BAME leavers in each of the above calendar years, please state the number with whom exit interviews were conducted.
  3. For each of the above calendar years, please state: a) The proportion of Houses of Parliament staff that were BAME in each calendar year in headcount terms b) The proportion of leavers from Houses of Parliament in each calendar year roles that were BAME in headcount terms.

 

Response

You have asked three questions about BAME members of staff at the Houses of Parliament. Please note that the House of Commons and the House of Lords are two separate public authorities for the purpose of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. Therefore, this response covers staff of the House of Commons Administration and the Parliamentary Digital Service, but not staff of the House of Lords Administration. Information about staff of the House of Lords Administration is the responsibility of the House of Lords, and should be directed to them.

Please also note that ethnicity is self-identified by members of staff, and to do so is not mandatory. Therefore, in the interests of completeness, information is included below both about staff who identify as any other category than ‘Any white background’ (referred to as ‘BAME’) and staff who have not disclosed this information.

Finally, in relation to the figures in the tables below, there is a trend that the response rates to all our diversity questions, which are voluntary, vary year to year. This makes comparisons about the representation of different ethnic groups hard to accurately quantify.

1) Please state the number of BAME staff directly employed by the Houses of Parliament who left their roles in each of the following calendar years: 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020.

The House of Commons holds information about the number of members of staff of the House of Commons Administration and the Parliamentary Digital Service who left their roles, split by categories for ethnicity.

Information for the 2017, 2018 and 2019 calendar years and 2020 up until 31 July (Table 1)

2) Of these BAME leavers in each of the above calendar years, please state the number with whom exit interviews were conducted.

This information is not held by the House of Commons. This is because information about which members of staff complete exit interviews or exit surveys is held separately from information about ethnicity, and they are not linked.

Please note that, while we endeavour to be as helpful as possible, the Freedom of Information Act only provides the requester with an access right to recorded information held by the House of Commons. This means that the House is not obligated to create new information or to provide analysis that is not already recorded. Further information can be found on our Parliamentary website FOI pages.

3) For each of the calendar years, please state: (a) the proportion of Houses of Parliament staff that were BAME in each calendar year in headcount terms; (b) the proportion of leavers from Houses of Parliament in each calendar year roles that were BAME in headcount terms.

The House of Commons holds information about the ethnicity of staff of the House of Commons Administration and the Parliamentary Digital Service who are BAME, and the proportion of total headcount that they represent.

Information for the 2017, 2018 and 2019 calendar years and 2020 up until 31 July (Table 2).

The House of Commons also holds information about the ethnicity of members of staff of the House of Commons Administration and the Parliamentary Digital Service who left their roles, and the proportion of total headcount that they represent.

Information for the 2017, 2018 and 2019 calendar years and 2020 up until 31 July (Table 3).