https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/03/15/the-rise-of-the-woke-bureaucracy/

New research published by the TaxPayers’ Alliance last week shows that, in the past three years, Britain’s cash-strapped councils have almost doubled their spending on ‘Equality, Diversity and Inclusion’ (EDI) roles. The number of these roles ballooned from 474 in 2020-21 to 717 in 2022-23. They are handsomely remunerated, too. An ‘assistant director of community services and EDI’ can net a tidy £103,000 a year in bankrupt Birmingham. Even amid the funding crisis, new postings continue to appear, often with innovative titles such as a ‘staying well team manager’ or a ‘diversity, inclusion and wellbeing adviser’.

The cost of these diversity commissars isn’t the only problem, of course. These initiatives also waste the time of other council employees, who are forced to sit through endless rounds of diversity training, rather than doing actual work providing services. Warwickshire County Council, for instance, has spent £677,000 on diversity training, in which staff took part in an African drumming session and played a board game about ‘respect at work’.

How any of this is supposed to relate to councils’ responsibilities for bins, schools and roads is far from clear. Indeed, as a recent report by the Mail on Sunday points out, with the £1.54million of public money spent on EDI training by Labour councils in England, they could have repaired 30,000 potholes.

@Flick It's bloody outrageous and it needs to stop.

@HebrideanHecate @Flick We have one of these departments. They're constantly hiring and are filled with senior management positions. Basically they hold events; that's all they seem to do.