Equality and diversity
The policies and objectives UK Export Finance has in place to meet its equality and diversity duties.
Equality Act 2010
Under the Equality Act 2010, public sector organisations are required to demonstrate that they are mindful of the three main aims of the Equality Act. These are:
- eliminate unlawful discrimination
- advance equality of opportunity
- foster good relations
The two specific public sector duties are to:
- publish equality and diversity information to show compliance with the Act by 31 January 2012, and at least annually from then on
- set and publish one or more specific and measurable equality objectives by 6 April 2012, and at least every 4 years.
Equality objectives
Our equality objectives are articulated in our annual HR Plan, which is developed to support the relevant strands of work in the delivery of the Business Plan 2024-29 and People Strategy 2024–2027.
This includes complying with the aims of the public sector equality duty each year. The objectives focus on the areas which the department has chosen to target over the year. They do not seek to cover every area of the business or to represent all of the department’s equality-related activity.
We publish our diversity data annually as of 31 March for the preceding year, which we use to measure our progress against our targets and external commitments.
UK Export Finance Public Sector Equality Duty Compliance
Women in Finance Charter
In 2017 UKEF became a signatory to the Women in Finance Charter. By becoming a signatory, we are publicly affirming our commitment to improving gender diversity within the Department.
We set ourselves an ambitious primary target of increasing female representation at Senior Civil Service (SCS) grades in the Department to 30% by 2020. We also aspired to improve overall female representation in our workforce to 40% over the same time period.
As of 31 March 2021, 33.3% of UKEF SCS staff were female, an increase from 8% in 2017. In light of this achievement, we set a further ambitious target of increasing female representation at Senior Civil Service (SCS) grades in the Department to 40% by 2025.
Since then, we have seen the percentage of women in SCS roles fluctuate, and this year it has fallen to 26.53% (as of 31 March 2025). We are therefore not on track to meet our target this year. With an average turnover at SCS of less than 5% over the past three years, it is clear that making a significant change to the proportion of women at SCS will take some time. We have also this year redefined our definition of senior management following the expansion of the SCS cohort to include technical SCS1s, who do not have Head of Division responsibility.
Given the low turnover, we have taken the decision to revise our target to 35% by 2027 and are committed to working towards this. To further reinforce this commitment, this year we have agreed new overall equality objectives for UKEF as part of our Public Sector Equality Duty compliance, which includes the goal to “increase the proportion of women in SCS roles by March 2029.
A focus for the coming year is interrogating our recruitment statistics, to identify the stage(s) at which women do not fare as well as men. We will then use that information to determine appropriate next steps to create an environment where, when opportunity allows, women have an equal chance of securing SCS roles as men.