Corporate report

June 2026 update

Updated 2 June 2026

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI)

We want the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to be a place where everyone is treated fairly, feels included, and can do their best work. Our EDI work helps us attract and keep talented people, and better understand the public we serve.

In autumn 2024 we started developing the next phase of our EDI strategy. We used evidence from workforce data, colleague feedback and a review of our equality objectives (which remain relevant for 2025 to 2026) to shape our priorities.

• building a diverse and inclusive workforce that reflects and understands the public we serve
• making sure all colleagues are valued and able to contribute
• helping colleagues to thrive and perform at their best

To deliver our strategy, we prioritise:

• meeting our statutory and legal responsibilities
• building on what has worked over the last 4 years by embedding good practice and sustaining momentum
• aligning our work with the CMA’s long-term organisational strategy and transformation programme

This page summarises what we delivered in 2025, the impact we are seeing, and our priorities for 2026 onwards.

Progress in 2025

During 2025 we continued to deliver our EDI commitments, alongside meeting our statutory duties and supporting wider organisational priorities.

• in February 2025 we renewed our Disability Confident accreditation (Level 2). We also set up a central workplace adjustments hub to help provide reasonable adjustments consistently, including tailored support for neurodiverse colleagues and improving candidate communications on reasonable adjustments
• to support the wellbeing of our colleagues we introduced a single flexitime policy and reinforced the role of regular meetings in monitoring workload and wellbeing. We also introduced a wellbeing conversation guide for managers and refreshed intranet guidance to bring together key policies, tools and support routes
• we improved how inclusive our recruitment processes are by delivering priority actions from our 2024 diagnostic. This included clearer job adverts, better candidate information, and improved guidance and training for hiring managers
• we have started work to strengthen the governance of our staff networks by enhancing senior sponsorship and introducing a staff network policy. This clarifies roles and accountabilities and improved engagement with senior leaders

Impact

Workforce diversity representation

Over the year we saw modest changes in our workforce diversity measures.

Our workforce profile shows modest progress. Female representation increased to 51%, including SCS, with improvements across most grades. Ethnic minority representation rose to 25%, but remains significantly lower at senior levels with around 8% representation at SCS. Disability representation increased slightly to 8% overall, with 6% at SCS level. LGBT+ representation remained stable at 9%.

Pay gaps

We continued to see year-on-year improvement in both our gender and ethnicity pay measures. The gender pay gap (mean and median) reduced to its lowest levels since reporting began, reflecting increased female representation at SCS level and a more balanced gender profile across grades.

Ethnicity pay gaps also improved across most measures. However, the overall ethnicity pay gap remains too high. A key contributing factor continues to be the under-representation of ethnic minority colleagues at SCS level.

Performance and development outcomes

Historically, the largest differences in performance outcomes have affected ethnic minority colleagues. During the year we saw incremental improvement, including a more even distribution of ‘Achieving’ ratings across ethnic minority groups.

However, ethnic minority colleagues remained under-represented in ‘Exceeding’ outcomes and slightly over-represented in ‘Not meeting expectations’.

Our approach for 2026 onwards

We know sustained progress comes from how we lead, make decisions and hold ourselves to account, not from standalone initiatives. That is why our EDI work is integrated into our wider people strategy and the delivery of organisational change.

We will take a structured, phased approach during 2026 to review evidence, engage colleagues, and refresh our equality objectives.

Our priorities for 2026 align to our people strategy and transformation outcomes. Later in 2026 we will publish our refreshed equality objectives and strategic priorities for 2026 to 2029.

Priorities for 2026

Statutory responsibilities and ongoing commitments

We will:

• maintain compliance and transparency, including reporting our gender, ethnicity and disability pay gaps
• embed the senior sponsorship model to strengthen how we hear colleagues’ lived experience
• refresh our EDI governance to support inclusive decision-making
• continue to integrate diversity insight into routine people reporting
• strengthen our Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) practice across internal activity and externally facing work, including where impacts may differ by protected characteristic

Leadership expectations

We will implement clear expectations and minimum standards for SCS leaders, setting out what leaders are accountable for in day-to-day decisions. This includes workforce planning and resourcing, recruitment and progression, interrupting bias, inclusive team culture and local wellbeing.

Targeted organisational priorities

2026 priorities will focus on the clearest evidence-based gaps.

• deliver targeted interventions (for example, sponsorship and talent programmes) to improve SCS representation for ethnic minorities and colleagues with a disability

• use our longer-term outcomes to guide activity while we refresh our equality objectives