Corporate report

Environment Agency equality, diversity and inclusion strategy 2022 to 2025

Published 9 November 2023

Applies to England

This strategy was approved in March 2022. It was published internally in May 2022 and has been in use since then.

During this time our Chief Executive was Sir James Bevan and our Chair Emma Howard Boyd.

The Environment Agency now has a new Chief Executive Philip Duffy and Chair Alan Lovell.

1. Foreword

The Environment Agency (EA) is made up of committed public servants. Last year, the EA’s engineers, scientists, officers, regulators, and many more responded to more than 76,000 incidents. These included flood, drought, fires, and pollution incidents: one every seven minutes, 24 hours a day.

Diversity leads to better decision making. Last year, a report from the 30% Club and the Oliver Wyman Forum called ‘The Climate Action Gender Gap’ said, “In the end, companies that are good at diversity are likely to be good at climate action. Those that combine the 2 will find they are in a better position than others to do business in a low-carbon economy.”

The Environment Agency is committed to having an inclusive culture:

• 84 per cent of employees think the Environment Agency is committed to equality, diversity and inclusion at work
• 76 per cent think the Environment Agency respects individual differences

We are not yet as diverse as the communities we serve. But our ambition is to be the best employer for equality, diversity, and inclusion in the country.

Last year, we launched a new race action plan with actions focussing on:

• recruitment and retention
• equitable outcomes
• accessible services

This strategy:

• shows how we plan to foster an inclusive culture which cultivates belonging
• ensures the Environment Agency is a place which truly represents the diversity of modern Britain - where everyone is valued and treated equally

As part of our commitment, we review our Environment Agency (EA): pay gap for disability, race, religion and belief, and sexual orientation as well as gender. But transparency is only the first step: action delivers change. Our action plan sets out clear targets on diversity for protected characteristics. We will start reviewing these diversity targets as soon as April 2022. This strategy takes an evidence-based approach using learning from other organisations and our own data and intelligence. It aligns with the Defra group equality, diversity and inclusion strategy 2020- 24 and builds on great work by our employee networks, human resources, and employees.

The climate emergency won’t discriminate, but how societies manage it, will. The Environment Agency has a vital role in preparing everyone in England for the climate shocks of the coming decades. We want to ensure that no one gets left behind and everyone has the opportunity to influence decision making in the greatest challenge, and opportunity, of our time.

Emma Howard Boyd – Chair

Sir James Bevan – Chief Executive

2. What equality, equity, diversity, and inclusion means to us

2.1 Equality

Equality is about access to opportunity.

We need to ensure that people are not treated less favourably because of their protected characteristics. This is cemented through the Equality Act 2010. This is a law protecting you from discrimination or unfair treatment based on certain personal characteristics. These are:

• age
• race
• sex
• gender reassignment
• disability
• religion or belief
• sexual orientation
• marriage or civil partnership
• pregnancy and maternity

2.2 Equity

Equity is the result or outcomes we achieve by applying equality.

We promote impartiality and fairness in all our approaches to people. This is especially in our:

• processes and procedures
• opportunities and access for all

We do this by understanding that people are different. We recognise that varied levels of resources or support are needed to:

• remove barriers
• allow people to succeed, engage and thrive in their job

We:

• understand the root cause of outcome disparity
• provide a voice in decisions to those that have been historically disadvantaged
• provide opportunities for learning and development based on merit and ensure we level the playing field for everyone

2.3 Diversity

We value and recognise difference both in our employees and the wider communities we serve.

We recognise that difference enriches our decisions and therefore our outcomes. We are all diverse. We have a legal responsibility to ensure equality of the 9 protected characteristics - as listed in the Equality section. But diversity is wider and some examples of difference (to name a few) include:

• nationality
• socio-economic status and or background
• values and or life experiences
• mental health
• body size, shape
• parental status and or caring responsibilities

We are all made up of different things. These differences overlap and is what we call intersectionality.

2.4 Inclusion

Inclusion is closely tied to a sense of belonging.

We:

• have a culture that is welcoming to everyone in every space, interactions and at all levels - regardless of age, sex, gender, religion, race, gender identity or abilities
• value difference and try to understand other perspectives even when we disagree
• use language that acknowledges diversity, is sensitive to difference and respects everyone
• ensure transparency in our decision-making and approaches to people
• are self-aware and are mindful of our privilege, or lack of, in all our interactions
• make space for all voices to be heard or for people to otherwise input in order that we truly value and reap the benefits of difference

3. Our equality, diversity, and inclusion ambition

In 2020, Coronavirus changed the way we live and impacted everyone’s home and work life. We saw increases in hate crimes in particular, the impassioned responses to the deaths of George Floyd, Sarah Everard, and Sabina Nessa. In addition, socio-economic shifts around class and social mobility made the impacts of inequality clearer across the organisation. Together with legislation, this drives our focus on eradicating inequality and increasing the equality, diversity and inclusion within our organisation, and our services to communities.

A plan to achieve this forms the basis of our equality, diversity, and inclusion strategy. It represents our passion for people and will address the need to drive improvements across all protected characteristics through a targeted response based on evidence. The Environment Agency has renewed its commitment, forming a holistic approach to equality, diversity, and inclusion. We will nurture an organisation that matches the changing needs of people and the environment we care for.

We have made small increases in diversity numbers when we look at race, gender, and sexual orientation. We also use employee surveys, performance management and other Human Resources (HR) data to give us a rich picture of our overall performance on equality, diversity, and inclusion. The Environment Agency has 22 EDI networks that not only support staff but advocate and drive changes in equality, diversity, and inclusion for the organisation. The Environment Agency recognises the importance of diversity in making better decisions. To this extent a Black, Asian and minority representative now sits alongside Directors in the organisational decision-making process.

The Environment Agency has invested in corporate initiatives including support for its EDI networks. The valuable effort from network leads, champions and members benefits all employees.

We have seen:

• benefits in making recruitment fairer and more inclusive
• improvements in respect at work
• an improvement in our approach to people - resulting in increased satisfaction

Better initiatives have increased recruitment and rates of promotion especially for women. We have new and improved policies. Among these initiatives were a breastfeeding policy and an improved parental leave policy.

In the last 10 years we have:

• doubled our numbers on people with disability who are in our organisation
• improved our disability and capabilities policies to help those with disabilities continue working in their roles or new roles within the organisation

There is still a lot we need to do. We need to:

• take stronger action, recognising that everyone is different
• provide targeted support to effectively remove barriers and level the playing field
• go beyond equality to ensure there is equity
• foster an inclusive culture for all, which cultivates belonging and ensure our organisation is anti-racist and does not discriminate

4. Our responsibility and commitment to EDI

The Equality Act 2010 provides the legal framework for equality in the UK. It protects people from discrimination at work and wider in the society. The Equality Act 2010 includes the public sector equality duties. This sets out our responsibility to:

• eliminate discrimination, harassment and victimisation
• advance equality and good relationships between people who share a protected characteristic and those who do not

The Environment Agency is committed to being an equitable and diverse organisation, where we value difference, include everyone so people can thrive. A focus on equality, diversity and inclusion will ensure our decisions are fair and transparent. The key to the success of the Environment Agency is valuing difference. We do this by drawing diverse talent into the organisation. This supports looking after and persuading people to look after the environment.

Negative environmental and climate impacts are:

• felt more acutely by areas where there is more social inequality
• often in communities that are predominantly ethnic minority

It is therefore essential that the lived experiences of people in these communities are included in our workforce. People with different perspectives are valuable to shape systems, policies and services. This will improve our ability to meet the diverse needs of a wider cross section of society. The use of a wide variety of ideas and diverse perspectives enables us to be better in:

• our decision making
• the environmental outcomes we deliver

Increased diversity and inclusion will generate improved efficiency and innovation. Most certainly, this will improve positive outcomes for all the communities we serve. It will ensure we become a more effective organisation in:

• delivering our commitments
• efficiently tackling the climate emergency
• protecting people and the environment

Equality, diversity, and inclusion is the right thing to achieve, morally. It makes good business sense, and we have a responsibility to realise it, under the law.

5. Our approach

We all have a role to play in ensuring we improve and become more inclusive. This strategy is for all Environment Agency employees:

• at every level
• whatever they do
• wherever they work

It reflects feedback from employees across the Environment Agency and draws on evidence of what has worked here, as well as in other organisations.

We will achieve this in our decision making by:

• centralising 80 per cent of our decisions nationally, to ensure a more coordinated approach
• 20 per cent locally to ensure a focus on local priorities

We will ensure national and local efforts are complementary. We have clear priorities and objectives to measure and report on progress and success

Our EDI strategy is grounded on the EDI principles set out in the Environment Agency People Strategy.

We will:

• have a strong focus on EDI that provides the cultural shift needed to create the truly inclusive organisation we aspire to be - in doing so we will take EDI beyond targets to build and develop a diverse culture that values all forms of diversity, allows people to be their best selves at work and celebrates difference

• ensure all our people are equipped to be inclusive and enable conversations that mean we are sensitive and understanding of our people as individuals

• build and maintain inclusive leadership skills across the organisation, where EDI is recognised and visible

• ensure our approach to people is truly inclusive and maximises opportunities to increase the diversity of our workforce to represent the communities we serve, including attraction, recruitment, on-boarding, learning and development, strategic workforce planning, reward, talent management and retention

• recognise and support the potential benefits of our work on the climate emergency to tackle inequality in the communities we serve

6. Strategic objectives

The Environment Agency will continue to focus on ensuring equality, diversity, and inclusion for all employees. Our 5-year action plan, EA2025: creating a better place - GOV.UK, sets out our long-term goals of what we aim to achieve by 2025 and the kind of organisation we want to be. A big part of that is our people.

The People Strategy draws on this and through clear principles:

• provides more detail on our ambition for our people
• links into our ambition for equality, diversity and inclusion

This is carried through in the Defra group equality, diversity and inclusion strategy 2020 to 2024. This aims to:

• create more inclusive cultures
• build, and sustain a diverse workforce across Defra
• enhance making the UK a great place to live for all citizens
• improve EDI capability and confidence
• communicate, raise awareness, and report progress

The Environment Agency equality, diversity, and inclusion strategy aligns with the Defra group equality, diversity and inclusion strategy. It closes the gap on the high-level aspirations sets out in the People Strategy by providing targeted focus based on evidence.

We have 4 strategic objectives for the organisation:

1. Build and develop an inclusive and respectful culture that allows everyone to be their best selves at work.

2. Increase the diversity of our workforce.

3. Ensure equity of opportunity in performance, development, progression and pay.

4. Increase our ability to protect and improve the environment for all communities.

6.1 Build and develop an inclusive and respectful culture that allows everyone to be their best selves at work

We have a cultural framework for the Environment Agency which has, ‘value difference; include everyone’, at its core. We will embed this by ensuring we focus on the right behaviours to help us improve and protect the environment. We will ensure all our people are equipped to be inclusive and enable conversations that mean we are sensitive and understanding of our people as individuals. We will build and maintain inclusive leadership skills across the organisation, where EDI is recognised and visible. We will promote inclusion, tackle exclusion and discrimination to become a more inclusive organisation.

6.2 Increase the diversity of our workforce

We will:

• recruit inclusively and equitably - this will ensure we have a diverse workforce, so we have a wide variety of lived experiences to influence better decisions
• become truly reflective of the communities we serve - this will be reflected in all our approaches to people in attracting including our outreach to schools and communities, recruiting, onboarding, and overall strategic workforce planning
• continue to learn from others and participate in benchmarking to ensure a process of continuous improvement

6.3 Ensure equity of opportunity in performance, development, progression and pay

Ensure our approach to performance, learning and development, reward and talent management is by default inclusive and equitable. We will review the way we conduct performance to ensure we are truly fair and consistent in our decision making. The intelligence tells us that some of our protected characteristics groups fall on the lower end of our performance management metrics. Our pay gap also reveals that we need to take action to improve the pay gap across groups.

6.4 Increase our ability to protect and improve the environment for all communities

We will improve our ability to protect and improve the environment through the delivery of equitable external services and environmental outcomes. This will include our community projects and our incident response. We will ensure there is fair and equitable distribution of environmental benefits to accurately reflect the diverse needs of the community.

7. Our priorities

We all have a role to play in ensuring we have an inclusive organisation. Intelligence over the last 10 years tells us that we have made the least progress on race and, to a lesser extent, gender and sexual orientation. Although we have made progress in improving disability numbers, our evidence tells us that we need to take further action to:

• improve performance ratings
• reduce the disability pay gap
• ensure that people have the right workplace adjustments

We therefore need more targeted actions to ensure more rapid progress in these areas.

In 2020, we put in resources and specific actions through an interim race action plan. A significant part of this is the culture change underway with the ‘big conversation on race’. This enabled us to make a start in addressing cultural changes. It drives much needed momentum on race and progress across all protected characteristics. Going forwards, actions from the race action plan will be nested in the overarching Environment Agency equality, diversity, and inclusion action plan. The action plan will be supported by our strategic objectives. We also have a cultural framework that provides the foundation for us to continue to value difference and focus on the behaviours we need to see.

The evidence shows that most of our workforce is concentrated between 31 and 60 years. We will therefore need to focus on improving our age profile through recruitment. We will focus on:

• attracting young people
• supporting learning and development
• ensuring effective knowledge transfer, especially prior to retirement

We do not have enough data to understand social mobility and addressing inequalities due to socio-economic background. We will therefore start laying foundations to improve our understanding in this area.

In addition to pursing equality, diversity and inclusion for all, the evidence tells us that we need to prioritise:

• race
• gender
• disability – particularly, workplace adjustments
• improve our age profile (focus on young starters, learning and development and knowledge transfer, especially prior to retirement)
• setting the foundations for understanding socio-economic background

We will drive actions across all protected characteristics by building on wider benefits across multiple groups. We recognise that we are all connected with multiple differences. Although we need targeted actions, we will need to continue to work together to ensure equity for all.

Underpinning these 4 objectives is the need to ensure we improve the delivery of equality, diversity, and inclusion across the entire organisation to enable success

8. Delivering and measuring success of our equality, diversity, and inclusion strategy

There are 4 enablers that are fundamental in improving delivery of the strategy, its objectives, focus areas and ensure success. These are:

• clear visible leadership, governance and accountability in equality, diversity, and inclusion
• communicate (to include reporting) and engage effectively
• use robust data and evidence to target action and measure progress
• work in partnership and ensure benchmarking to evidence action

We will improve leadership, communication and accountability on equality, diversity, and inclusion to ensure our EDI ambition is visible in all parts of the organisation.

This will be supported by clarity on roles, responsibilities, governance and the national/local (80:20) split for delivery of equality, diversity and inclusion. This will be imperative for everyone but particularly for key groups and teams contributing to EDI work, including (to name a few):

• Human Resources (HR)
• EDI networks
• people groups
• local outcome planning leads

To enable us to deliver the EDI strategy effectively, we will focus on clear communication and good engagement.

We will:

• coordinate a network of EDI portfolio leads across the organisation to share best practice
• create an EDI resource hub for signposting, guidance and learning resources - this will improve EDI and sharing best practice across the Environment Agency
• provide training to develop the capability and capacity of employees to contribute to EDI progress, share best practice and work together

We will deliver the objectives through a detailed action plan.

We will:

• target, and monitor action based on good data and evidence, learn from and with others
• use a mixture of qualitative and quantitative measures to drive success
• work in partnership across Defra, continuing to work with our EDI networks, ensuring support in place to effectively support our employees
• strengthen governance and reporting, and ensure shared resources and best practice across the entire organisation
• use benchmarking to measure success and drive more action so we are not complacent with our achievements.

9. Equality Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan

We have a detailed action plan that we will record and monitor progress against. We have distilled this down to a few high-level actions that will provide an overview of what we need to deliver.

9.1 High-level actions

Objective 1: build and develop an inclusive and respectful culture that allows everyone to be their best selves at work

High-level actions:

1. Equality, diversity, and inclusion training for new starters to ensure the work on the ‘big conversation on race’ continues to promote a more inclusive culture, ensuring that all staff have ongoing EDI confidence.

2. Develop the capability of leaders, managers, and team members to operate inclusively, respectfully and without bias through blended learning.

3. Promote the refreshed EA cultural framework building on the work of the race action plan and embed ‘value difference, include everyone’ with clear expectations of what constitutes positive and unacceptable behaviours.

Objective 2: increase the diversity of our workforce

High-level actions:

1. All recruitment 6 months and more to be advertised externally as well as internally (permanent and temporary roles).

2. All grades advertised grade 7 and above must have a diverse shortlisting panel and interview panel and not just on the staff engagement panel.

3. Review targets for protected characteristics when the new census becomes available in April 2022.

4. Focus on paid apprenticeships, internships, and placements to encourage the intake of younger employees.

Objective 3: Ensure equity of opportunity in performance, development, progression and pay

High-level actions:

1. Develop a sponsorship program for those from underrepresented groups. Pilot an initial 2-year program to test effectiveness.

2. Work with employee networks and line managers to improve uptake of employee passports and properly embed workplace adjustments.

3. Continue to report on pay gaps (going beyond statutory gender reporting and extending existing groups to include socio-economic background) and take action to address the underlying causes.

4. Role model flexible working arrangements and create guidance to make business cases for flexible working clearer.

5. Develop a new menopause policy and achieve White Ribbon Accreditation for the EA.

Objective 4: Improve our ability to protect the environment for all communities

High-level actions:

1. Be an active and positive part of the communities we work in, by using our offices, land, and people to their advantage (from eMission 2030).

2. Improve outreach/engagement of diverse communities and use equality impact assessment tools to ensure we consider equality, diversity and inclusion impacts in our decision making (from eMission 2030).

3. Evaluate and act to ensure social equity is delivered through our work (from eMission 2030).

We will measure and report progress, enabling us to take any necessary remedial action to ensure we are the best organisation for equality, diversity, and inclusion in the United Kingdom.