Lloyds to increase number of black staff in senior roles

Lloyds Banking Group has pledged to increase the number of black staff in senior roles from only 0.6% to at least 3% over the next four years, as part of a “race action plan” rolled out weeks after Black Lives Matter protests began in the UK.

The commitment, announced to staff on Thursday, will mean recruiting about 168 more black colleagues into senior roles by 2024.

Britain’s biggest high street lender will also publish its first ethnicity pay gap report later this year and include at least one candidate from a black, Asian or minority ethnic (BAME) background on every executive director shortlist.

It will help ensure there is more diverse pool of candidates to replace the outgoing chief executive, António Horta-Osório, who will step down next year after a decade at the helm.

Currently, the bank only employs about 40 black staff across its 7,000-strong senior management team. The pledge will raise that total to about 210 staff and help reflect the proportion of black workers across the wider UK labour market.

Black people make up about 3.3% of the total population of England and Wales but hold only 1.5% of the 3.7m leadership positions across the UK’s wider public and private sectors in 2019, according to Business in the Community.

Horta-Osório said: “A more inclusive society is a more prosperous society, and a diverse business is a better business.

“It is clear that achieving an inclusive environment for everyone is our priority but right now we have very specific challenges that we have to address urgently for our black colleagues. Feedback has provided a clear way forward and, as a start, we have established an immediate action plan which focuses on culture, recruitment and progression.”

The focus on black management builds on Lloyds’ broader BAME target set in 2018, which aims to result in non-white staff making up 10% of the total workforce and 8% of senior managers by the end of 2020. The bank has already reached the workforce target of 10.3% of its 63,000 staff but has hit only 7.3% on the senior staff target. Those targets will be reviewed at the end of the year.

As part of Lloyds’ seven-point action plan, it will develop an internal race education programme and organise regular “listening sessions” to gauge staff experiences. It will also form a BAME advisory board to mould its diversity strategy and keep tabs on the bank’s progress.

Horta-Osório said: “This is just the beginning. The commitments we are making will not fix the issues overnight, and targets and measures will only take us so far but we have to challenge ourselves to do better and I am fully committed that we will do so.”