The last few weeks have seen the release of pay data from the BBC. Many people were shocked to see the high pay of some of the presenters, with Chris Evans topping the list with an eye-watering £2.2million, earning more in a week than Harrow’s average annual pay. Much of the media attention has focused on the gap between men and women, but there was another gap too, between ethnic minorities and white presenters. In 2017 how can it be that you have to get to the 25th person on the list before you can find an ethnic minority? In fact if you take all the ethnic minorities on the list and add up their entire salary, you don’t get to the amount earned by Chris Evans.
It’s not just the BBC that has this problem - if you look at the top of the organisation I lead, Harrow Council, there are very few ethic minorities there too. This is also true in other parts of the public sector and the private sector. In example after example we see mainly white men at the top. This cannot go on. No one is saying that the BBC is consciously discriminating when they make their hiring or pay decisions, but it shows a wider problem. If you do not give people in underrepresented groups opportunities to grow and progress, and then not give them opportunities for promotion, we will never fix the problem.
In March of this year, the Tesco chairman said that ‘“If you are a white male - tough - you are an endangered species and you are going to have to work twice as hard." This type of scaremongering is not going to help. This rhetoric aims to set one side against the other, when really the answer is that we all need to come together. He also didn’t mention that he is the chair of a board of 12 people, not a single one is an ethnic minority and 8 of the 12 are white men.
We need to go further in politics too. Across London, there are 33 leaders of local authorities. Just a handful are ethnic minorities, and it does not represent London and its make up at all. I sit around the table with all these leaders and often wonder why. It’s clear that there is a long way to go. We need short term solutions and we need long term ones too. Decision should always be made on merit and there is no need to lower standards to ensure we get ethnic minorities at the top of the public sector. But what we have at the moment can’t continue. Are we really saying there are no ethnic minorities in the whole of the UK that are as good as Chris Evans? Are we truly to believe that there are no ethnic minorities that are capable of being in the top 24 highest paid people at the BBC? The answer is no.
The Labour party has had some good success in increasing the number of women MPs in parliament. It’s time that such practices were extended to look at all under-represented groups in parliament. This took effort, the use of all woman shortlists has been controversial at times, but no one can say it hasn’t had an effect. It’s time to take action. I’m glad that as a country we have moved forward on these issues over the last 20 years. But the BBC data should make us all look at what we can do now to make sure this gap is closed soon. I will certainly be thinking about what I can do.
