This week, the equalities minister and business secretary Kemi Badenoch took aim at Britain’s woke bureaucracy.

The government’s Inclusion at Work panel, convened by Badenoch last year, has unveiled its new report into UK employers’ Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) practices. Composed of private and public-sector experts and advised by a Harvard professor, the panel noted that 10,000 EDI jobs in the public sector are estimated to cost the British taxpayer £557 million per year.

It’s high time that the government got a grip on our spiralling EDI bureaucracy

According to the report, many EDI initiatives have little evidence behind them, are often ‘polarising’ and in some cases ‘unlawful’.As Badenoch put it in an accompanying Telegraph op-ed, concepts like ‘unconscious bias’ and ‘white privilege’, regularly employed in diversity training, are ‘bunkum’. The report joins existing research on diversity training in finding that by calling attention to differences and casting whites as oppressors and blacks as oppressed, such initiatives often increase racial tensions. And few will many be surprised to learn that many of these initiatives are often little more than virtue-signalling. According to the report, one in four bosses admit their diversity schemes were ‘reactive’ to political fads, such as Black Lives Matter. Three in four admit to not having done any research on such practices before foisting them on employees.

The report also takes on the thornier issue of diversity targets in hiring, which have often led to employers unlawfully discriminating against potential applicants. It points to the controversy in the RAF in which pressure to meet recruitment targets for women and ethnic minorities led to unlawful ‘positive discrimination’ against white male applicants. It also cites the lesser known case of Furlong v Chief Constable of Cheshire Police, where it was found in 2019 that Cheshire Police had discriminated against a white candidate through incorrectly applying the positive action provisions of the Equality Act 2010.

Badenoch takes a strong stance against such moves: ‘No group should ever be worse off because of companies’ diversity policies – whether that be black women, or white men.’ Instead, she says, the government will ensure all employees ‘will be treated fairly and according to merit’.

Even better, the report takes aim at the ideology behind the EDI industry. ‘Employers’, it explains, ‘should recognise that equality of opportunity will sometimes result in unequal outcomes, and disparities between individuals are not always a product of discrimination.’ Though buried in the centre of the report, this point is absolutely vital. By denying that an existing disparity is necessarily evidence of discrimination – as fashionable dogmas like ‘structural’ or racism or the so-called ‘gender pay gap’ would have it – it strikes at the heart of the EDI industry.

All of which is welcome. It’s high time that the government got a grip on our spiralling EDI bureaucracy. However, it’s still not as comprehensive as it could be.

The report finds that there is often ‘confusion’ from employers about what they’re supposed to be doing when it comes to EDI policies.It notes that they are ill-equipped to take many of these decisions. After all, ‘judgements of relative advantage between individuals and groups (by virtue of their characteristics), and the proportionality of differential treatment required to address disadvantage, [are] complex and likely beyond the capability of a corporate HR team.’ You would think this would be obvious. Put 1,000 sociologists in a room and they still wouldn’t be able to agree on which group is the most disadvantaged and what proportional breakdown of employees would be the most fair for a given employer. Why should we expect the answer to come from Jenny from HR?

This is where the report misses an opportunity. After all, why are employers having to weigh up what counts as a ‘proportionate’ employment outcome in the first place? A concern with proportionality is not just a fashionable woke dogma – it is also the letter of the law under the Equality Act 2010. The Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) obliges all public bodies to ‘encourage persons who share a relevant protected characteristic to participate in public life or in any other activity in which participation by such persons is disproportionately low’. This means public sector employers have to make judgments about what employment outcomes would be suitably proportionate. And they have a duty to try and achieve them, through wheezes like ‘positive action’ and diversity quotas. In this way, by mandating endless EDI reporting and social engineering, the PSED has been central to the rise of Britain’s woke bureaucracy. So it’s a shame to see this Labour law passed over here.

Of course, it’s still to Badenoch’s great credit that she has dared to champion ‘fairness and meritocracy’ against the EDI industry. But she should go further. Neither will be achievable while the Public Sector Equality Duty is the law of the land.