Lord Young of Acton (Con)

I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, for giving us an opportunity to discuss this important issue. I declare my interest as the director of the Free Speech Union. In the past six years, in its caseload, the Free Speech Union has taken on 167 cases in which a Civil Service body—a Whitehall department—is the recorded other party. Those are cases where employees have been put through disciplinary processes, and in some cases dismissed. The largest single category in that caseload is female employees who ran afoul of institutional orthodoxy on issues such as access to single-sex spaces. To bring home what kind of case the Free Speech Union typically deals with, I thought I would tell the Grand Committee about one particular case: namely, that of Anna Thomas, a mother of one who was employed at the time, in 2020, by the DWP. She was employed as a coach at a jobcentre in Portsmouth. She was alarmed when she was directed to an anti-racism hub on the department’s intranet which encouraged civil servants to treat racism like Covid-19 and to “assume that you have it”. This was in the wake of George Floyd’s death in Minnesota. The hub was prefaced with a statement by Peter Schofield, then the DWP’s Permanent Secretary, telling staff they were “responsible for being actively anti-racist”, and asking them to “make the DWP an anti-racist organisation”. I am sure that noble Lords are familiar with the fact that anti-racism is a central concept in critical race theory. In case they are in any doubt that the DWP was embracing critical race theory, learning resources on this hub included a diagram from the American activist Ibram X Kendi, one of the authors of critical race theory, and that diagram asked staff to “admit that you deny racism is a problem” and to “promote and advocate for policies and leaders that are anti-racist”. Staff were also directed to the work of Robin DiAngelo—again, this in a hub that they were referred to by the Permanent Secretary—who, as noble Lords may know, is a critical race theorist who claims that white people, including children, are “inherently racist”. Anna Thomas raised the alarm. In the context of a whistleblower, she discussed this with various senior members of the department. Initially, her complaint was taken seriously and upheld. The DWP’s own behavioural science expert advised that the anti-racism hub was political, and Mr Schofield should not have gone down the road of anti-racism. Nevertheless, the culture endured and Anna Thomas’s fears about political bias within the DWP materialised when she was asked to promote an event in Portsmouth for people interested in a career in the Metropolitan Police, and straight white men were explicitly excluded from participating in this particular recruitment opportunity—an example of what my noble friend Lord Jackson of Peterborough refers to as a woke recruitment practice. In due course, Anna Thomas was placed under investigation because she would not keep quiet about these concerns, and in November 2021 she was dismissed for gross misconduct. The Free Speech Union took on her case; we brought a case in the employment tribunal against the department claiming that she was the victim of unfair dismissal, belief discrimination, victimisation as a whistleblower and harassment. I am pleased to say that after three preliminary hearings, the DWP settled and paid Ms Thomas £100,000—an example of the kind of expense that the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, was talking about. If the Minister would like to convey to Antonia Romeo that I am certainly available to give evidence to her inquiry into impartiality, among other things, in the Civil Service, I would be very happy to share some of our data with her.