The eruption of bullygate reminds me of this recent exchange between Labour MP, Sandra Osborne, and Peter Ricketts, the Foreign Office’s Permanent Secretary:
Osborne: Could I ask you about staff morale as far as bullying, harassment and discrimination is concerned? In the staff survey of 2008-I know that Mr. Bevan referred to the 2009 survey, which has not yet been published-17% of all FCO staff reported experiencing this, and it was only 11% on average across Whitehall. Also, 20% of locally based staff reported this, as opposed to 14% of UK-based staff. How do you explain this relatively high level of reporting of harassment and bullying?
Ricketts: First, can I say that I find it absolutely unacceptable? It’s something that we are worried about and working on. We are very, very keen to see that we get to the bottom of it and root out whatever the problems are. Mr. Bevan can give you details of where we are in the 2009 staff survey. To our real disappointment, that number has not come down very significantly. It has come down from 17 to 16%, which is not good enough, so we have to continue to tackle this problem seriously.
Part of it is understanding exactly what is going on here. We put together bullying, harassment and intimidation, and I need to understand more about what are the actual problems that staff are reporting there, because any suggestion of bullying or harassment is completely unacceptable. Indeed, we are prepared to take staff out of positions abroad and bring them home if we see evidence of behaviour that is bullying or harassment, and we have done that, so we’re trying to send the strongest signal we can, which is taking people out of their postings and bringing them back to London if we see evidence of that.
Osborne went on to point out that “reported levels of discrimination, bullying or harassment tended to be higher among the staff at lower grades, disabled staff and minority ethnic groups, black staff in particular.” James Bevan, the FCO’s DG for Change and Delivery, replied:
You are right. We were so concerned by the 17% figure from the last survey that we commissioned a more detailed analysis of what the data were telling us, and they told us that, by and large, the allegations tend to relate to junior officers who feel that they are being bullied by senior officers and to local staff who sometimes feel that they are being bullied by UK staff, and that there is a higher prevalence of reported experience of this behaviour from black minority ethnic and other minority groups.
One thing that I have done is to meet with representatives of the black staff to talk through why they think this is happening. I have to say that there were some very convincing stories which resulted in my writing to all our heads of mission abroad to say that we are particularly concerned at the high levels of reported behaviour affecting black and minority ethnic staff and that we wanted to crack down on it absolutely to make sure that it reduces next year. The task for us now is to analyse the latest data in the new survey and see if that has happened. If it has not, we will have to keep going.
It’s a worrying finding.
Update: It turns out these are not new findings. From 2006:
One in ten government workers in Whitehall say that they are being bullied, a staff survey has revealed. The research says that the figure rises to one in three in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, with black and Chinese employees suffering the worst harassment.
