Plans for new initiatives on diversity are to be presented to the board of the energy and water group United Utilities.
The proposals will be put forward this month by the group’s in-house Diversity Network Forum, which was formed in May to improve its equal opportunities performance.
‘We’ve made some solid improvements in this area over the last couple of years, but we’re hoping that by creating formalised plans we will see some bigger changes,’ said Justine Riches, chair of the forum.
‘Our plan of action will outline how we are going to create a more diverse workforce and how to sustain that. It will be fed into the board this month.’
The seven-person forum was set up as part of a board agreement earlier this year to provide a stronger focus on diversity issues across the group.
With representatives on the forum from each of the group’s seven business units, which include North West Water, Norweb and Vertex, its brief is ‘to raise awareness of diversity issues and to implement better methods to attract and retain a diverse workforce’.
The group says it has ‘a long way to go’ on diversity matters and concedes that ‘the balance of our workforce does not reflect the overall make-up of society’.
Latest figures reveal that only half of one per cent of the group’s 10,000 workforce are disabled, compared with 15 per cent of the population in the northwest of England, where it mainly operates.
They also show that 32 per cent of the workforce are women compared with 44 per cent in the regional population, and that 2.5 per cent are from ethnic minorities compared with 3.2 per cent at large.
‘We recognise that there has been work going on in the various business units on an ad hoc basis, but the forum has given us an opportunity to share what we are doing with each other and to put things on a more formal footing,’ said Riches.
The United Utilities forum has been studying various internal statistics on staff diversity over the past few months, including results from an employee diversity survey at North West Water.
Although the company has not revealed full details of the information gleaned from that survey, it says the initiative has ‘helped us to build a more accurate profile of employee characteristics based on their self-classification’.
The new emphasis on diversity is outlined in the group’s first combined social and environmental report, which was verified by csr network.
The report, which includes a contribution from the minister for corporate social responsibility, Kim Howells, says the group will set other group-wide performance targets on social and environmental issues by the end of this year. At the moment it only sets targets for its individual businesses.
Group community and communications manager Helen Norris said social and environment matters had been combined this year ‘to reflect the move towards integrated reporting on our total impact’.