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Equality and diversity

Equality and diversity is not just about complying with equality legislation. We believe that it is vital for achieving competitive advantage and in a tight employment market, we need to attract and retain talented people from all the UK’s diverse communities. We need to be close to our customers and provide them with the right products and services. By attracting and retaining a diverse workforce, we will better understand the needs of all our customers and be able to build lasting relationships.

Over the last few years we have been working to increase the number of women and ethnic minority employees in management and senior management positions across the organisation. At the end of 2007, there were four women on our group executive committee, one of the highest numbers for a FTSE 100 company, and 22 per cent of our senior managers were women.

We continue to make significant progress with our disability and sexual orientation programmes. In 2007 our disability programme was ranked first out of 116 organisations by the Employers’ Forum on Disability and we maintained our sixth place ranking in Stonewall’s† Index of the 100 best employers of lesbian, gay and bisexual people.

Diversity - Women managers (2007: 40.1%; 2006: 38.5%; 2005: 38.4%); Women senior managers (2007: 21.7%; 2006: 20.9%; 2005: 20.3%); Ethnic minority managers (2007: 4.9%; 2006: 4.3%; 2005: 4.1%); Ethnic minority senior managers (2007: 2.5%; 2006: 1.9%; 2005 1.8%); Disabled employees (2007: 2%; 2006: 1.5%; 2005: 1.5%); Lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) employees (2007: 0.8%; 2006: 0.2%; 2005: 0.2%).
† Stonewell is a compaigning organisation that works to achieve equality and justice for lesbians, gay men and bisexual people.
†† Shows percentage of whole workforce although not all employees have supplied information on race, disability or sexual orientation.