Treasury to consider diversity in future Bank of England appointments

The Treasury Committee has published reports on the appointment of Professor Jonathan Haskel to the Monetary Policy Committee and Bradley Fried to the Chair of the Court of the Bank of England.

The Committee has agreed that both of these appointments meet its requirements of personal independence and professional competence, but that its concerns about the lack of diversity at the senior levels of the Bank of England persist.

In its Gender Pay Gap report, the Bank of England said that while it is confident that men and women are paid equally for doing equivalent jobs across the Bank, the main reason for its "organisation-wide gender pay gap" is an imbalance of male and female colleagues across the organisation.

Nicky Morgan MP, chair of the Treasury Committee, has written to Sir Tom Scholar, permanent secretary of HM Treasury, requesting the Treasury’s strategy and action plan for how it intends to address diversity in public appointments.

Morgan also said that the Committee is prepared to take progress on this matter into account at the next appointment made to any of the Bank of England’s Policy Committees.

Morgan has also written to Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, to request the Bank’s diversity strategy and an action plan for how it intends to address diversity in its senior management team.

She said: "Whilst the Committee has approved the appointments of Professor Haskel and Mr Fried, it’s disappointing that the gender balance at the most senior levels of the Bank of England will not be improved.

"The Committee raised concerns about the Bank’s gender diversity following the appointment of Sir Dave Ramsden and Professor Silvana Tenreyro in October 2017. Since October, only three out of 10 public appointments and reappointments to the Bank’s committees have been women.

"With the Bank’s female representation in senior management roles at the Bank decreasing to 29 per cent last year, it seems increasingly unlikely that the Bank will meet its own diversity strategy to have 35 per cent female participation in senior management positions by 2020.

"As we concluded in our Women in Finance Report, recruitment practices and workplace culture are often barriers to women progressing to the most senior levels. The Bank and the Treasury must explain how they will address such barriers to improve the diversity in public appointments.

"As the Committee raised with the Economic Secretary to the Treasury on Wednesday, the Treasury Committee is prepared to take progress on this matter into account in the next appointment made to any of the Bank of England’s Policy Committee."