What we've been doing

Data is important for understanding the success of our initiatives, but workforce profiles do not change overnight. We are confident that we have the foundations in place to make change happen. We have commitment from our board, Leadership Team and our staff. We talk about diversity and inclusion in everyday worklife, and it is becoming integral to how we do things.

• In 2017 the NHF had no BAME board members and we recognised this was unacceptable. Since then, our board recruitment has been explicit about our under-representation and our ambition to better reflect society. We’ve advertised in specialist media, given clear direction to recruitment specialists and adopted the Rooney Rule when shortlisting. In January 2020, 27% of our non-executive board were from a BAME background.
• We have a staff training programme to support diversity and inclusion, including disability awareness, unconscious bias, management training, managing professional relationships and mental health awareness.
• We introduced a range of staff-led initiatives to raise awareness of issues related to equality, diversity and inclusion.
• We have a suite of policies to attract and retain a diverse workforce, including flexible working and enhanced maternity, paternity, shared parental, adoption and sick leave.
• We report on key staff diversity data internally and externally.
• We voluntarily report on our gender pay data and have committed to voluntarily reporting on our ethnicity pay data.
• We are trialling the Rooney Rule for recruitment.
• We are members of Women in Social Housing, the Housing Diversity Network and the London Housing and Diversity Group.
• We are a Disability Confident employer.
• We are communicating our commitment to diversity and inclusion to all our audiences, including potential job applicants.
• We signed up to the Employers' Initiative on Domestic Abuse and the Chartered Institute of Housing’s Make a Stand supporters pledge, and introduced a domestic abuse policy.
• We recommitted to the Future of London speakers pledge, and we are improving the diversity of speakers at our own conferences.
• We are committed to reflecting the diversity of society in our media spokespeople, our blog authors and our national member groups.