Bonuses tied to diversity targets
By Andrew Harvey / Ariel BBC, 17.01.06 week 3

Mark Thompson says that recruiting talent from different backgrounds must be a priority

Mark Thompson is getting tough over diversity. He is demanding that targets must be met for increasing the numbers of staff from ethnic minorities and with disabilities – and any director who fails to deliver will not get an annual bonus.

The director general told the Black and Asian Forum on Monday night that he considered targets to be ‘incredibly important' but he admitted that at the present rate the BBC would fail to meet them.

‘During the next two years I intend to make diversity a key objective for our managers and the directors have agreed that they will not put themselves forward for bonuses unless they hit the numbers by the end of year two [2007-2008].'

The targets are 12.5 percent of all staff from ethnic minorities, 7 percent for senior managers and 4 percent of staff with disabilities.

‘I want every director to think hard and to encourage every manager to think hard about how we can achieve the targets we said we would meet,' said Thompson.

He said that the drive to recruit more people from diverse backgrounds had ‘nothing to do with political correctness' and everything to do with creating a workforce that more accurately reflected the composition of the country.

It has been estimated that within the next 15 years black and Asian people will make up at least 40 percent of the youth in London and Birmingham .

The BBC's future depended on its ability to produce content that was relevant to people of all social and racial groups, he said.

‘One of the biggest lessons of recent years, and one that Greg Dyke took to heart, is that Britain is changing. It is a very diverse society and reflecting that diversity will be one of the keys to our success,' said Thompson. If programmes were to have a wide appeal they had to come from creative teams that were themselves made up of people of varying racial, religious and regional backgrounds and those who knew what it was like to be disabled.

He said there needed to be changes in the approach to recruitment. The BBC had to find ways of attracting a wider range of talented people to apply for jobs, perhaps by looking beyond those with a university education.

Anticipating critics who might accuse him of encouraging a system of positive discrimination that might rate targets higher than talent, Thompson said: ‘This is not about lowering standards, that's not what I want to happen.

I believe that talent is not based on race, it is evenly spread across the human population and I think a good employer finds ways of accessing that talent from every part of society.'

Discussing the current job cuts which will see hundreds of people leaving the BBC this year, he said he would not accept a reduction in numbers as an excuse for missing targets. ‘Making sure we have a richly diverse workforce is just as important when numbers are going down as when they are going up. We have to take this seriously.'