Report of progress against TPR’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy 2021 to 25
In June 2021 we published our first Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Strategy 2021 to 2025, which outlined our plans to embed EDI across our organisation and support our regulated community to do the same.
Internally, the strategy sets out our ambitions to diversify our TPR community and create the right environment for our people to thrive and be their best selves.
Externally, it outlines how we plan to create a fairer and more inclusive culture across the pensions industry, and how we will work with others to address inequality among savers.
To promote the launch of our strategy, we carried out internal launch activities and hosted an external webinar. You can read more about it and view our external launch webinar.
The strategy sets out a number of ambitious strategic aims, objectives and success measures. We have made some progress over the past nine months against our aims and objectives and the majority of these are in progress. While this has meant we did not achieve all of the success measures that we committed to deliver in 2021 to 2022, we built good foundations to achieve our ambitions going forward.
Over the past nine months, we have made the following progress.
Strategic objective 1: To be a fair, diverse and inclusive employer
- Incorporated additional questions on EDI in our MyTPR staff engagement survey and carried out regular wellbeing pulse surveys through the pandemic to help us understand the impact on our staff, their work and their wellbeing.
The feedback from these surveys helped us to set benchmarks and measure levels of inclusion within TPR, with the commitment to take action to ensure marked improvement by 2025 and address the issues and provide ongoing support. - Updated our anti-bullying and harassment and equal opportunities policies in response to feedback received in the staff engagement survey, which showed that some people were not sure how to report bullying, harassment and discrimination. The revised policy provides clarity and gives people the confidence to raise and report an issue of harassment, bullying or discrimination.
Alongside this, we established an anti-bullying and harassment group, which carried out a review of discriminatory behaviours and identified three key actions to take forward, including the creation of fair treatment ambassadors, signposting on the intranet and training for managers. - Embedded work to revise our values and behaviours framework within our new People and Culture Strategy to provide a foundation for transforming our culture.
The People and Culture and EDI strategies complement one another and have shared objectives to make sure our people feel safe, supported and celebrated throughout their career at TPR, particularly in terms of building a more inclusive and supportive culture. The People and Culture Strategy has three areas of focus, all of which will have a strong EDI element: culture, leadership and organisation and people. - Carried out an external review of recruitment processes, working with external EDI experts to enable us to reflect best practice and attract talented people from diverse backgrounds. An action plan has been developed to address the issues identified within the review findings. The action plan aims to ensure we have a consistent, fair and inclusive approach to recruitment across the organisation though updated recruitment policy, guidance, tools and management training.
- Partnered with external reward specialists to support us identify the issues and interventions required to develop long-term diversity pay gap action plans for gender, disability, ethnicity and sexual orientation and reduce the pay gaps for under-represented groups.
Strategic objective 2: To build a collective understanding of why pensions inequalities occur and work in partnership with others seeking to reduce them
- We launched a call for input on the pensions consumer journey jointly with the FCA in May 2021. This outlined the structural issues within society that can have an impact on good pensions outcomes and asked how the journey be improved to help seeking to provide an evidence base for future regulatory reform.
- Respondents offered pension-specific solutions to help inform our work, particularly around gender and religion. As a result, we invited the Islamic Finance Guru in to provide a policy workshop which highlighted a potential equality duty issue around the lack of sharia-compliant pensions being offered to Muslims under automatic enrolment, which we are currently exploring further.
- We are also working with colleagues at the DWP to help develop our collective evidence base in this area.
- Developed and launched a tailored Inclusive Leadership Development Programme to equip our leaders with the confidence to talk about inclusion and enable inclusion to play an everyday part of life at TPR.
Strategic objective 3: To promote high standards of equality, diversity and inclusion among our regulated community
- Worked closely with representatives from the pensions industry on equality, diversity and inclusion issues via our diversity and inclusion industry working group to use our influence to increase diversity and inclusion in the governing bodies of schemes within our regulated community. We set up four diversity and inclusion sub-groups to lead the development of materials and insights that we hope will help trustee boards to become more diverse and inclusive.
The sub-groups are focused on the role data can play in bringing diversity and inclusion to governing bodies — developing best practice in the composition of boards, developing practical tools to share best practice on recruiting trustees, and delivering engagement with employers to help broaden the appeal of trusteeship. The output from those workstreams will be turned into an action plan in 2022 to 2023.
We know we have more work to do. The activities we have progressed demonstrate our continued commitment to EDI and have been significant in enabling us to continue to work towards achieving our objectives in 2022 to 2023.