This theme has the following objectives:

• Ensure our sector’s approach to recruitment and talent acquisition is welcoming and accessible for potential employees from all backgrounds, experiences and seniority.
• Create a diverse range of entry points to begin a career or make a mid-career change into our sector.
• Demonstrate that insurance and long-term savings offers a wide range of attractive career opportunities for many different skill sets.

Progress we have made in 2023:

• Improved awareness and inclusion for neurodiverse talent
• Engagement on our industry apprenticeships pledge

In 2023, we focussed our work on the ‘Attract’ theme on two main issues – neurodiversity and apprenticeships.

Neurodiversity is an intersectional issue and is often linked to other disadvantages employees may face. For example, neurodiverse employees may suffer mental health problems because they feel the need to “mask” their true selves at work, and need support from their employers. In turn, while neurodiverse people often need specific forms of support, employers who offer this will find this can be used to support other employees as well.

We see apprenticeships as providing valuable lifelong learning opportunities, benefiting individuals at various career stages (rather than just as an alternative to further education for recent school-leavers). We want to see the money our members invest in the apprenticeships levy used to build a talented and more diverse pipeline of talented leaders and innovators across our sector.

A summary of our activities in these two areas is included below.

Neurodiverse talent: Improving awareness and inclusion

We are a founding member of the Group for Autism, Insurance, Investment and Neurodiversity (GAIN) and has been vocal in encouraging member companies to join as well. GAIN’s mission is to spark a radical improvement in the employment prospects of neurodiverse people in our sector by matching the industry’s talent needs with the capabilities of neurodiverse individuals.

We have worked together with GAIN to help create networks of industry peers seeking to create opportunities for neurodiverse people and to raise awareness. During Neurodiversity Celebration Week, we participated and supported a cross-industry promotion campaign “Creating Pathways to Neuroinclusion” which included educational materials, events, and testimonials from neurodiverse individuals working in the industry.

We have seen encouraging progress -

• A 10% annual increase in firms that have a specific policy in place to support neurodiverse individuals within the workplace.
• The number of companies collecting data on neurodiversity has increased from 40% to 47%.

"The ABI deserve huge credit for recognising and giving prominence to neurodiversity in the Blueprint. ABI were amongst the very first to express, and deliver, strong support for GAIN and our mission - to improve, radically, the employment prospects of neurodivergent people in our industry. The changes needed - crucial, but not expensive or difficult - are now properly underway in many ABI members. The insurance industry is becoming a role model for other sectors. The Blueprint is going to embed and accelerate this."

Laurie Edmans CBE, FCII Co-Chair GAIN (Group for Autism, Insurance, Investment and Neurodiversity)

This theme has the following objectives:

• Foster a sector-wide culture that allows everyone employed in insurance and long-term savings to reach their full potential.
• Create environments that retain people even when their circumstances change or they experience significant life events.
• Embed and expand a diverse pipeline of talented people across the sector to be appointed to leadership and executive roles.

Progress we have made in 2023:

• New signatories for our recommended charters including Women in Finance, Race at Work, and Disability Confident Employer Scheme.
• Increased mental health support and awareness programmes available to employees in the industry. 

This theme focusses on work we can do for existing employees in the sector.

Under this section, we look at the various external and ABI-led charters and initiatives that our Blueprint recommends our members sign up to. Although aspects of these charters are equally relevant to the ‘Attract’ and ‘Advance’ themes, we include them under the ‘Grow’ theme because they are a way of providing transparency over whether any commitments that a firm makes in its external communications are delivered in reality for employees.

We also want our DEI Blueprint to promote practical action (not just target-setting), so we look at two areas we have particularly focussed on which help employees and allow them to progress in their careers – mental health support and secondments.

External Charters and Benchmarks: Aligning the sector around leading practice

Our DEI Blueprint brings together a range of initiatives targeted at specific issues, characteristics or groups into a single cohesive strategy for DEI.

As part of this, we identified three external charters and schemes that we recommend our members sign up to.

• Government’s Women in Finance charter
• Business in the Community’s Race at Work Charter
• Government’s Disability Confident employer scheme

Women in Finance Charter

Our 2023 aim for the Women in Finance Charter was to increase the number of firms signing the charter so that at least 50 firms have become signatories. We have met this aim - 43 of our members are signatories, along with 7 of our associate members.

The Women in Finance Charter is also having a genuine impact on the representation of women in our sector:

• Data from our annual DEI collection also shows that representation of women on boards has increased from 19% in 2017 to 32% in 2022.
• Representation of women on executive teams has increased from 22% in 2017 to 29% in 2022.
• 69% of companies now set representation targets for women at the executive team level, an increase from 2021.

However, we recognise that this progress – while welcome – is too slow and not yet substantial enough, especially in the context of 58% of entry-level equivalent roles in the sector being held by women.

We expect to see more progress as firms adopt the practical steps we recommend, so that more women are able to advance into executive and board roles, and people who are in less senior roles can better balance their careers with family life and other interests. We continue to support Aviva’s Amanda Blanc in her role as the Women in Finance Charter Champion, and we want to use our DEI Network to share updates on the Charter to ensure our sector stays committed to it.

"Building a more inclusive insurance industry is vital if we’re to deliver the best value for our customers. It’s good to see progress across the sector this year but we can all speed up action. DEI must continue to be a priority and we support the practical steps the ABI has set out in its Blueprint lasting change."

Jonny Briggs, Diversity Equity Inclusion & Resourcing Director, Aviva

Race at Work Charter

Our 2023 aim for Business in the Community’s Race at Work Charter was to campaign so that 50 firms become signatories. We have met this aim, with have 42 members and 15 associate members signed up, which brings us to a total of 57.

Our data collection also shows an improvement in the proportion of black and minority ethnic employees at senior levels. We are especially pleased to see that ethnic minority representation at board level has increased from 2% in 2021 to 6% in 2022. Again, more work is required to make further progress.

The charter outlines seven key actions for signatories. Action number five emphasizes the importance of supporting career progression for ethnically diverse employees, including Black, Asian, Mixed Race, and others. It calls for specific measures like implementing two-way mentoring and sponsorship.

Our member and Race at Work charter signatory Direct Line Group has developed a reverse mentoring programme to act as a catalyst for driving meaningful change to support greater inclusion for employees from diverse backgrounds, especially Black colleagues. 

This theme has the following objectives:

• Build a set of consistent metrics that allow us to understand the effectiveness of actions the sector is taking on DEI.
• Foster a culture of transparency where evidence informs prioritisation and the progress being made is regularly reviewed.
• Collaborate to ensure that employees are able to feel comfortable sharing data about themselves to inform decision-making.

Under this theme, our focus has been on both making our own DEI Data Collection more representative and on helping our members prioritise which data they use to assess the effectiveness of their own DEI Strategies.

We also work to make our own member networks and our flagship events operate effectively as a vehicle for sharing and promoting best practice.

Additionally, we work with a wide range of external experts and collaborate with counterparts across insurance and long-term savings and the wider financial services sector.

The current status of our data collection and our other priority activities under this theme are summarised below.

Data and Evidence: Expanding the annual ABI DEI data collection

We are continuing to broaden the representation of firms participating in our annual ABI DEI data collection, encompassing a wider cross-section of the industry.

We recognise that, especially for smaller firms, providing data requires them to commit additional resource.

We are therefore pleased that four new firms have confirmed their participation in 2023, marking a significant step toward achieving this objective. This will provide a richer and more inclusive dataset that better represents the industry landscape.

We continue to work with the help of our ABI data team to encourage more firms to take part in the future by updating our guidance notes and making sure our data collection stays consistent with data requests from other organisations, including any existing or future regulatory obligations.

Our members have fed back that our data collection is considered to be of more value than some of the other data collections they are asked to complete because it links directly to measuring progress against the goals in our Blueprint.

Collaboration: Comparing our evidence Base with industry counterparts

Collaboration with a wide range of external stakeholders and industry counterparts remains a cornerstone of our approach. We are actively working to compare our evidence base with other organizations, such as the Investment Association (IA), the Financial Services Skills Commission (FSSC), and Lloyd's of London. 

We also wish to collaborate with representative bodies from other markets to understand how we can learn from each other. By participating in best practice calls and leveraging feedback from member firms we aim to ensure that we learn from the best approaches available.

Data Collection: Guidance on Best Practice

To encourage a high percentage of employees to take part in their employers’ DEI data collection, particularly on employees' experiences of inclusion strategies and social mobility, we have worked closely with our member firms to discuss potential barriers and to highlight solutions to them.

We have identified existing toolkits, such as the Lloyd’s Diversity data collection toolkit, and made sure members have access to these. We also plan to update the reference base of our DEI Blueprint.

Additionally, our ongoing discussions within the DEI Network provide a platform for sharing best practices and insights. This collaborative effort is essential in shaping the way forward for effective data collection and analysis.

Member Networks: Sharing best practice and driving change

We continue to leverage our member networks, notably the ABI DEI Board sub-group and the DEI Network, to review our progress and reassess priorities. Our member group on DEI was upgraded to a Board sub-group in 2022 to reflect the importance of this issue within the ABI’s overall purpose and strategy and to ensure that its work was directly accountable to the ABI Board.

Recent presentations from external speakers, including the Chartered Insurance Institute (CII) and Grant Thornton, have fostered insightful discussions within these groups.

Our data team also provided a detailed presentation on the results of our data collection, followed by a roundtable discussion on the lessons learned from this data.

We use the expertise from our members represented in these discussions to ensure that our DEI Blueprint remains aligned with evolving industry dynamics and needs.

The member groups also allow members to network with their peers, raise questions and share best practice. DEI is an area where firms benefit from collaboration, and we welcome the constructive approach firms bring to these issues.

The DEI Network is open to all our members – and we encourage any firm not already part of this group to join.  

Annual Conference and DEI Summit: Convening the sector to raise awareness and share best practice

Our programme of flagship events raises awareness of the importance of DEI and allows members, partners and associate members to share best practice, and hear from experts (from within and outside our sector).

In 2023 we hosted a plenary session on DEI at our Flagship Annual Conference in February, and we have also included sessions on DEI at our Future Leaders program and our Young Professionals event.

Our 2023 annual DEI Summit includes panel sessions focussed on providing practical insights on how to address some of the more challenging or less advanced parts of the DEI agenda, including disability, neurodiversity, ageism and older workers and utilizing apprenticeships to improve on social mobility.

These sessions will offer practical insights for participants to create a sector-wide culture of inclusion.

Social Mobility: More progress is needed on data collection

In order to address socio-economic diversity and effectively implement diversity measures that work, employers must seek to understand the current makeup of their workforce.

The proportion of companies collecting social mobility data from colleagues has increased from 29% in 2021 to 33% in 2022.

While this modest increase is positive, the ABI will prioritise supporting more firms to collect data on this in 2024 and 2025.

We contributed to the City of London’s Socio-Economic diversity taskforce and supported their 2022 recommendation for all employers in UK financial and professional services to collect data on the socioeconomic background of their employees by 2025.

For example, Progress Together, a membership body set up following a recommendation from the Socio-Economic diversity Taskforce, can support firms in their work on socio-economic diversity, including data collection and disclosure efforts.

"The ABI is leading the way. It should be recognised for encouraging and supporting the insurance and long-term savings sector to make faster progress around social mobility.

We know workforce socio-economic diversity fits squarely within the 'S' in the ESG. But to evidence this to investors, standards setters, regulators and clients, the sector needs more data. We now know which question to ask (Parental Occupation at 14 - as recommended by the Social Mobility Commission), and I am delighted that HR systems such as Workday are adding socio-economic background to their platforms.

At Progress Together we are proud to work in partnership with the ABI to help firms in collecting social mobility data and boosting response rates." Sophie Hulm, CEO, Progress Together

This progress update is based on data from our most recent DEI Data collection (2022)