The media is not sufficiently diverse and could learn from business about encouraging people from minority ethnic backgrounds, Sajid Javid, the culture and media secretary, has said.
Javid, who is the first British-Asian Conservative cabinet minister, said the statistics clearly show there is a gap given that just 6% of people working in newspapers, radio and television are from ethnic minorities compared with 14% of the population as a whole.
In contrast, he said working on the trading floor of a bank before entering politics was “like walking round the United Nations” as it did not matter where a worker was from. Asked whether the media and politics could learn from the business world, he said: “Yes.”
He made the comments on a special edition of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme about diversity, which was edited by comedian Lenny Henry.
“If you look at some of the numbers to really get to the bottom of this – and some recent studies have shown I think they’re saying around 6% of people working in the media industry as a whole … when the ethnic minority population of the country is around 14%. So when you look at it that way, 6% versus 14%, I think the answer’s quite clear,” he said.
Javid said there had been some remarkable achievements by minority ethnic talent on TV and radio and broadcasting but “that doesn’t take away from the fact that there hasn’t been enough”.
However, he dismissed the idea of the BBC having quotas when it comes to employing people from a diverse range of backgrounds under its charter agreement, which is up for renegotiation in 2016.
“I wish it was as easy as that, but I don’t think something like that in itself would actually achieve the desired results,” he said. “The concern I’d have is that when you have an approach where it’s about reaching a quota or a certain number, but it becomes an official target, a requirement, then you’d always run this risk that someone might try to fill that just for the sake of filling it.
“I think the problem is actually more profound than that because it’s not just about having the black face or the brown face, it’s about building a sustainable pipeline of talent and making sure that people from all backgrounds, including black backgrounds in particular, think of this as a career opportunity for them and any perception they have that it is not for whatever reason, those are tackled.”
Javid said he had not thought about media as a career opportunity and joked that the closest he ever came was when a careers adviser suggested he should think about becoming a television repair man.
