To ask the Minister of State, Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform what information his Department holds on the (a) sex, (b) ethnicity, (c) age, (d) disability, (e) sexual orientation and (f) religion or belief of its staff; and what assessment he has made of his Department's performance against its targets relating to diversity in its workforce. (246027)

Gender and age information is routinely maintained on the staff database.

Staff are able to individually record ethnicity and disability on the staff database, on a voluntary basis. Currently 79 per cent. of staff have chosen to do so. The facility to record sexual orientation and religion or belief will be added during 2009.

Anonymised information on ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation and religion or belief is also collected annually as part of the Department's staff opinion survey and used as part of the assessment of the Department's performance against its targets relating to diversity in the work force.

There are a number of metrics used by the Department to assess performance against achievement of the priorities in the Diversity Strategy. These targets include numerical representation of diverse groups within the senior civil service, the results of external benchmarking exercises and the results of specific groups participating in the staff opinion survey. The current Diversity Strategy was agreed and launched in October 2008 and progress is due to be formally reviewed in May 2009.

Current progress towards targets for representation in the senior civil service is as follows: