The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has ordered the University of Oxford to disclose feedback received from its Stonewall Workplace Equality Index.
Stonewall requires organisations to sign a contract which forbids them from revealing the feedback it receives.
However, the regulator argued that an “unusually strong public interest in transparency” exists because of the “potential for a scheme to be misused as a campaigning tool”.
No transparency
The Don’t Submit to Stonewall campaign, initiated by the groups Legal Feminist and Sex Matters, submitted Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to scores of organisations – including Oxford.
The University was among a number to claim they could withhold the information in order to protect Stonewall’s commercial interests.
But the Commissioner ruled that the University was wrong and must disclose the feedback within 35 days.
Women’s group Sex Matters now plans to submit new requests to 43 public authorities, including the BBC, Channel 4, HMRC and Ofsted, for information they had previously refused to disclose.
‘Wholly improper’
Stonewall’s ‘Diversity Champions’ scheme has been mired in controversy for months.
It is wholly improper for any public body to be signed up as a Stonewall member or to submit to Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index
The Department of Work and Pensions was the latest public body to abandon it, following others including the Crown Prosecution Service, Ofcom, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and the Department of Health and Social Care.
Naomi Cunningham, a barrister who chairs Sex Matters, said: “Stonewall schemes are designed to reach deeply into every aspect of the client organisations’ operations.”
“It is wholly improper for any public body to be signed up as a Stonewall member or to submit to Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index.”
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