Buckingham Palace says it ‘must do more’ in diversity report

Buckingham Palace is vowing that it “must do more” to increase diversity among its staff after publishing its percentage of minority employees for the first time.

Royal officials on Thursday released the Sovereign Grant report, an annual financial statement for the palace, which showed that 8.5 percent of royal employees are identified as “ethnic minorities” in the United Kingdom. 

The report states that the palace has a goal of boosting that number to 10 percent by 2022.

A senior palace source told CNN, “The results are not what we would like but we are committed to improving this.”

“Hence we’ve started to publish for the first time our diversity statistics to ensure that we are both open and transparent about our efforts to improve and we fully expect to be held accountable for the progress that we make,” the source said.  

“We have continuous engagement with external advisors, organizations that are at the grassroots level who sit on our steering committee — people who are able to give us a different voice, a different perspective and we recognize that we must do more,” they added.

The percentage of ethnic minorities in the U.K. as a whole is approximately 14 percent, according to CNN.

Clarence House, Charles, the Prince of Wales’s household, confirmed that its proportion of staff who are an ethnic minority is also approximately 8 percent, according to the BBC.

Buckingham Palace blocked ethnic minorities from working in certain positions in the royal household until at least the late 1960s, according to a recent review of documents from the U.K.’s national archives.

The documents, obtained by The Guardian, showed that Queen Elizabeth II’s chief financial manager in 1968 said that it “was not, in fact, the practice to appoint coloured immigrants or foreigners” to clerical roles.

The palace allowed individuals who are ethnic minorities to work as domestic servants, The Guardian noted.  

Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, alleged during a bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey earlier this year that, prior to the birth of her son with her husband, Prince Harry, there were conversations within the royal family about “how dark his skin might be.”

Meghan also suggested during the interview that race may have played a role in Archie, her son, not receiving a royal title or security following his birth in 2019, which she called a break with protocol.