Charlotte Hogg, our COO, oversees the Bank-wide diversity initiatives under our Senior Managers’ responsibilities. The Bank’s commitment to diversity cascades through the organisation. Our diversity goals now form an explicit part of the objectives of each Executive and the management of individual directorates. Our recruitment process is open and transparent to all, including for senior appointments. The Bank has also been focussing heavily on how to create the right environment to achieve these targets. We are looking closely at what drives performance, differentiates talent, motivates the right behaviours, and creates barriers to success. We have made a strong commitment to flexible working at all levels of the organisation. Over 11% of our staff are employed on a formalised flexible working arrangement. In a recent survey, almost two thirds felt that they had a good balance between their work and personal life. Encouragingly three quarters believe that the Bank takes diversity seriously. Our Women in the Bank network set up a mentoring programme, which is now in its second year. This is complimented by the work of some of our other thriving staff networks – our Bank of England Ethnic Minority (BEEM) network for example has established a “building bridges”, reciprocal mentoring programme – designed to foster relationships, networks and understanding between senior management and more junior BAME colleagues. We also have an LGBT network working hard to promote understanding, increase awareness and break down barriers. Our broader leadership training programme emphasises unconscious bias training to ensure diversity can flourish and progress.

Many countries, especially in advanced economies have spent substantial amount of public funds to boost aggregate demand and to revitalize the financial system. Most of these countries have no fiscal resources left to put forward a similar stimulus package, if the world economy experiences another setback. Therefore it is of utmost importance to keep the recovery intact, which is already too fragile. Debt sustainability and fiscal imbalances stand out as the main challenges for many years to come. As the recent developments in the financial markets revealed, deterioration of sovereign creditworthiness can hamper macroeconomic and financial stability. Therefore, ongoing problems especially in some advanced economies, particularly in Europe should be resolved in a quick, effective and credible manner. However, we should also keep in mind that supporting global demand is a global responsibility. It is questionable whether emerging market economies would be able to fulfill the gap in global demand, while advanced countries stay on the sideline to clean up their balance sheets. Neither their share on global economy nor their economic and financial structure would be adequate to play that role. Especially emerging economies that are in deficit, still being in convergence stage, need to raise their production capacity to pay off their external debt accumulated during their catch-up. Therefore, I strongly believe that a holistic approach is a must. While developing any kind of policies, including fiscal tightening or restructuring, one should pay great attention to negative externalities these policies may cause on other economies. In particular, we should avoid beggar-thy-neighbor type of policies.