Introduction

British Cycling is committed to the principle of equality of opportunity and aims to ensure that all employees, members and stakeholders are treated fairly and on an equal basis. 

We recognise that stakeholders, participants, members, athletes, employees and volunteers bring a unique value to our cycling community and that we must utilise our diversity of skills, experience, insights, perspectives and innovative ideas to act as a catalyst for positive change and drive our passion for excellence in all areas of British Cycling.

Strategic plan

Diversity and inclusion are key elements of our strategy and these actions form part of our operational plans.

Our Diversity Action Plan complements the work of our operational plans which are driven from our Purpose and Strategy. The key elements of this are seen in:

• Growing participation – improve access and opportunities for disabled cyclists and under-represented groups.
• Become a high performing organisation – recognise and promote equality, diversity and inclusion.
• Strengthening governance – recruit the right people with the right skills.

Commitment

Our goal at British Cycling is to transform Britain into a great cycling nation. Our values that underpin this work are vital to achieving that goal. These are:

• Unity – We pride ourselves on inclusivity and diversity, and are committed to working in partnership within our organisation and with others.
• Integrity – We accept personal responsibility for all of our actions and always act with transparency, honesty and trust.

• Excellence – We are passionate about winning, and are determined to be the very best at everything we do by pursuing innovation and continuous improvement.

A more diverse workforce will help us in every aspect of this work.

Board diversity

British Cycling’s board, led by an independent chair, is made up of 11 nominated, elected and independent members. We believe that the new composition of our board represents a turning point in our journey. We want to develop a more diverse board that has a clear understanding of our role, scope of responsibilities and expected contribution to the long-term success of British Cycling.

We will also conduct a scoping exercise to assess existing skills, knowledge and experience across our whole governance structure and agree a plan of action with the regions to achieve greater diversity and inclusion through the recruitment of National Councillors, Board Commissions and Committees and Elected Directors.

Following our Annual General Meeting in November, British Cycling has hit the 30% gender diversity target required by Sport England’s Code for Sports Governance and will continue to work towards achieving gender parity and greater diversity.  

Communications

We want to ensure that British Cycling’s commitment to diversity is communicated effectively using both internal and external channels.

This will include communication of British Cycling’s new Diversity Action Plan across the business as well as to key stakeholders and partners while building relationships with key groups –LGBT+, disabled and BAME to understand how we can meet their needs in terms of education programmes and cycling initiatives.
British Cycling staff and recruitment

Over the next five years we’ll be working towards developing a more diverse Board and workforce. This will see us recruit and train a team of Diversity Champions to roll out diversity, inclusion and unconscious bias training to all employees, athletes and Regional Boards.

We want British Cycling to be able to attract an increasingly diverse range of candidates. To achieve this we need to embed good diversity and inclusion practice into our recruitment activities and decision making processes.

This will see us introduce a revised recruitment process for employees, casual workers and volunteers that removes any bias within the activities and encourages participation from under-represented groups. 

Monitoring

We currently hold the intermediate level of the Equality Standard and this allows us to review our progress so that we can continuously improve.

We will measure the progress of our activities through the delivery of our operational plans and via our employee and athlete satisfaction in our Culture Survey. Participation in diversity and inclusion activities will also be measured through involvement and activities of our Diversity Champions. The Board will report diversity measures on an annual basis as part of our Annual Report, providing narrative on area that we wish to address to ensure that we reach our goal of becoming a high performing organisation and a great place to work for everyone.