News

UKERC aims to foster an inclusive culture that is fair, values diversity and maintains a working and social environment in which the rights and dignity of our staff, researchers, students, partners and stakeholders are respected.

Our Vision is to be the UK’s centre of excellence for creating and applying knowledge to inform the energy transition and build a low-carbon, sustainable future. We will not achieve this aim unless we commit to improving Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) across the consortium. Actively reaching out to and involving diverse groups will ensure a sustainable future that benefits everyone, rather than a select few.

We are therefore pleased to announce the publication of our EDI Plan to the website. Its purpose is to match agreed policy with concrete action, enabling UKERC to uphold its EDI commitments. The Plan was originally drafted in 2019 but was reviewed at the end of 2021 to reflect our learnings over the past two years.

As UKERC is not a legal entity and is instead a research collaboration between 20+ academic institutions, each influenced by their own EDI policies as well as those of UKRI, the aim was to reinforce, support and go beyond those procedures if appropriate.

We recognise that UKERC has some way to go on diversity and would therefore like to invite the wider community, particularly underrepresented groups, to provide feedback on this plan by publishing it as a ‘living document’. It is open to revision and we encourage readers to get in touch with any feedback. By engaging directly with underrepresented groups, we can develop EDI policies that are targeted and enable them to thrive.

You can find the EDI Plan on our EDI webpage here.