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Nigel Farage's party faces embarrassment today as new figures appear to discredit Reform UK's claims about 'wasteful' public sector spending on diversity schemes.

Farage's party has repeatedly claimed that it could save £7 billion a year by scrapping Government spending on 'DEI' programmes - representing diversity, equality and inclusion schemes designed to reduce discrimination and create more welcoming, representative workplaces.

But new Government figures - which have yet to be refuted by the far-right party - show that just £27 million was actually spent on so-called DEI measures in 2022-23 by the civil service - suggesting leader Nigel Farage's claims are off by a factor of about 250.

The civil service spend amounts to less than a penny a week per person living in Britain.

A spokesman for Reform UK told the Times today that the £7 billion figure was from a review of total public sector spending by the right-wing Conservative Way Forward group, 'which included councils, school boards, universities and government grants to charities among other areas.' Universities are largely funded through tuition fees, not the Government.

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But it is hard to see how anywhere near Reform's £7bn figure could be met even taking into account wider Government spending.

Over 500,000 people work for the civil service in the UK. Wider public sector employment is about 12 times larger, at just over six million people, according to the Office for National Statistics. Yet the £27m civil service EDI spending is just 0.4% of Reform UK's claimed total public sector DEI spend per year. 'DEI' as a term is a direct import by Reform UK from the US: in the UK it is typically referred to as EDI.

And the new official review of equality spending by Government departments and so-called quangos shows there are 380 'equality, diversity and inclusion' staff working full-time in the civil service - out of more than half a million people.

Civil service union FDA's Assistant General Secretary Lucille Thirlby told this newspaper: that across an organisation of more than 500,000 staff, "these couple of hundred EDI staff represent a small cost of the overall salary bill."

"Scaling back EDI staff would likely leave departments exposed to challenges around discrimination - be that individual cases or structural issues like equal pay and failure to apply reasonable adjustments - eroding any potential cost savings while making the civil service a much worse place to work."

And the Institute for Government's senior researcher Jack Worlidge added that EDI initiatives are a "common feature of many workplaces, including the civil service."

"The [new] figures show that savings from scrapping such initiatives would not be significant in the context of overall government spending. Between July 2022 and 2023, the equivalent of ~0.07% of the civil service workforce was devoted to EDI initiatives, costing…about 0.1% of the civil service pay bill."

The UK Government spends around £1.2 trillion a year in total, on services from the NHS to schools and roads - thousands of times more than spent on civil service DEI schemes.

The Conservative-party backing CWF's central mission is to lobby for "less government, [a] smaller state and lower taxes" with Margaret Tha...