St John’s Buildings condemns racism in all its forms and is committed to creating and maintaining an inclusive environment, free from racism and all discrimination for all of our members, their clients, our employees and others who work with and visit our chambers.

We commit to undertaking the following actions to support this:

  1. Impressing upon our employees and members our Values, in particular those of Community, Service Excellence and Approachability, which mean that we offer a friendly, supportive and respectful environment to all.
  2. Promoting our Dignity at Work and Equality Policies, to be clear what behaviour can constitute discrimination including: bullying, harassment and victimisation and that it will not be tolerated.
  3. Refreshing our equality, diversity and inclusion training for all pupils, members and employees and implementing specific Race Awareness Training (based on guidance from the Bar Council’s Race Working Group).
  4. Continuing to audit race equality in Chambers through a number of actions including: surveying members; analysing data on recruitment of pupils, members, and staff; analysing data on the distribution of unallocated work and income; and considering the membership of internal committees. Taking positive actions to improve race equality and representation, where these are found to be deficient.
  5. Taking positive action to encourage applications from under-represented groups to apply for pupillage at Chambers and ensuring our Pupillage Committee and other recruiting managers are trained in fair recruitment processes to best support equality of opportunity in our recruitment process.
  6. Supporting positive initiatives like Bridging the Bar to improve equality of access to opportunities to gain work experience and build networks to support a career at the Bar.

We are pleased to report some positive outcomes from our work so far in this regard:

  1. Our most recent analysis of income and work allocation, conducted in May 2021, found equality of earnings and opportunities, with no disadvantage associated with ethnicity.
  2. We are delighted to have attracted, shortlisted and appointed a strong representation of applicants from ethnic minorities in our pupillage recruitment campaigns, including 37.5% of our intake of new pupils in 2021.