Simon Carter

Tara, thank you very much for having me here today. Today, across our board and our senior management team, we’re about 40% female—we do want to do better in that regard. Across our whole company, we’re 50% male/female. So, you can see we’ve got work to do at a senior team level, but we’re pleased with the progress we’ve made and there’s been no one particular route to the success we’ve had.

I think it’s been a combination of things, but setting a strategic framework’s been really helpful. We’re doing that right across all of DE&I. So, it’s about the culture of the organisation and I think my predecessor, Chris [Grigg], created the right organisation that was attractive to women to join, and they could see their careers could move forward within the business.

It’s then about career progression within the company. We’ve had success in different areas there. It’s about having good career plans, but also being pragmatic. We’re quite a small business, we’re 600 employees, even though we’re a FTSE 100 company. So, at times, it’s not always possible to find that immediate promotion. So, where we have been successful, it’s been where women have come into the business, they’ve broadened their skillset by moving to different departments, and then when there has been an opportunity to move forward, they’ve been very well placed to take it.

So, if you look at our executive committee today, we have three women on the executive committee. One of those joined the executive committee externally. She was a GC by background. That’s Brona [McKeown]. And then more recently, she’s become our Head of HR, so she’s broadened her skillset. And then, similarly, Emma [Cariaga] and Kelly [Cleveland] joined as Head of Residential and into our corporate finance department respectively, and have moved on and broadened their career through time.

Absolutely. I was on a panel yesterday and it was a big topic that came up, we were talking about women in real estate, and having those role models makes it so much easier for women to see that there’s a route to the top of the organization.

So, I joined Real Estate Balance about a year ago. Its roots were promoting women in real estate and ensuring that they had a route to succeed. It’s now broadened out to the wider diversity area.

And one of the reasons I joined was at British Land, we care about this topic. I think it’s important not just from a moral perspective, but businesses that are more diverse, they definitely make better decisions. I think they can be more innovative. And when you look at our customers, we have a retail business, we have an office business, and our customers are completely diverse. And so, if we’re more diverse as a business, that really helps us.

But also, and I think this is very much [true] for 25×25: joining these organisations, you just get practical tips. You know, we’re trying initiatives on the ground—often they don’t work, often they do work. And so also learning from other CEOs as they go through what is quite a difficult problem to fix. Finding out what works, what doesn’t work, will mean that we get there a bit quicker. So that was my rationale.