white menThe RAF chief came under heavy fire from the defence select committee over what happened to Group Captain Nicholl, who quit because she refused to implement what she deemed to be an "unlawful order" to favour women and ethnic minorities when selecting individuals for training courses.
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Air Chief Marshal Wigston said that he was limited in what he could say about Group Captain Nicholl's case because it is the topic of an ongoing inquiry. It revolved around an order that was given to the officer last August and was never implemented because she quit.
Before this happened, though, Mr Ellwood said she had allegedly already discovered a recruitment practice that appeared to favour women and ethnic minority candidates over white men in a bid to improve the RAF's diversity targets.
"She determined that, I understand, about 160 cases of positive discrimination had taken place and she ended up having to resign not wishing to go through with this policy," Mr Ellwood said.
The RAF chief admitted that mistakes had been made "historically".
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"Those are challenging goals, those are stretching aspirational levels of ambition … One of the mistakes we have identified is that that aspirational goal … when it was translated into the strategy and then translated into our business plan and then trickled down into individual recruiting officers', recruiting sergeants' in-year personal objectives and was an unattainable target that put intolerable stress on them, and that was a failing of the organisation where an aspirational goal becomes an individual's target."
