The great scrape: FTSE firms erase 'DEI' from annual reports

Five years after the murder of George Floyd sparked the Black Lives Matter protests and a rush among corporates to champion diversity, analysis of annual reports by The Observer reveals a sharp decline in mentions of the terms "diversity, equity and inclusion" (DEI) by a majority of FTSE 100 companies.

- Barney Macintyre and Joe White investigate how leading British companies are rewriting their yearly surveys in the wake of Donald Trump's corporate crusade against diversity, equity and sustainability

Total mentions of DEI, along with the number of pages containing the phrase and variations on it, both declined by more than 16% on average when comparing the annual reports for 85 companies in 2023 and 2024. Meanwhile, the total mentions of environmental, social and governance (ESG) and variations on the term declined 22%.

The data suggests a large orange cloud has blown across the Atlantic and now looms over the boardrooms of Britain. Since reclaiming the office of president, Donald Trump has sought to expunge mention of these two abbreviations from federal documents and has threatened to take legal action against companies that fail to do the same. His administration is in the process of blowing $2m on an investigation into whether DEI policies cause plane crashes.

Although attention paid to DEI and ESG in UK company reports since the global anti-racism protests of summer 2020 has increased overall, the recent scraping of 2023 and 2024 reports - which came before Trump began his second term - shows a backslide. Anecdotally, the erasing of DEI and ESG from corporate websites, reports and internal communications in 2025 appears to have accelerated.