Rob joined the Ministry of Justice [then known as the Lord Chancellor's Department) in October 1983. He progressed to be Deputy Court Manger before joining the
South Eastern Circuit IT team. In 1998 he became a development trainer with corporate HR and helped form the MoJ’s Employee Engagement Team.
Rob currently leads the recruitment and development of Employee Engagement Champions, a network of over 850 people across the department including courts, tribunals, prisons and the Legal Aid Agency.
Rob was, for four months in 2015, interim lead of the MoJ’s Diversity & Inclusion Team.
In May 2016 Rob was chosen to lead the MoJ’s Race Project – an inward facing programme of work aimed at supporting the MoJ’s published Diversity & Inclusion objectives and turning the dial on race equality.
In September 2016, Rob was elected to a one-year tenure as Chair of the Civil Service Race Forum. The CSRF is an umbrella network of BAME staff networks across the Civil Service made up of over 30 Government departments, reaching over 6,000 BAME civil servants.
After 35 years at the MoJ, Rob moved to the Department for Education [DfE] in April 2019 to lead the Embedding Culture Change Team on the DfE’s
Transformation & Digital Directorate.
Rob was awarded an OBE in the 2018 New Year’s Honours list for ‘Services to Race Equality in the workplace and the community.
Rob Neil believes that increasing cultural intelligence can help individuals identify their biases and create effective strategies for managing them.
Longstanding friends and civil servants Rob Neil and Paul Downer give their views on why Black History Month exists, who it’s for, and what we should be doing for equality, diversity and inclusion.
Rob Neil, MoJ's interim head of Diversity & Inclusion, urges everyone to take part in the largest-ever Race at Work survey. The results will help inform the Talent Action Plan to remove barriers to success for under-represented groups.
