3. What are our equalities objectives?
Our equality objectives are designed to help us achieve a better approach to including equalities thinking in our work. We have developed our objectives using:
- the requirements of the legislation
- the knowledge we have built up over the last three years about what is important to our communities and equality groups
- priorities identified in our council plan and supporting plans through wide consultation with partners, businesses, the voluntary sector, faith groups, young people and residents
- feedback in the 2010 Diversity Peer Challenge report based on their assessment of our approach to equalities using the Equalities Framework Standard for Local Authorities.
Our objectives are:
Objective 1 - Know our communities
- Co-ordinate and share equalities information, data and intelligence across the organisation
- Make better use of partnership data to improve our intelligence profile of East Devon
- Consider opportunities for using customer data to target services
- Survey East Devon to find out what our residents think we need to prioritise
- Introduce the contacts from local equality and diversity groups to our Corporate Equality Group
- Ask local diversity groups to review our policies
- Involve our Equality Partners in the design of
the new offices at Heathpark
Objective 2 - Serve our communities
- Continue to monitor demand to make sure the council offers services in the where and when our customers want them
- Forge better links with partnerships and community groups
- Make sure we work with partners and have a zero tolerance approach to ‘hate crime’
- Work with partners and lobby government to minimise the impact of proposed major changes to benefits for people out of work or on low incomes
Objective 3 - Include equalities in all our decision making
- Help councillors to understand equalities issues and promote equalities thinking in debate and decision making particularly around budget decisions
- Complete an equality impact analysis for all relevant key decisions, service changes and policies
- Revise procurement, financial and legal contracts to reflect our commitment to equalities
- Improve monitoring of our workforce profile to identify trends and challenge inequalities