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Policy Equality policy and Strategy 2017-20

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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

  1. Co-ordinate and share equalities information, data and intelligence across the organisation
  2. Make better use of partnership data to improve our intelligence profile of East Devon
  3. Consider opportunities for using customer data to target services
  4. Survey East Devon to find out what our residents think we need to prioritise
  5. Introduce the contacts from local equality and diversity groups to our Corporate Equality Group
  6. Ask local diversity groups to review our policies
  7. Involve our Equality Partners in the design of
    the new offices at Heathpark

Objective 2 - Serve our communities

  1. Continue to monitor demand to make sure the council offers services in the where and when our customers want them
  2. Forge better links with partnerships and community groups
  3. Make sure we work with partners and have a zero tolerance approach to ‘hate crime’
  4. 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

  1. Help councillors to understand equalities issues and promote equalities thinking in debate and decision making particularly around budget decisions
  2. Complete an equality impact analysis for all relevant key decisions, service changes and policies
  3. Revise procurement, financial and legal contracts to reflect our commitment to equalities
  4. Improve monitoring of our workforce profile to identify trends and challenge inequalities