4. What are our equalities objectives?
Equality Objective Number 1 - Know our communities
- Co-ordinate and share equalities information, data and intelligence across the organisation.
- Develop better data and information about our towns.
- Make good use of partnership data to improve our intelligence profile of East Devon
- Consider opportunities for using customer data to target services.
- Regularly survey East Devon residents and equalities groups to find out what they think of our services and how we need to improve.
- Ask local diversity groups to review our policies and practices including this policy.
Equality Objective Number 2 – Serve our communities
- Continue to monitor demand to make sure the council offers services how 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.
- Maintain a diverse workforce that is reflective of the local community and who feel valued and treated fairly.
- Recognise the needs of different customers and make reasonable adjustments.
- Develop and action our new Poverty Strategy to help support all our communities.
- We have signed up to the Armed Forces Community Covenant which is a promise of support to local servicemen and women, veterans and their families.
Equality Objective Number 3 – Include equalities in all our decision making
- Help councillors identify equalities issues and promote equalities thinking in debate and decision making particularly around budget decisions.
- Equalities review required on all committee papers via the reporting template.
- 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.
- Produce equal pay data in accordance with legislation and gender pay gap reporting.