Valuing Diversity - The Council's Equality Strategy

Involving and Informing Others

Our Staff

We have a number of current mechanisms for consulting and updating our staff on matters affecting them. At a formal level, we have established directorate level consultation groups with participation of both staff and trade unions. This is supported by formal corporate level arrangements and we consult our trade unions through a regular meeting on policy issues (Empol). Equalities issues fall within the remit of these groups.

At a less formal level, we have made a commitment that all Directorates will achieve the Investors in People Award by 2004. The fundamental elements of this award are that staff are fully involved in planning services, know what they are expected to achieve and are given the appropriate training and support to do so. Following this thread, staff will be involved and informed of the actions required to improve the Council's performance in relation to diversity and will receive regular information on progress.

We have established a small staff reference group on race from volunteers who responded to a personal letter seeking their support. We will extend this to form reference or focus groups to consider gender and disability issues. We will further extend the mechanism to consider other equalities issues where appropriate.

This strategy will be placed on the Council's intranet. It will be publicised and views sought by means of a Chief Executive's newsletter. We recognise that not all staff have access to information electronically but systems are in place to provide hard copies for those without such access.

Our Community

We have acknowledged elsewhere in this document that we must foster greater links with disadvantaged and minority groups and individuals within our community and more work is needed to ensure consultation with both groups and individuals is meaningful. This will be done in line with the Council's consultation strategy.

There is no one body of knowledge on the groups that exist in terms of race, disability, gender etc and one of the actions we will take is to put together a database, with our partners, to ensure that the appropriate information is available.

We have mentioned elsewhere the work done by the Local Strategic Partnership and we will ensure that this vehicle is used fully and systematically to promote social inclusion.

We will report performance against our plans and targets annually through the Best Value Performance Plan and, where appropriate, the Council's own community newspaper. We will make this information available in appropriate languages and formats.

We will also use the local media to publicise our progress.

The Council's website is continually being developed and we will use this site to inform our community of progress.