Valuing Diversity - The Council's Equality Strategy

Planning and Target Setting

Action Planning

Corporate and Directorate action plans were developed as part of the Race Equality Scheme. As the Council recognised that it was starting from a low base and proposed to review its Race Equality Scheme more frequently than the required three year cycle, the action plans were short term concentrated on the areas identified as having the highest priority. Whilst these remain valid, the diversity strategy provides the opportunity for action in the longer term.

The corporate level action plans are structured to support the five strategic aims outlined in this strategy and will deliver the commitments made in this document over a period of some five years. More detailed Directorate level action plans will be developed in order to deliver the corporate action plan. Please note that all action plans will be incorporated into the Council's developing business planning processes.

The action plans will be kept under continuous review to ensure that progress is made.

Each Director will be responsible for ensuring progress against detailed Directorate action plans.

The Corporate Equalities Group will drive progress against the corporate action plans and monitor progress against Directorate action plans and will report regularly to the Strategic Management Team.

Scrutiny Commission 1 will monitor progress against all action plans through quarterly reports from the Corporate Equalities Group.

Performance Information and Target Setting

We recognise that we are starting from a relatively low base in consistently considering equality issues and some of our performance information is not sufficiently robust to allow the setting of meaningful targets. Some of our first actions will be to develop systems that enable us to assess the current position in many areas for subsequent use in target setting.

In other areas, we do have robust information and where this is the case we have used it to set the targets that are detailed in the action plan. Both Best Value Performance Indicators and, in some cases, local performance indicators will help us to assess progress.

We are, thus, able to set robust targets for gender and race in relation to the workforce as we have accurate population information. We have no such information in relation to disability and we have therefore used the unitary/all England authority average as the benchmark against which targets to improve the proportion of disabled staff in our workforce can be set.