Equality and diversity

The Council's vision under our Corporate Plan is that Babergh and Mid Suffolk District Councils are places of opportunity and ambition for all.

The Council is fully committed to eliminating discrimination and actively promotes equal opportunities for everybody who lives in, works in, visits Babergh and Mid Suffolk.

The Council believes that its performance and achievements will improve in an environment where equal opportunities exist and prejudice and discrimination are not tolerated.

The Council will ensure it complies with race, disability, gender and wider equality legislation.

The Council will work with its partners and local communities to challenge discrimination, to celebrate diversity and to promote cohesion.

Our objectives

Babergh and Mid Suffolk District Councils want to recognise and embrace equality and diversity in the following ways:

Babergh and Mid Suffolk officers and Councillors to understand and ensure that the legal obligations under the public sector Equality Duty are delivered

  • To improve services and organisational delivery in order to better facilitate compliance with the public sector Equality Duty in relation to residents, visitors, businesses and officers
  • To ensure that our communities equality needs are met and support community cohesion

When the Equality Act 2010 came into effect, it introduced nine Protected Characteristics (which replaced Equality Strands).

The Characteristics are:

  • Age
  • Sex
  • Disability
  • Gender reassignment
  • Marriage and civil partnerships
  • Pregnancy and maternity
  • Race
  • Religion or belief
  • Sexual orientation

They were introduced to further tackle and eliminate discrimination and ensure fairness within society, regardless of belief or preference.

To meet new requirements, and fulfil our duties under the Act, the equality monitoring questions that we ask were updated. These questions are widely used across the organisation within employment application forms, customer feedback, and questionnaires.

Why do we monitor equality?

We are committed to equality monitoring, so that we can improve our services. We need to know which groups use our services - and the reasons why some people may not use them. We can then identify the access issues and barriers to our services that some people face, so that we can remove them and make improvements.

We also want to make sure that everyone who accesses our services is equally happy with their outcome(s).

If you look at the legislation that we comply with, you will understand that there are, primarily, seven pieces of personal information that we ask you to provide us with. This is so we can adequately monitor how we provide services for you. They are:

  • your age
  • your gender
  • your marital status
  • whether you have any disabilities
  • your ethnicity
  • your religious beliefs (if any)
  • your sexual orientation (if you are aged over 18)

All equality monitoring data is classed as personal data, under the Data Protection Act, and will be treated confidentially. We only use this data for statistical purposes.

If you do provide answers to our monitoring questions, they will be a great help to us. However, they are optional.

Our specific duties under the Equality Act

As we have over 150 employees, the Act requires that we publish a workforce equality report each year. These reports provide equality monitoring information about our staff:

The Public Sector Equality Duty, at section 149 of the Equality Act 2010, requires public bodies such as the Local Authority to consider all individuals when carrying out their day to day work.

This includes consideration in shaping policy, in delivering services and in relation to their own employees. It requires public bodies to have due regard to the need to eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunity, and foster good relations between different people when carrying out their activities.

The Equality Duty supports good decision making - it encourages public bodies to understand how different people will be affected by their activities, so that their policies and services are appropriate and accessible to all and meet different people's needs.

Through understanding the effect of their activities on different people, and how inclusive public services can support and open up people's opportunities, public bodies can be more efficient and effective. The Equality Duty therefore helps public bodies to deliver the Government's overall objectives for public services.

The Public Sector Equality Duty 2010 (section 149) requires Local Authorities to devise and publish equalities objectives (minimum of one) by 6th April 2012. The purpose of these objectives is to strengthen performance in general equalities duties and demonstrate that practical action is being taken to address equalities issues both inside the organisation and in the wider community.

Our objectives are as follows:

Continued training and learning with our staff, councillors and also partners delivering services on our behalf

The way we operate reflects equality and diversity in all that we do particularly in commissioning, procurement, policy development and our constitution

All communications are undertaken fairly and equally ensuring we acknowledge and remove barriers to communication, both in the workforce and with our communities

Our Equality Objectives need to be looked at and commented on by community members to make sure that they are meeting the needs of the community. If you would like to comment on any of our equalities work or would like to be consulted with when they are updated please let us know by emailing us.