Our Equal Opportunities Responsibilities

Leicester City Council is committed to equality of opportunity and elimination of discrimination for all people regardless of age, colour, disability, ethnic or national origin, gender, marital status, race, religion and religious belief, sexuality, or trade union membership.

We aim to be responsive and open, and to demonstrate both quality and equality to our citizens, to our service users and to those who visit our city. It is our aim to ensure that people can fully participate in and benefit from the social, cultural, economic and environmental quality of life the city offers its users.

We are committed to promoting equality in respect of our various roles as:

• Service provider – providing a range of facilities and services meeting the differing needs of local people.

• Employer – ensuring fair recruitment, having a representative workforce, and providing a working environment that is safe, accessible and free from harassment and discrimination.
• Community leaders – through our democratically elected Councillors, working with communities and partners in the statutory, voluntary and private sectors to improve the quality of life for the people of Leicester.
  

Our business case for implementing equality

Leicester’s population is diverse. We know that people’s life experiences differ, depending on their personal, social and economic circumstances. As a local authority, we have a duty, both legal and ethical, to ensure that we meet the needs of the people in the communities we serve. It is up to us to lead by example:

• As a service provider, ensuring equal access to services.

• As an employer, ensuring that we have a representative workforce that reflects the community we serve.
• As community leaders, promoting good community relations among the diverse groups within Leicester and tackling discrimination within our communities.
  

We are held to account by various inspection regimes and must be able to demonstrate that we do indeed effectively and efficiently serve our communities. Our ability to manager equality and diversity has gained increasing importance within the external inspections we face. One way of ensuring that our management of equality and diversity is ‘fit for purpose’ is to measure ourselves against the Equality Standard for Local Government.  The Council has been externally validated as having reached Level 3 of the 5 level Equality Standard and has been awarded an Equality Mark Certificate by the Improvement and Development Agency (I&DeA) for its work on promoting equality and diversity.

Equality outcomes

It is important that the Council is able to show the positive impact of the way it provides services and frames its policies ‘on the ground’ – by the equality ‘outcomes’ that it has achieved. We will be compiling examples and posting them here, of how we have been successful in improving people’s lives in the city.

We see equality as being the ‘value added’ bit to our services:

• The way we tailor information to provide maximum access by the Council’s diverse range of users.

• The way we tailor the delivery of services to meet access needs of our different service users.
• The involvement of our service users, staff and external stakeholders in identifying how best to provide services.
• Our representative workforce that our diverse range of service users can more readily relate to.
  

 In time we will be collecting good practice examples for all of these 4 areas and posting them.