As a public sector organisation, we have a statutory duty to ensure that equality and diversity are embedded into all our functions and activities as required by the Equality Act 2010. The Act legally protects people from discrimination in the workplace and in wider society. It is underpinned by the Public Sector Equality Duty, which supports good decision-making by ensuring that public bodies (and others providing public services) consider how different people will be affected by their activities, helping them to deliver policies and services which are efficient and effective, accessible to all and which meet different people's needs.
The Equality Act legally protects people from discrimination in the workplace and in wider society. It introduced nine 'protected characteristics', making it unlawful to discriminate against someone on the grounds of age, disability, race, sex, sexual orientation, gender re-assignment, marriage and civil partners, religion or belief, and pregnancy or maternity.
The Equality Act introduced a Public Sector Equality Duty, which contains the General Duty and the Specific Duties.
The general duty requires public bodies to consider how the decisions that they make, and the services they deliver, affect people who share different protected characteristics. It has three main aims, it requires public bodies to have due regard to:
Having due regard means consciously thinking about the three aims of the duty as part of the decision-making process. This means that consideration of equality issues must influence the decisions reached by public bodies in ways that include:
Advancing equality of opportunity involves considering the need to remove or minimise disadvantage suffered by people due to their protected characteristics, meets the needs of these people and encourage people to participate in public life where participation is low from people within the protected characteristics.
Fostering good relations involves tackling prejudice and promoting understanding between people who share a protected characteristic and others. We are a very rural district, and people living outside the larger towns can find it difficult to access services. We will treat people fairly wherever they live and make sure they get the services they need.
The specific duties require public bodies to publish information to show how they did this. To ensure transparency, we are required to publish:
To assist in the performance of this duty, we have produced an annual equality monitoring report.
The report presents an analysis of the following areas: