Equalities monitoring

The council has a legal duty to comply with the Equality Act 2010. A key part of the Act involves taking the necessary steps to collect equality data on our residents.

Collecting equality data allows us to better understand the services we provide, the people we employ and the money we spend.

When we are thinking about changing services or developing new policies, we need to understand the groups of people who might be affected by the proposals.

If we collect data on our service users, we are much more likely to know about the potential impact on those groups.

What is equality monitoring?

Equality monitoring is recording the social identity of staff and service users. We do this so that the council can:

analyse the use and experience of service delivery by different groups; and
take necessary and appropriate action to improve services for particular groups of people.

Why do we monitor?

Equality monitoring applies both to the council’s employees and the borough’s residents.

It is important that the council collects and analyses information about its staff and residents so that it can:

identify and address issues of inequality and discrimination
improve its decisions
understand the needs of groups of people in the borough
understand the impact council services could have on groups
identify whether services are reaching the intended groups of people.

When do we carry out equality monitoring?

We should carry out equality monitoring only where there is a possibility of gathering useful information that we can act on to improve services or reveal possible discrimination.

People should not be asked equality questions unless the information will be used to improve services or reveal possible inequality.

That being said, most services will need to carry out equality monitoring so they have accurate information on the particular groups of people using or not using their service.

Equality monitoring should be undertaken to help us meet our duties under legislation covering equal opportunities and their respective codes of practice.

What do we monitor?

Front line services are required to monitor as standard the nine protected characteristics as outlined in the monitoring template.

All frontline services are expected to monitor the following by equality group/protected characteristic:

take up or non-take up of services, as appropriate
customer complaints
customer satisfaction and
employment statistics, recruitment, promotion, disciplinary, grievances, training and employment tribunal cases.