Our integrated equality scheme

Our vision is to make a real difference to people’s lives through our policing style. We will achieve this by engaging with all our communities, listening and responding to their needs and providing a top quality service through our local neighbourhood policing teams.

Policing should be rooted in our communities. It must value our communities, and it must be citizen-focused. We need to be helpful and straightforward, seeking excellence and a performance of which we may be proud. We must strive to reduce disorder, crime and the fear of crime. We must improve customer satisfaction and increase confidence in our service. Above all, we must uphold the law and protect life and property, treating people fairly, and recognising the needs of minority and vulnerable groups.

To read more of the integrated equality scheme please use this link.

Making the equality scheme live

Our integrated equality scheme grew out of our old race, gender and disability equality schemes which are required under various pieces of equality legislation. In order to make sure that we are working towards better equality and fairness we used a set of recommendations which are placed on our Organisational Learning Database. This is the system we use to track that work towards the equality scheme is being completed.

Between March and July 2010 we have worked with our senior staff to reduce the number of uncompleted recommendations to 14 from 26. We have done further work to reduce the recommendations and the updated list as at November 9 2011 is given here. A full list of the remaining recommendations is available here.

The integrated Equality Scheme was due to be updated in September 2010. The Equality Act 2010 does not specifically require us to have and publish a scheme. It does require us to integrate Equality and Diversity outcomes throughout all of our business planning and demonstrate this. We intend to make use of the Equality Standard for the Police Service to measure our progress towards the EDHR strategy. On the 9th of November our Internal E and D Strategic Board agreed to become the body which will scrutinise progress against the Equality Standard for the Police Service. For more details of what we have been doing on the standard please click on the link.

We do not intend to revise the 2010 equality scheme at this time but are concentrating our efforts on improving E and D outcomes across the business through the Equality Standard. We have a self assessment which we have consulted on with our IAG members. The Internal E and D Strategic Board will concentrate on the following areas in its next meetings so that we have strategic and planned approach to performance improvement in this area.

• January Meeting - The Equality and Diversity Department should complete the IAG work on our self assessment against the Equality Standard and prepare recommendations, agreed with the owners of those recommendations, to address the four Units of the standard that are currently assessed as “Below Baseline”. Progress against the agreed recommendations will be monitored by the Performance and Analysis Department using the Organisational Learning database.
• April Meeting – Recommendation owners for the work commenced in January will be held to account for progress. The Equality and Diversity Department complete the IAG prioritisation of the remaining Units to prepare recommendations, agreed with the owners of those recommendations, to address the top ten Units from the priority list. Progress against the top ten recommendations will be monitored by the force performance dept using the Organisational Learning database
• June - Recommendation owners for the work commenced in January and April will be held to account for progress. The Equality and Diversity Department will report on the new round of evidence gathering by BCU’s and Department for the next self assessment against the Standard in October.