Hello
My name is Sonja Crisp and I am the Cabinet member responsible for equality, fairness and inclusion.

In the City of York Council we are committed to fairness.

We believe fairness is about making sure that everyone shares in the excellent quality of life our city offers.  This means enjoying a long and fulfilling life, in good housing, with excellent opportunities in work, education, training, self-development, and participation in public life, safety and security in family and social life, and the chance to enjoy diverse and inclusive culture and leisure opportunities.

It is also about providing services that meet the needs of our different communities, employing workers from these communities and working with all our partners for a fairer, more inclusive York.

Our Council Plan 2011-15 and other plans (like the transport plan, housing plans, children and young people's plan, education plans etc) tell you what services we shall deliver, why, when and how. We need these plans to make sure that our vision for a fair city is realised.  The plans include actions we are still working on, as well as new actions.  We work with our communities to make sure that plans and actions are up to date and that we deliver what our communities need in the best  way possible using the money, knowledge and people we have available.

Our plans have objectives and targets. We use them to measure whether we are successful in making life better in our City for everyone. You can download our Fairness objectives and targets for 2012-15 (pdf document 177KB)

The Council is currently further developing our fairness objectives and targets and will be publishing a new Single Equality Scheme for 2012-15 by November 2012.  This will be informed by the work of the York Fairness Commission, an independent body set up by the City of York Council to advise the authority on how to address deprivation, exclusion and inequality in the city. The initial results of the commission's work have already influenced the Council's budget setting for 2012-14.  The final report, to be published in June, will inform the work of the Council and its partners, to create a fairer York for all its residents. 

Every June starting with June 2013, we aim to publish a report telling you how well we have done with our objectives and targets in the previous financial year (i.e. from April to March).

Besides having action plans and targets, we also use our buying power and the money we give to groups and organisations as grants or loans, to make sure that they contribute to making our vision for fairness a reality.

We also judge our work about fairness against the rules of the Equality Equality Framework for Local Government (EFLG) . This is the national standard that local government uses to assess how well it is doing in terms of fairness. In July 2011, external experts told us that we reached Level Achieving of the Framework.  We now have a plan of action to make sure that we reach Level Excellent, the top level of the Framework, by the end of 2014 at the latest.

One of the rules of the Framework is that we must consider the needs of vulnerable people in everything we do. We use a process called "impact assessment" to do this and also ask our partners and those who work on our behalf to do the same. To complete our assessments we use:

• Information from consultation and engagement with our communities of interest, both residents and staff. We do this mainly but not exclusively through our Equality Advisory Group and our Staff Equality Reference Group. A "community of interest" is a group of individuals who share common experiences because of their gender, age, disability, race, sexual orientation, religion or belief, gender reassignment, marital status, pregnancy or maternity or because they are carers of older and/or disabled people.
• Data about customers and staff describing who they are, their needs and experiences when using our services or when they are employed by us.
• Data that tells us how we are progressing against the objectives we have set.

 
You can find the information we use to put in place our fairness plans, objectives and targets as well as when we do impact assessments below.

Information and data about our city

STREAM - Statistic, research and mapping a local information system for North Yorkshire and York

Statistics and census information - information from the 2011 census will be available towards the end of 2012.

Information and data about our staff

You can download equality information about HR Starters, HR Leavers and general equalities statistics  via the links provided.

We also have information on Disciplinaries/Grievances/Flexible Working Requests and Corporate Training broken down by specific groups.

Information about consultation with our communities

Consultations

City of York Council Equality Advisory Group

Equality Impact Assessment consultation reports

Other information

Click here to get information about our communities of interest, as they were on 31 January 2012.

We use this information to put in place fairness policies and action plans. A list of current policies and plans is available here .  We also use information that tells us what our communities need now and in the future. You can find this information in a document called York's Joint Health Strategic Needs Assessment 2010/11.

We check regularly to see how we are doing against objectives and actions we have in the policies and plans. We report these in a number of documents as below:

Monitor 2 Public Finance and Performance report 2011/12

The Local Account for Adult Social Care 2011

We are developing detailed plans to make sure that information about our staff and customers from the various communities of interest is user-friendly and easier to access and understand in the future. We aim to complete this work by January 2013.

Cllr Sonja Crisp
Cabinet Member for Culture, Leisure and Social Inclusion it online