Single Equalities Scheme
All public bodies are required to proactively promote equality of opportunity, eliminate unlawful discrimination and promote good relations between groups. They are also required to highlight how they will do this by producing and publishing a race, disability and gender equality scheme setting out how they will meet the general and specific duties.
As an employer, service provider, procurer of goods and services and community leader, Harrow Council cannot fulfill any of these roles successfully without addressing issues relating to equalities and diversity. As an employer, equalities is about developing a workforce that reflects the communities it serves and eliminating discrimination from recruitment, training and development. In service provision, equality is about providing a service that is right for each individual, taking account of their specific needs. For procuring goods and services, it is vital to ensure all service providers delivering a service on our behalf share our commitment to equality and diversity. For community leadership, equality is about describing a vision for the area that is built on recognising the needs of every local community, promoting inclusion and cohesion, fairness and justice.
To demonstrate our commitment to equality and diversity, the Council has gone beyond the legal requirement to develop and publish Equality Schemes for race, gender and disability and has produced a Single Equality Scheme (SES) incorporating the requirements of the existing duties but also extending it to age, religion or belief and sexual orientation equality. The idea of a Single Equality Scheme has also prompted by thinking about the way people are categorised. Rather than think of people by reference to the equality strand or strands that might apply to them, the council wanted to address equality as a mainstreamed part of customer service, community leadership and as an employer.
As well as meeting our legal requirements, the aim of the SES is to build equalities into all our functions, services, policies, processes and systems to ensure we are championing equality and diversity as an employer, service provider, procurer of goods services and community leader.
