Equality Objectives 2022-2025 consultation

Closed 20 Mar 2022

Opened 14 Feb 2022

Contact

ECC.Equalities@essex.gov.uk

Overview

Draft Equality Objectives 2022-2025

Equality, diversity and inclusion are at the heart of the council’s values as an organisation.  

Our equality objectives are important to us as they guide the work we carry out across the county and show our commitment to challenging inequality and promoting fairness and inclusivity.

The Equality Act 2010 requires the Council to publish equality objectives at least every four years, to show the work that we will carry out to:

  • Eliminate unfair discrimination, harassment and victimisation.
  • Advance equality of opportunity between persons who share a relevant protected characteristic and those who do not;
  • Foster good relationships between those with a relevant protected characteristic and those who do not.

Everyone’s Essex

Everyone’s Essex, our plan for levelling up the county 2021-2025, sets out our areas of focus over the next four years. It articulates our aim to achieve better outcomes for Essex residents, and outlines how we can work better as an organisation to meet our ambitions.

We have identified three themes – Renewal, Equality, Ambition – to ensure we are well placed to address the challenges ahead. Alongside these themes, that run through everything we do, we will focus on 4 areas where outcomes matter for the quality of life of our residents.

They are:

  • the economy
  • the environment
  • children and families
  • promoting health, care and wellbeing for all the parts of our population who need our support

 

The equality objective that Essex County Council would like to work to in 2022-25 is:

We are committed to addressing inequalities and levelling up life chances for our residents and advancing equality of opportunity for our communities.

We will achieve this by focusing on 7 key areas:

  1. Developing a Levelling Up Strategy that will set out our long-term commitment through a series of policy interventions to connect people to opportunities and support aspiration across Essex, with a specific focus on those cohorts and places most at need.
  2. Focusing on a key commitment in Everyone’s Essex to work with children, young people and partners across the system to improve outcomes for the most vulnerable children and disadvantaged groups.
  3. Working with partners to deliver an effective and robust response to tackling Hate Crime across Essex and ensure communities are informed about, and confident in, reporting hate crime, through the Essex Hate Crime Prevention Delivery Plan.
  4. Working with partners, to develop and implement a revised and updated Joint Health and Wellbeing Strategy to address the issues impacting our communities, as identified through the Joint Strategic Needs Assessment.
  5. Working with partners to tackle violence, intimidation and abuse against women and girls in Essex communities, as well as working with communities to improve feelings of safety in public spaces.
  6. Developing a series of resources from the release of the Census 2021 outputs to provide a high level of insight into the needs of our communities to influence the shaping of inclusive policy and practice going forward.
  7. Improve our understanding of the race disparities that exist in the provision of our service delivery to Essex residents and work with service users and local communities to address them.

In this consultation we ask you whether or not you agree with the seven areas of focus under the equality objective and if there is anything else you would like to see included.

We will also be setting a second equality objective which focuses on the corporate equality health of our workforce, developed through consultation with our employees.

Areas

  • All Areas

Audiences

  • Anyone from any background

Interests

  • Corporate operations
  • Democracy
  • Policy making