Bath and North East Somerset Council reaches the ‘achieving’ level

Summary

Bath and North East Somerset Council worked with the South West Improvement and Efficiency Partnership (SW IEP) to gain the ‘achieving’ level of the Equality Framework for Local Government (EFLG).

Key learnings for other councils

• Carrying out a mock assessments of equalities performance against the EFLG is very helpful
• Councils need a range of help in progressing through the levels of the EFLG.

Who was involved?

• The SW IEP team – two people over two days
• Elected members
• The county’s chief executive
• The Corporate Equality Group, chaired by director of Finance and Resources with cross-organisational membership
• Departmental Equality Groups – chaired by directors or equivalents, covering all services
• Three worker challenge groups
• External stakeholders
• External partners
• The Equality team.

The problems and how we tackled them

The EFLG focuses on the outcomes that equality work produces. It thus requires councils to demonstrate that equality is integral to corporate planning and decision making.

The council had been working towards the EFLG since its inception. It took the view that, despite the initial challenge, the EFLG would bring significant long-term benefits. These would include embedding equality into systems and processes. However, Bath had not benefitted from any other external verification of its equality work.

Initially, the council felt that to gain maximum benefit from the peer challenge, it was vital to find the correct mix of people for each focus group. It therefore decided internal staff and external participants should be combined. This proved challenging, as although people had joint responsibility through partnership working for some activities, some of the discussions were somewhat ‘stunted’.

Feedback from participants highlighted an issue: that some voluntary sector participants were receiving funding – albeit for different purposes – from participating statutory partners. They thus felt that they could not speak freely in the sessions.

Two key focus groups were thus set up:

One group involved cross-party elected members with responsibility for scrutiny panels. This group discussed how interventions from the Equality team and specific training on scrutiny can benefit the elected member role. This group also looked at the role of Equality Impact Assessments (EqIAs) in improving performance on equality. Officers acted as advisor to panels on specific issues.

The second focus group looked at equality mapping. The council’s data analysts embraced the concept of equality mapping from an early stage. This was instrumental in improving knowledge of local communities by comparing national with local level data. Thus key trends, significant changes and emerging issues regarding local communities could be identified and highlighted.

Outcomes and impact

SW IEP carried out a mock diagnostic assessment of the council’s performance against the EFLG. The findings were used to improve performance and processes when carrying out equalities work.

The mock assessment enabled Bath to demonstrate its strengths as well as identifying areas for development. The review helped Bath be confident about equality work having real benefits in council performance as well as communities.

Using an external review to highlight areas of success meant that elected members have become more confident in championing equality issues. They now challenge services that fail to provide EqIAs when necessary.

The council has been able to evidence significant strengths in its performance. And the diagnostic report has focused Bath on agreeing a short-term improvement plan before applying for a full peer challenge.

Bath acknowledges that the main challenge lies in articulating a clear and persuasive narrative which brings together a corporate story.

What could we have done better?

The council was concerned not to overload the SW IEP team before they arrived, and so did not send preliminary evidence to the assessors. It relied on ‘on the table‘ evidence for the team to consider during their time onsite. However, the council felt that this gave an incorrect impression of where it was with equalities work.

As a learning point, Bath found that the assessors were interested in some of the smaller activities, elements that were perceived as not significant enough to mention. In future we need to be more pragmatic about promoting what we do, and celebrating our successes.

We should have given some of our evidence in the form of case studies

Throughout the process the council were well represented by senior staff as well as practitioners. However, it could have done with better engagement with some middle-tier staff.

Next steps

The council got some very positive and constructive feedback from the SW IEP team. This is now being peer reviewed against the ‘achieving’ level in June 2010.

Contact 

Samantha Jones
Interim Equality Team Leader Bath and North East Somerset Council
telephone: 01225 396364
email: equality@bathnes.gov.uk

Page published May 2010.