Ealing Homes: Development of a Single Equality Scheme

An equality scheme is a plan that outlines a public body’s action to address the requirements of the three public duties that cover race, disability and gender to proactively promote equality over a specific year period. All three duties seek to mainstream equality into all aspects of an organisation’s policy and decision making.

Ealing Homes is an Arms Length Management Organisation (ALMO) which manages, on behalf of Ealing Council, approximately 18,000 council tenants and leaseholders properties; providing tenancy and leasehold housing services.

They deliver services to a wide range of people, with differing needs and aspirations, with almost two thirds of their tenants coming from black and minority ethnic backgrounds, with at least 38 different languages spoken in local schools. The organisation recognised that this diversity creates real challenges for them on a daily basis and aims to ensure that, regardless of his or her social class or identity, each resident receives the highest level of satisfaction.

Ealing Homes wanted their Single Equality Scheme to consider all equality strands including race and ethnicity, disability, gender, age, sexuality and religion and faith. They also recognised that class or social deprivation impacts on people’s life experience and decided to consider this area as an intrinsic part of their work and service planning in order to demonstrate their understanding and commitment to equality and diversity good practice.

Our work on the development of the scheme commenced in January 2008 and was divided into three main stages:

• Research;
• Consultation; and
• Analysis.

This stage of the project consisted of a review of a range of data and information including:

• Ealing Homes’ employment and service policies and procedures;
• Ealing Homes’ approach to Equality Impact Assessment;
• Employment and tenancy monitoring;
• Results from inspections and reviews;
• Procurement arrangements.

This research allowed us to review the areas that clearly demonstrated good practice around equality and diversity and allowed us to identify key areas for further action and exploration.

A series of consultation sessions took place throughout February 2008. These consisted of:

• One-to-one conversations with members of the Executive Management Team;
• Focus groups sessions with 13 members of the Senior Management Team and the Management Operations Team (MOT);
• Focus groups with around 25 staff from all areas of the organisations;
• Focus groups with 15 key stakeholders including Councillors, Board Members, representatives from the London Borough of Ealing, the Police, the voluntary sector and health;
• Focus groups with residents groups specifically including disabled people. In all around 30 residents participated in the sessions.

Focus groups were designed to inform participants about the equality scheme and Ealing Homes aims, to promote discussion about the areas where Ealing Homes has already achieved success around equality and diversity and areas that they should consider as priorities over the next three years.

The sessions with senior managers and staff focused more on how to demonstrate good equality and diversity practice in relation to equality and diversity as well as discussions around priorities with regards to equality and service delivery. This raised questions on where they fall short on excellence in equality with regard to their services.

In the session with residents the questions focused on what actions in their opinion Ealing Homes need to consider to meet their needs. We asked them how they would redesign any of the services provided by Ealing Homes to make them more accessible. Finally, we asked what different communities would consider to be our priorities with regards to equality and service delivery.

In the session with stakeholders the following questions were discussed:

• What do you consider to be the priority actions for Ealing Homes with regard to equality and service delivery? (Consider the short/medium and long term)
• Are there any issues within your own organisation that will impact on our Single Equality Scheme/priorities?
• Are there further actions that we need to take in order to ensure that our SES is responsive and inclusive to the views of stakeholders and residents?

The sessions were generally positive and enabled participants to contribute ideas to the process. It was particularly important that a diverse range of residents participated in the sessions. Good representation was on the whole achieved with particularly strong representation from BME communities and from disabled residents.

Once the consultation process was completed analysis took place of the feedback from the consultation and the research. We discussed the findings in detail with Ealing Homes at all stages, including the possible reasons for some of the issues/findings. This analysis and discussion process informed the state of play section and the action plan in the final report.