Ryedale District Council: Audit and Consultancy Support

We have recently undertaken an audit of equalities processes and performance across Ryedale District Council in order to support the Council in progressing to level 3 of the Equality Standard for Local Government. This has included a review of systems for the collection of workforce monitoring data. We are currently developing the next stage of our intervention to provide some capacity-building workshops around workforce monitoring for officers from Human Resources and senior managers. These sessions are likely to include:

• Short, informal training inputs, e.g. to ensure everyone understands ‘positive action’ or ‘equality impact assessments’;
• Examples of good practice and benchmarking data from other organisations to suggest ideas for future actions and realistic targets;
• An opportunity to review, analyse and reflect on the monitoring data and what it means; and
• Facilitated action planning both to improve the process of workforce monitoring and the actions to improve equality in the workforce.

In the context of mainstreaming equality and diversity we were commissioned by Ryedale District Council (RDC) for audit and consultancy support. The idea was that the Council would benefit from an audit to review current performance on equalities in the context of compliance with the public duties and the Equality Standard for Local Government.
RDC also wanted an audit to record and evaluate their progress as well as the following:

• To use the audit report as part of their evidence for CPA
• To use the audit to help managers recognise their existing good practice, reinvigorate the agenda and shape next steps – to sell equality in a positive way to improve services.

However, before starting on the audit and conducting any consultancy work we reviewed existing policy and strategy documents which link to the 4 key areas of the Equality Standard, namely:

• Leadership and corporate commitment;
• Community engagement and accountability;
• Service delivery and customer care;
• Employment and training.

The audit report illustrated key findings and recommendations:

• Corporate Commitment and Leadership;
• Good Practice;
• Involvement and Consultation;
• Equality Impact Assessments;
• Equality Monitoring: Workforce, Services, Community Profiling;
• Equality and Diversity Learning and Development;
• Extending the standard to the three ‘newer strands’ – sexual orientation, religion or belief, and age; and
• Target for achieving level 3 of the standard.