Servite Houses: Review of Equalities Scheme

Servite Houses are one of the UK’s larger housing associations, providing 18,000 homes for over 30,000 people across the UK. Following a competitive tender process, we were invited in spring 2008 to deliver a range of Equality and Diversity focused services to support the organisation.

Following re-organisation, Servite Houses wanted to work with an external equalities provider who could offer a wide range of advice and organisational support on service delivery issues. Initially, we were asked to review their existing Equalities Scheme and make recommendations. Further work has developed from this starting point.

Our review of the equalities scheme, together with preliminary meetings with key personnel at Servite, revealed the main areas of improvement for the organisation. We were informed by the regulatory requirements, such as the Housing Inspectorate’s Diversity KLOE (Key Line of Enquiry), and the importance of demonstrating concrete evidence of success at inspection. We drew on our work with other housing providers and knowledge of good practice in the sector, to suggest the next steps.

The outcome of the review was that we have been invited to:

• Facilitate a day with the senior management team, to enable them to identify their key strategic equalities objectives for the coming year, and to plan how these will be implemented;
• Advise at the early stages of development of a customer care strategy, to ensure that equality and diversity issues are built in from the start; and
• Research and make recommendations on how to carry out customer profiling in a cost-effective and thorough manner.

We are working closely with a senior policy manager at Servite to ensure that our work reflects the organisation’s needs. We will be reviewing our interventions each quarter and our flexibility to date has been valuable to the organisation.

Our commitment is to help Servite senior managers devise a robust and operational equalities strategy, with clear and measurable ways to build the organisation’s capacity in this area. We expect to continue to work with Servite Houses over the long term, for example, by reviewing learning and development and integrating equality impact assessment into service planning and reviews.