Equality and diversity report

What we have achieved in 2023-24

Political and Officer Leadership

Commitment to Equality and Diversity

Our new Corporate Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Policy (EDI) sets out our commitment as a council to achieve better outcomes for everyone in Gateshead. This policy is for all Gateshead residents, our employees and our councillors. It applies to all council services, including those using volunteers or delivered by other organisations on behalf of the council. It replaces our previous Equal Opportunities policy.

Our vision is to make Gateshead a place where everyone can thrive, no matter who they are or their background or experiences. We will make EDI our shared responsibility and priority, so that we all work to tackle the inequalities faced by people in our communities.

Our commitments in the policy are based on the themes within the Equality Framework for Local Government; Leadership, Communities, Services and Workforce. We will report on progress in delivering against our policy commitments in future annual reports.

Priorities and working in partnership

Voluntary and Community Sector

We have worked in partnership with the Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) to respond to issues faced by our residents. At a strategic level this is through our VCSE Leaders forum. Our Community Health and Wellbeing service also co-ordinates the Gateshead Food partnership of 130 contacts, the Warm Spaces network of 90 partners and the newly developed Gateshead Fuel Poverty forum. These partners deliver vital front-line support to vulnerable residents and signpost onto further help to improve outcomes such as benefit maximisation.

Our Holiday Activity and Food (HAF) programme delivers across Gateshead with over 70 partners to children and young people who are eligible for Free School Meals, or who have special educational needs. The range of CYP who benefit from this programme includes children with disabilities, refugees and asylum seekers, children from our faith and ethnic minority communities.

Gateshead Volunteer Centre has worked closely with our Localities service to develop volunteering action plans for different areas of Gateshead. In the South this has involved older people within Birtley and Lamesley working together through a Friends of group on environmental tasks, reducing social isolation and improving community pride. The Volunteer coordinators network across Gateshead brings together 120 partners from across the VCS.

Performance monitoring and scrutiny

Equality indicators within the Performance Management and Improvement Framework

Our Performance Management and Improvement Framework (PMIF) enables the council to know how it is delivering on Thrive, our strategic approach and our Health and Wellbeing Strategy.  It has a clear focus on priorities, delivery, measurement and analysis of impact.

The analysis of our year-end performance for April 2023 to March 2024 against each of the 6 policy objectives of the Health and Wellbeing Strategy and the Balanced Scorecard is reported to Overview and Scrutiny committees (OSC) and Cabinet. Corporate Resources OSC considered the organisational 'health check' Balanced Scorecard, which includes equality indicators. Key emerging headlines relevant to equalities include:

• The continuing impacts of rising costs facing local people, families, and businesses, as well as in the delivery of services.
• The demand pressures faced by services continues including support for children's and adult social care which continue to increase, as well as expanding demand for debt advice, with partnership activity underway with Citizens Advice Gateshead.
• Earlier intervention can help to reduce health inequalities faced in later life and improve health and wellbeing outcomes, which can help to reduce demand for services. 
  • Two of the Priority Based Transformation Areas as part of the budget approach are Adults Social Care and Housing Improvement which will directly inform this priority objective.
  • Locality Working was piloted in Birtley and will be further rolled out during 24/25; in short term it will support early intervention with longer term goal of improving life chances and reducing dependence on council services.
• Additional support is still being sought and provided to local people and businesses through various grants, although this is affected additional by burdens relating to central Government's initiatives.
• Many services across the council are working closely with key partners and local communities to deliver support to residents in need.
• Many services are actively engaging with customers to improve their offer and/or customer experience.

Our employee equality indicator, percentage of the workforce self-reporting their protected characteristics, improved from a baseline of 35% (March 21) to our current level of 47.4% (March 24). This is a slight drop of 4% from twelve months ago.

For our residents' equality indicators, percentage of residents who are in vulnerable, just coping, managing or thriving categories taken from our Local index of need (LIoN) data analysis, the picture is mixed. Residents identified as being most vulnerable reduced from a baseline of 39.5% to 31.8%. An increase was seen in the percentage of residents just coping, while those managing remain similar, however a reduction noted in percentage of residents who were thriving from 10% to 7%.