East Suffolk Council

Equality and diversity

Equality, diversity and inclusion

East Suffolk Council continues to actively promote equality, diversity, and inclusion in all aspects of both service delivery and employment. Councillors and staff are committed to ensuring equitable access to services for all residents, with an ambition to achieve equity wherever possible, and a supportive, inclusive working environment for employees.

We are working to meet our obligations under the Equality Act 2010, guided by the three public sector equality duties:

• Eliminate discrimination, harassment, and victimisation, and any other conduct prohibited by or under the Act.
• Advance equality of opportunity between people who share a protected characteristic and those who do not.
• Foster good relations between people who share a protected characteristic and those who do not.

We remain committed to considering the needs of the nine protected characteristic groups identified in the Equality Act 2010, plus socio-economic disadvantage, which is a key concern in East Suffolk:

• Age.
• Gender reassignment.
• Marriage and civil partnership.
• Pregnancy and maternity.
• Disability.
• Race (including colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin).
• Religion or belief (including lack of belief).
• Sex.
• Sexual orientation.
• Socio-economic disadvantage (we have added a tenth characteristic - socio economic disadvantage, which includes the pockets of deprivation that exist, particularly in our rural communities).

East Suffolk Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Policy

We work collaboratively with partners and communities to ensure that everyone is treated fairly through service delivery and policy development.

The East Suffolk Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Policy focuses on a range of things we do to try to ensure that we promote equality including:

Ensuring that the buildings that we deliver services from are accessible.

• Considering income deprivation in service charges where possible.
• Engaging with individuals and communities when developing new services.
• Providing information in accessible and inclusive formats.
• Engaging respectfully with the public.
• Striving to meet individual needs wherever possible.
• Monitoring service usage to identify disparities and improve access.
• Transparent and accountable decision-making.
• Training staff to recognise and respond to diverse needs.

The policy is being updated in 2025 - if you have any comments on these priorities, please let us know.

Continuous improvement

We recently completed a self-assessment using the Local Government Association’s Equality Framework for Local Government (EFLG) to benchmark our progress.

Our EDI priorities for the next 12 months include:

Equality and diversity priorities 2025

• Improve data collection, analysis, and use across all ten characteristic groups.
• Use evidence to inform the update of our policy, our equality objectives, service design, and commissioning.
• Review and refresh our equality objectives, embedding them in wider strategic and service plans.
• Publish an Annual Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Report.
• Strengthen monitoring of equality outcomes across all services, including health inequalities.
• Integrate equality considerations into our quarterly monitoring against our Strategic Plan - Our Direction 2028.
• Define the Scrutiny Committee’s role in reviewing EDI progress.
• Collect community intelligence more systematically from councillors and frontline staff.
• Engage underrepresented groups more effectively in civic and democratic processes.
• Promote community cohesion and address emerging tensions.
• Build staff confidence in serving diverse communities.
• Reinforce senior-level commitment to equity and inclusion, including through the Corporate Leadership Team and Leadership Forum.
• Assess cumulative service impacts on protected groups.
• Set and monitor outcomes for people with multiple protected characteristics.

Equality and diversity tools

We use a variety of tools and groups to promote equality and inclusion:

• Services for All Group – brings together officers from across departments to coordinate Equality, Diversity and Inclusion efforts and training.
• Human Resources – ensures ethical, inclusive employment practices and organisational development.
• People Strategy – aligns workforce planning with Equality, Diversity and Inclusion objectives, ensuring skilled and diverse staffing.
• Training and development – Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, safeguarding, and community awareness are part of induction and ongoing training for staff and councillors, including new ‘bitesize’ training sessions.
• Community partnerships – ongoing collaboration with voluntary and community groups, including our new East Suffolk Youth Council, local faith groups, and two Disability Forums.
• Commissioned services – we continue to support Citizens Advice and our two Disability Advice organisations to work with marginalised groups.

Measuring equality impact

We carry out Equality Impact Analyses (EqIAs) to ensure that our decisions promote inclusion, eliminate discrimination, and advance fairness.

• EqIAs are required for all Cabinet and Scrutiny reports involving policy or service changes but are now embedded in our Project Development and Management process.
• Community demographic data, including from Suffolk Observatory and local reports, supports the analysis.
• We document positive outcomes and learning from EqIA processes and capture learning points – things that we could do better

Equality monitoring

To fulfil our EDI commitments, we:

• collect monitoring data, where appropriate, on protected characteristics to ensure fairness in employment and service delivery,
• respect individual privacy and confidentiality in all data collection and use,
• use engagement and feedback from front-line services to tailor services to community needs.