Equality & Diversity at Irwell Valley is led from the top.
We have a Board Member who attends the Irwell Valley Equality & Diversity Forum and so increases the profile of Equality & Diversity at Board.
We have a group of colleagues who form a the Equality and Diversity forum and it is their main responsibility to ensure we follow our Equality and Diversity Scheme and action plan and monitor the progress of projects within Irwell Valley's project management systems.
Please
click here to download the outcomes from interim Single Equality Scheme Action Plan October 10 - March 11 in our Equality and Diversity Newsletter
Our key objectives for 2011/12 for Equality and Diversity are:
- Have effective leadership and governance in place to scrutinise performance on equality and diversity and set challenging targets.
- Provide excellence in customer service that responds to the individual needs of our customers.
- Provide opportunities for customer involvement and consultation within all sections of the community.
- Ensure that equality and diversity principles are fully reflected in our approach to recruitment, colleague development and training.
- Make certain that our procurement processes and partners reflect our commitment to equality and diversity.
In order to provide the services that our customers want, we need to know who our customers are. To apply this we performed a resident profiling exercise and we now have data (including information on the faith, ethnicity, disability/ limiting long term illness, first language, sexuality, age, gender and transgender) for around 94.8% of our customers. This allows us to shape our services around their needs.
The customer profiling exercise has allowed us to identify the preferred methods of communication for all customers for example, we can now automatically send inromation to customers in large print.
We also use our customer profiling information to help us carry out Equality Impact Assessments (EIAs) on our policies and services. These are made available to our Residents’ Scrutiny Panel, Operations Committee and Board of Management and have to be signed by the Head of Customer Services before these can be published. You can contact us on the details below to find our more about EIAs or to request copies of these.
Our offices and 50Plus housing schemes are accessible to customers with disabilities.
We subscribe to Language Line and have a Translation, Interpretations & Alternative Format Policy to provide colleagues with information – including identifying colleagues with language and/ sign language skills in order to facilitate and improve our service to customers.
If you want to find out more about how we're looking to make our services and homes accessible to all, please contact the Customer Service Team on
comments@irwellvalleyha.co.uk or call us on
0161 610 4708.