Equality & Diversity

The Council recognises that some people might suffer discrimination and be disadvantaged for many reasons.  Blaenau Gwent Council has both a moral and statutory obligation to reflect the needs of a diverse community through our service provision and as an employer.

The Council has a commitment to promoting equality and diversity across all of our services and ensuring that the services that we offer are accessible to all.  Our commitment is about recognising and valuing diversity and ensuring that every individual is entitled to dignity and respect.

To reinforce this commitment  the Chief Executive, Mr Robin Morrison was recently announced as the Authority’s Equalities Champion.

In seeking to address inequalities in the way that we implement policies and provide services the Council adopted the Generic Equality Standard for Local Government in 2002.  The Standard was developed to provide a comprehensive tool to enable Local Authorities to mainstream and benchmark their approach to equality practices in service delivery and employment.  It provided a common approach for dealing with Race, Welsh Language, Gender, Disability, Sexual Orientation, Religion/Belief and Age.

The Standard has since been superseded by the Equality Improvement Framework for Welsh Local Government (EIF) which was developed by Stuart Speedon in conjunction with the WLGA.

Local Government in Wales plays a crucial part in tackling discrimination and promoting equality due to its levels of staff employment and its provision of so many essential front line services.  As with the standard, EIF intends to mainstream Equalities into the way a local Authority operates, but does it in a different way.  The EIF aims to promote Equality through Leadership and a Performance Management System that can apply throughout Local Government.  The EIF sits within the Wales Programme for Improvement (WPI) and establishes a framework for Assessment and improvement that focuses on the importance of equality.   It is expected that the Authority will adopt the EIF in the near future.

The most recent and ground breaking legislation to be introduced is the Equality Act of 2006.

This Act brought about the abolition of the following Equality Commissions:-
   

• Commission for Racial Equality (CRE)
• Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC)
• Disability Rights Commission (DRC)

More importantly it created in their place the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC).

The EHRC has taken on the responsibility for the following equality strands:-
   

• Age
• Disability
• Gender
• Religion/Belief
• Sexual Orientation
• Human Rights

The Welsh Language remains under the Control of the Welsh Language Board (which is governed by the Welsh Language Act 1993) but is implicit in the work that the EHRC does.

The Equality Act 2006 has also stipulated the following:- 
   

• It has created a duty on public bodies to promote Equality of opportunity between men and women, and also prohibits sex discrimination in the workplace.
• It has made it unlawful to discriminate on the grounds of sexual orientation, Religion or Belief in the provision of goods, facilities and services, the management of premises, Education and the exercise of public functions.