Equality plan

Local people are being invited to have their say on a draft equality plan that sets out how the Council’s work will help make Hackney a fairer place.

The plan covers the Council’s approach to tackling inequality and poverty, celebrating and serving the borough’s diverse communities, and how it will take action to ensure its workforce is diverse at all levels. 

The first draft - published as part of a consultation - is intended as a starting point for residents, community groups and businesses to have their say. 

The equality plan is designed to help define how the priorities set out in the Council’s strategic plan - approved last year - will help make the borough fairer for people with protected characteristics or who are vulnerable because of life experiences. 

By law, it is illegal to discriminate against someone because of protected characteristics - age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership status, pregnancy or recent pregnancy, race, religion or belief, sex or sexual orientation. Public bodies must take action to tackle discrimination and discrimination when it relates to a protected characteristic and are expected to publish draft objectives and to consult on them. The Council is also proposing to adopt a voluntary part of the Equality Act 2012, which commits the Council to considering the desirability of exercising decisions ‘in a way that is designed to reduce the inequalities of outcome which result from socio-economic disadvantage’. 

The Council has included these objectives in its draft equality plan and is asking people whether they think it has got the objectives right, whether its priorities are the right ones, which groups should be included in the plan, and what the Council needs to do differently to make sure outcomes are fair. 

It is also proposing to consider the needs of groups who are vulnerable because of life experiences in its decision-making, including: those who have served in the armed forces, care leavers and carers, people with complex needs and long-term conditions, looked-after children, anyone going through the menopause or andropause, single parents and refugees and people who have an immigration status that makes them vulnerable.