Why are we doing this?: Every four years Wrexham County Borough Council are required to publish an Equality Plan. This Plan needs to include equalities objectives for each of the protected characteristics included in the Equality Act 2010.
Our Equality Plan needs to be clear about what progress or success against our objectives will look like. We need to consider relevant equality information in order to develop our objectives, we also need to outline the steps we will take to meet our objectives.
What do we want to know?: In order to develop our objectives, we need a clear overview and understanding of the major issues facing people with protected characteristics. Engagement is critical to provide a firm evidence base.
We need to engage with individuals and groups of people with protected characteristics with regard to:
- Setting equality objectives
- Preparing and reviewing our Strategice Equality Plan
- Identifying how our work and activities may contribute to meeting the general duty
- Assessing the likely impact on equality of any policies or practices being proposed or reviewed.
What we found out: The consultation told us that in the main the areas we were considering could be areas of inequality, however, some of these were things that the Council could not have much influence over, or work to address any inequality was already underway by ourselves as part of our council priorities, by our partners - for example, health partners or the work of the Wrexham Public Services Board. We did not wish this plan to duplicate the work of others, but to add value and make a real difference to people's lives.
More information on the Council Plan can be found here: The Council Plan and on the Wrexham Public Services Board website here: Wrexham Public Service Board.
We also found we needed to be more specific in our objectives – therefore this helped us to refine and really focus our objectives on the things that we as a local authority can really make a difference to.
A summary of findings from all the consultation can be found in Appendix B of our Strategic Equality Plan and information on how the equality objectives changed as a result of this can be found at Appendix C of our Strategic Equality Plan.
What difference has it made?: Actions were developed to outline how we will achieve the objectives of our Strategic Equality Plan 2020-24, and performance measures developed to show how we will know that what we are doing is working. These are shown in the information about each objective in our Strategic Equality Plan 2020-24.
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Consultation start date
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10 December 2019
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Consultation end date
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31 March 2020
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