Social Housing Equality Framework
In June 2011, Tower Hamlets Homes was awarded
with the "Achieving" level accreditation by Local Government
Improvement and Development.
We made an early corporate commitment to use the Equality
Framework to embed a greater understanding and structure to our
planning and improvements, alongside the Audit Commission’s
inspection criteria. Our
Diversity Strategy sets out what we would improve, and we
aligned these objectives to the Equality Framework outcome areas.
We said we would use the Framework to challenge ourselves, to
improve and to measure our progress in mainstreaming diversity and
equality within our business and we continue to do just that as we
strive for excellence. We believe that we now have a good
foundation in place for the ‘Achieving’ level, reaffirmed by the
Audit Commission’s judgement that our strengths outweigh our
weaknesses in responding to diversity in our November 2010
inspection.
Our work over the last 18 months has been
characterised by activities to ensure we made and embedded
improvements across our services, so that we became more accessible
and more inclusive and that we could show we had processes in place
to deliver fairness. Important features of this work included:
- gaining a more complete and sophisticated understanding of the
diversity of our customer groups – and starting to use this insight
to improve services, increase satisfaction and reduce inequality,
for example in our rents and repairs services;
- working with statutory and community partners to start to
tackle overcrowding which can damage the life opportunities of many
of our tenants and their children, especially Black and Minority
Ethnic households;
- putting resident and staff engagement at the heart of the
business, and strategically working with groups who are typically
marginalised in designing better services;
- improving customer services, receptions, written material and
our website to make them accessible to a greater number of
residents;
- implementing an organisational framework and providing staff
with the tools to respond to vulnerability;
- equipping staff with the knowledge and confidence of equality
and diversity needs so that we are clear what we can do to make our
services more accessible and inclusive.
These documents set the scene for our work in
Tower Hamlets, and then go on to summarise our self-assessed
position under each of the five outcome areas. In moving from
achieving to excellence, we will be working to continue to achieve
improved equality and diversity outcomes in order to deliver our
organisation purpose to be the best landlord in Tower Hamlets by
2014.