Equality Monitoring

Monitoring people by equality group, such as by age, disability, gender, race, religion or belief, or sexual orientation helps to identify inequalities.  It enables us to take action to reduce and eliminate differences in uptake of services, representation in forums and consultation groups and outcomes experienced by different groups of customers, potential customers and employees.

Without equality monitoring we do not know who our customers are and who is not using or able to access our services.  With this information we can plan improvements that will narrow the gap for our diverse customers in terms of the quality of service being delivered and the employment opportunities being made available.

It can be difficult to prove that equalities duties have been met if monitoring data is not available and the results provide us with a way to identify the current situation and measure progress.

Equality monitoring is needed to:

• highlight inequalities;

• investigate the causes of inequality;

• take action to reduce and remove inequalities.