At Teignbridge Council we aim to:

Eliminate discrimination, harassment, victimisation and other crimes against groups of people based on their colour, culture, sexuality, religion, ethnic origin, ability or language.

Advance equality of opportunities by removing or minimising disadvantage, taking into account people’s disabilities and encouraging participation in public life

Foster good relations between people, tackling prejudice and promoting understanding.

How we will do this:

Customers

• Ensuring our interactions with customers, partners and communities promotes equality and diversity
• Making sure our information is accessible, easy to understand and can be made available in a range of formats
• Ensuring our public buildings are widely accessible and clearly signed
• Ensuring our customers are treated with respect and given privacy and confidentiality
• Providing dedicated facilities for vulnerable people including changing facilities in our leisure centres for people with disabilities, proxy voting for people not able to attend a polling station, ensuring improved broadband for rurally isolated people and providing assisted bin collections or free clinical waste collection.

Communities

• Supporting a number of groups representing protected characteristics including a gypsy and traveller forum, residents panels and focus groups
• Providing community grants to support groups and communities with special needs, or events that promote diversity, health and wellbeing
• Reducing anti-social behaviour that results in harassment, alarm and distress by providing intervention, meetings and specific orders for individuals, and tackling domestic violence and abuse
• Reduce homelessness and ensure vulnerable people are prioritised, equality issues are recognised and people’s individual needs taken into account
• Providing disabled toilets and changing facilities around the district and rural skip services, recycling banks and other services for people with disabilities
• We know who our communities and customers are. Our impact assessments on any project we undertake or any change we make always take into consideration all the protected characteristics as listed under the Equality Act 2010 – but additionally we include rurality and economic deprivation when assessing the relevance of our proposals.

Our staff

• Ensuring all our staff undergo diversity training and understand accessibility regulations. Ensure we have staff trained in British Sign Language, and that language options including translation and interpretation are available for our literature
• A thorough vetting procedure to ensure vulnerable people are safeguarded, and our contractors and staff have undergone safeguarding checks when working with vulnerable customers or groups
• Involve our communities in discussions that affect them, inform our residents and businesses of any decisions we’re making.