The following section details the five objectives for mainstreaming equality in our work and some examples of what we have been doing and achieving since we last reported in 2023.

1. To know and understand all our communities. 

We gather information about our people through a variety of approaches including population surveys, Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation data, Census information, local survey work etc. However, this information is limited in that it doesn’t provide people’s lived experiences.  Engaging directly with people and building relationships is key to understanding the true experience and the story behind the statistics. We can then take effective action based on evidence where we identify disadvantage and disproportionate impacts for particular groups of people. Below are a few examples of activity:

• Engagement with the Muslim community to understand barriers that have resulted in the low uptake of girls and women accessing free period products. This has resulted in Lanarkshire Mosque becoming an access point and opening specifically for 2 hours each day for this purpose.

• The women’s Town Centre Safety Pilot on Motherwell and Coatbridge to understand girls and women’s experiences of accessing and using the town centres to inform the town centre action plans.

• Continuing engagement with our minority ethnic communities which has resulted in numerous initiatives to improve the lives of people including:

  • the contract with the Asian Business Chamber to support minority ethnic entrepreneurship;

  • the development of a new Cultural Committee to bring together and celebrate North Lanarkshire’s rich and diverse cultures;

  • positive action in recruitment of Congolese and Ukrainian people working in Early Years; and

  • the ESOL Learners Forum who provide a voice for learners to influence ESOL teaching practice.

• The engagement between the Community Partnership Team and the Deaf BSL community to inform the development of the Community Safety Strategy

2. To involve our communities effectively.

Nothing about us without us is the mantra for ensuring the planning and design of buildings and services are fit for purpose and meet the needs of people - getting it right first time. We engage and involve people at the earliest part of the process.  

• Co-designing the future community hubs with representative organisations including NL Disability Forum, Voice of Experience, Lanarkshire Links, NL Carers Together, and Equals Advocacy.

• Continuing our partnership with NL Disability Access Panel who provide the Council and its partners the experience of disabled people in relation to the built environment ensuring that access issues are factored into projects at the design stage.

• Lanarkshire BSL Steering Group provides a conduit for Deaf and Deafblind BSL users to have an ongoing dialogue with the Council to improve service delivery for BSL users. The group has representatives from four Deaf and Deafblind BSL user organisations operating in Lanarkshire who have co-produced with us the second Shared BSL Plan for Lanarkshire 2024-2029.

• Our nine Boards support community participation and provide a single coordinated approach to governance for local communities reflecting statutory and regulatory requirements and operate in a manner consistent with influencing and delivering the One Plan outcomes at a local level. The Boards play a role in terms of decision making within a locality and the involvement of local people is key. 

3. To demonstrate leadership in equalities and human rights, both within the council and amongst partners, and organisational commitment to excellence. 

The Council’s Chief Executive leads the way in all matters of equality and human rights. His vision and expectations that the work we undertake as a public body is first and foremost to improve all people’s lives is articulated at all levels of the Council as well as with our community planning partners. 

The Chief Officer – People Resources - has corporate lead for equalities within her portfolio and provides the strategic direction through managing the Equalities Team and chairing the Council’s Equality Board.  

Our Elected Member Equality Champion also ensures that equality and diversity issues are highlighted and progressed within the Council and its communities.

• promoting and ensuring cross-party support for Council initiatives, for example participation in the Gender Budgeting Project, and promoting the Elected Member Diversity Monitoring; 

• participating in Council Working groups including the Equality Board  the Equally Safe at Work Working Group; and 

• chairing and providing welcome addresses at Council events and conferences.

Strategic Leadership Board – Lead Officers Group

The Lead Officers Group was formed to drive forward progress on the recommendations of the Our Lives Research. This SLB’s leadership is crucial in giving this important work the validity it requires across North Lanarkshire’s community partnerships.  An example of how this leadership has proven critical is that through the Lead Officers Group a new Cultural Committee for North Lanarkshire has been established. Lack of cultural celebration and acknowledgement of different cultures in NL was highlighted as an area of great concern to people who participated in the Our Lives research. Since the committees first meeting late in 2024 there are 35 members from 20 organisations participating. 

Employer Accreditation Programmes

Disability Confident Leader 

The Council was re-accredited for the 3rd time with the Disability Confident Leader employer accreditation in March 2023. Being a leader requires not only removing barriers to disabled people gaining and sustaining employment but also taking a pro-active approach to encourage our suppliers and partner firms to also become disability confident.

Equally Safe at Work 

The Council has recently achieved Bronze renewal in the Equally Safe at Work employer accreditation programme.  It was one of the first Local Authorities to achieve this accreditation.

Race at Work Charter 

The Council was the first Scottish Local Authority to sign up to the Business in the Community’s Race at Work Charter.  The Chief Social Work Officer was recently appointed as our Executive Sponsor for Race.

Action Plans to advance the asks of all of these accreditation programmes have been developed to ensure delivery. Working Groups also exist to monitor and review progress and people with lived experience are central to the review and monitoring process.  

4. To ensure that local public services are responsive to different needs and treat users with dignity and respect. 

Our approach to undertaking equality impact assessments means that decisions that require committee approval are included within the committee report being considered by Elected Members. This provides elected members with the confidence that equality considerations are embedded into the Council’s decision-making processes.  

We have a quality control aspect to impact assessments that includes confirming that the author of the assessment has undertaken equality impact assessment training. Since introducing this 91employees have undertaken Equality Impact Assessment e-learning and a further 50 have undertaken Equality Impact Assessment face to face training.

Recent assessments have included: 

• Tower Strategy – assessing plans to progress the re-provisioning and the need to balance the re-housing needs of tenants affected by the re-provisioning programme and other applicants on the council’s housing waiting list.

• Insourcing of Business Gateway Lanarkshire Service – assess the change in delivery model from outsourced to in-house. 

• Sexual Harassment Policy – assess the impact and implementation of a new policy. 

• Homelessness Action Plan 2025-2028  - The Homelessness Action Plan (HAP) 2025-2028 aims to significantly reduce homelessness in North Lanarkshire through prevention, rapid rehousing, and housing support.  

• The HIVE Women’s Business Incubator Project based in Airdrie  - assess the impact of creating a women’s business incubator to help encourage and enable more women to start and sustain businesses within North Lanarkshire’s economy. 

• First Stop Shop Service Review  - A review of the current operating model to ensure the service continues to meet the changing needs of customers whilst providing best value and a sustainable future delivery model. 

A trauma informed and responsive organisation and services  

In May 2023 the W&TP committee in North Lanarkshire Council endorsed a vision and strategy to become a trauma informed and responsive organisation. The values and principles which underpin being trauma informed align with the plan for North Lanarkshire and as such, trauma is now a core component of the Council’s Programme of work 2023 – 2028. North Lanarkshire Council and the HSCP signed the leadership pledge of support in 2023 to publicly commit to this ambition and appointed 3 senior managers and an elected member as champions to drive this change programme forward.

A steering group has been developed to provide strategic focus and direction with a role of coordinating / having oversight of work that is taking place in services. A Trauma Plan has been created to ensure trauma informed practice and systems are embedded within the council’s operating model. The main national drivers that underpin the national trauma transformation programme are mirrored in the PoW deliverables. Within North Lanarkshire the aim is to thread trauma approaches and responses through all our work, organisation and culture.

As such a range of work is ongoing across the Council and HSCP to implement the Trauma plan with a focus on creating the culture and conditions across the council to enable staff to respond in ways which recognise the impacts of trauma, promote recovery, prevent re-traumatisation, and ensure services and effective supports are accessible to / effective for those who need them most. This has involved among other things:

• briefings to senior leadership across the Council;

• Managers have been asked to develop trauma plans for their services to consider how best to implement trauma informed approaches;

• a service trauma plan focussing on data and evaluation is currently being trialled with 2 services;

• the Equality Impact Assessment template has also been reviewed to focus attention on the impact of trauma on individuals when services are being developed and reviewed;

• providing opportunities for staff to develop skills and confidence in working with trauma and a training implementation plan has been developed to support this ambition. Ten Elected Members have also participated in training; and

• council wide strategies and policies have also been reviewed and refreshed to incorporate Trauma principles

In the creation of our community hubs, which are central to the Council’s future operating model, we are designing them with a trauma informed lens so as they are friendly, welcoming and accessible. Walkabouts in existing hubs with people with lived experiences are taking place and necessary changes being implemented. 

5. To ensure that the needs of people who are living with the experience of trauma is  considered in our decision making we have integrated trauma into our equality impact assessment process.

Work with schools on LGB&T supports

Increasingly the needs and support for young people who are LGB&T is being highlighted in our schools. Education and Families in 2023 have been engaging with Time for Inclusive Education (TIE), a charity that tackles homophobic, biphobic and transphobic prejudice and bullying through education. The Council target is that all teaching staff will have completed TIE level 1 training by end of session 2026-27.

DigitalNL

With the move to providing access to services in a more digital way we know that for some groups of people they will experience barriers if that is the only route for them.

Older people are less likely to be digitally connected and skilled.  Trust and confidence in digital technologies is commonplace.

Our Lives research highlighted a number of concerns for minority ethnic people - language skills, literacy, affordability for some groups also a key barrier.

For some disabled people digital technology can be a blessing while for others a barrier. For some people who use assistive technology – screen readers for instance - form filling on-line can present real problems.

People whose first language is BSL can be very digitally excluded, particularly older users as information needs to be in BSL.

The Council through various working groups – Digital Zones, Improving Customer Experience for example – is ensuring those most excluded are not left behind. Key is continuous engagement and involvement with groups who are impacted.

Accessing face to face services also need to be accessible. Employees skills and confidence in supporting service users and customers different needs is crucial and training and development opportunities need to reflect this.

One size does not fit all and we will need to continue to provide information and access to our services in a variety of ways that are proportionate and relevant.

Recognising the importance of this area the Council has set a new equality outcome for 2025-29 to ensure we get this right for everyone and no-one is left behind.

Access to language interpretation

All of our front facing reception areas have access to Language Line and Contact Scotland BSL which provides service users, whose first language is not English including those Deaf people who use BSL with access to interpreters on the spot.

6. To develop and sustain a skilled and committed workforce able to meet the needs of all local people. 

Training and Development  

The Council’s Talent and Organisational (TOD) team provide a raft of training opportunities for employees to meet both their personal and professional development needs. The establishment of the on-line portal LearnNL gives all employees easy access to the whole menu of training and development opportunities both face to face and e-learning.   

We have ensured that equality and diversity training is accessible and has its own dedicated section in the LearnNL dashboard covering a multitude of aspects about equality and diversity. The broad range of training available also includes bespoke courses developed for our Council and service needs. 

We have developed a new one-day Promoting Workplace Equality Workshop that aims to support employees become champions in their own workplaces – challenging prejudice and promoting equality at the same time. Since piloting in April 2023 more than 70 employees have participated.

As part of NLC’s leadership development programme a session entitled: Anti-Racist Education: The School Leader’s Role has been incorporated. This interactive workshop explores a school leader’s role in fostering an anti-racist culture, enacting an anti-racist curriculum and building racial literacy and confidence in anti-racist leadership and education.  This session is facilitated by the Lead Specialist (Race Equality) in Education Scotland.  

The Education and Family service has also continued to promote Education Scotland’s Building Racial Literacy programme, with one colleague completing the pilot programme and another enrolled to start in the next cohort. 

Action on Gender Equality Project 

In 2022 the Council began a partnership with the Scottish Women’s Budget Group. The project aims to support greater use of gender budgeting tools in local decision making in Scotland to reduce inequalities. Since this time the Council has been supported by the SWBG by:

• Delivering workshops for staff and Elected Members on gender budgeting;

• Support in delivering the Shared Prosperity Funding in Active Travel and Supporting Business; and

• Reviewing the Council’s Equality Impact Assessment Process