Our equality commitment

Equality and diversity is important to us because it means trying our best to treat people fairly and with dignity. It also means making sure that we remove barriers to equality for our colleagues, job applicants and for people using our services.

We also value the cultural diversity of all Derby people and the richness that this gives our city.

Equality, Dignity and Respect Policy

Our Equality, Dignity and Respect Policy sets out our guiding principles on equality and diversity, which all our colleagues have to work to.

The policy also contains the Statutory Equality Objectives for 2025-2028:

Objective 1 Leadership - Leaders, across the organisation actively embrace equality, diversity, inclusion and compassion and make fair, accessible and inclusive decisions. This objective is all about how Leadership embraces equality, diversity, and inclusion in the way the Council is managed.

Objective 2 Communities - Strengthen meaningful inclusive engagement between the Council, colleagues, volunteers, communities, neighbourhoods, groups and individuals, fostering good relations between them as part of our Public Sector Equality Duty. This is about our role in the community and how we tackle hate crime and promote understanding amongst communities.

Objective 3 Partnerships - Coordinate effective joint working on equality, diversity and inclusion with other statutory agencies and partners. Use our Public Sector Equality Duty to be an influencer for change to external organisations in their equality, diversity and inclusion journey.  This is about how we work together with our partners to provide a more consistent approach on equality, diversity and inclusion with our joint customers - for example bus services, businesses in Derby.

Objective 4 Removing barriers to our services - Maximise people’s ability to access our services, identifying and removing barriers to inclusion This is about how we check on how we are delivering and commissioning our services by equality monitoring and talking to our customers and Equality Hubs and Networks about what they think about our services and how we can remove any barriers. Our services need to be designed ‘with’ people and not ‘for’ people.

Objective 5 Diverse workforce - Champion diversity at all levels across our workforce, so we are representative of our communities, promoting colleague understanding and accountability for equality, diversity and inclusion. This objective is about our role as an inclusive employer and making sure our colleagues can be themselves at work.

The equality objectives have been developed with our Equality Hubs and Forums and employee networks and have been signed off by our Equality, Inclusion Board, Corporate Leadership Team and Corporate Leadership Team. Here is our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Plan.

Interpretation and translation - Accessible Communications Protocol

We know we need to make reasonable adjustments in communication for some of our disabled employees and customers. We also need to make sure that our customers can understand important information about our services.

We have contracts with agencies to make sure we can make our information accessible. As a result, we have produced the Accessible Communication Protocol.

Disability Confident Leader

We were one of the first employers in Derbyshire to win the original Fit for Work award, and then used its replacement, 'Positive about Disabled People'.

We are now proud to be a Disability Confident Leader for all our work and commitment around recruiting and retaining disabled people.