Equality and Diversity
Thanet District Council is committed to
supporting social inclusion and ensuring that everyone in the
District is treated equally. This means that everyone has the same
opportunity to access and receive services and employment
opportunities. They can participate in all aspects of
community life regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender,
disability, age, sexual orientation religion or beliefs.
Did you know?
- The number of economically active people in the district with a
long-term illness is 17.8%;
- Thanet has a small minority ethnic population, with white:
Irish as the largest group at 0.9%;
- The age structure of the Thanet population shows that there are
less working aged adults and more elderly adults than the national
picture.
(source Census 2001)
This means that we have a diverse community and we are committed
to achieving equality for all.
Our aims
We aim to:
- Promote equality of opportunity;
- Eliminate unlawful discrimination;
- Promote participation in community life;
- Promote good relations between people from different
backgrounds.
To achieve these aims we are taking steps
to:
- Make services more accessible, promoting take up by all
sections of the community;
- Assess our service provision to ensure that any barriers to
accessing services and the opportunities on offer are identified
and where possible removed;
- Develop a better understanding of our service users;
- Raise the profile of equality and diversity across all our
service areas.
What we are doing to meet these committments and achieve our
aims
We have adopted the Equality Standard for
Local Government. This is a nationally recognised framework
that measures our progress in achieving equality and diversity.
We set ourselves the target of achieving
level 3 of the Standard by October 2009.
Part of the activity that will help
us achieve this aim will include:
- reviewing our equalities policy and
corporate action plan, which set out our commitments and how
we will achieve them;
- preparing employment equality targets for
recruitment and retention, as well as producing a workforce
profile;
- enabling elected members to access equality
and diversity training;
- producing online information resources for staff and residents
to help us better understand our district.
Our corporate action plan incorporates our revised Race
Equality Scheme (RES), our Disability Equality Scheme (DES), and
following our annual rerview of the plan in 2007, our first Gender
Equality Scheme is now included. Look under the DES/RES/GES column
in the Action plan for elements relating to these schemes.
These schemes are required by Law. You can find out more
about these schemes at the following website:
- Race Equality Duty
- Disability Equality Duty
- Gender Equality Duty
Equality
and Human Rights Commission website
or
We want to know what you think. We want to get
things right and we will be reviewing and developing our Corporate
Equality Plan annually. Your views and opinions really do
matter. If you have any suggestions about improving our plan
and objectives, please let us know:
Ian Driver
Corporate Project Officer
Thanet District Council
PO Box 9 Cecil Street Margate
Kent CT9 1XZ
If you have problems reading any of our key documents
and require any of them in alternate formats or another language,
please call 01843 577165.