Equality and Diversity
Staffordshire Fire and Rescue Service have embraced the Equality Act and the Public Sector Duty it places upon us. To ensure we know what we need to know we are looking at all our functions and partnerships through a Strategic equality and diversity lens. Our Equality and Diversity function sits within our Prevent and Protect Directorate and is a Principle in our Corporate Safety Plan. This means that all the decisions Stoke on Trent and Staffordshire Fire and Rescue Authority make, whether that be on the use of community facilitates, the review of data collection, the developing partnerships to deliver services and our internal business transformation process, has an Equality and Diversity 'safety check'.
The scope of our impact assessment process
We believe that when we look holistically at our services, and the staff who deliver them, and consider the characteristics of our service users and staff profile, we are in a better position to identify risk and respond appropriately. This is why we put our People Impact Assessment (PIA) process, in its adaptable formats, at the beginning of our decisions and policy development. We are currently simplifying our PIA format to ensure that we show due regard to inform our strategies and policies are fit to deliver a positive outcome. We do not go through a box ticking exercise and our Community Interest Company and Fire Stations collect information on who is using our service in order that we can accurately build profiles on who is most at risk and target our resources appropriately. Our Communications Team are a pivotal point to ensure we engage with and involve the widest possible cohort of Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire’s residents and partners.
We are developing partnerships and our information sharing protocols, in particular with health and social care, are providing information whereby we can target resources to those most at risk.
Our success at our community fire stations
Our Communication and Engagement Strategy enables us to receive regular feedback from our communities regarding our activities. It is our community based activity which has informed us of some of the journey that we would wish to take in order to deliver excellent services to all, whether they are in the form of prevention, protection or response. It is a primary function of our Service to feedback to our staff and our community against our objectives and ensures their views and contribution are always considered and valued.
Equality objectives
The Equality Act 2010 (Specific Duties) Regulations 2011 came into force on September 10 2011. The specific duties require public bodies to publish relevant, proportionate information showing compliance with the Equality Duty, and to set equality objectives.
To ensure the Service meets our obligations under equality legislation, transparency obligations and employment provisions, we endeavour to monitor, analyse and publish the profile of our staff annually. Effective monitoring is an important tool for measuring performance and progress towards equality and diversity goals and in ensuring a truly inclusive staff makeup. But monitoring is not an end in itself. Data that is collected needs to be analysed and used to inform appropriate action. An understanding of its potential to help underpin our equality and inclusion strategy is a good place to start. We also collect relevant data monitoring to ensure we fully understand vulnerability and risks to the community.
Workforce profile (September 2022 to March 2023)
We monitor staff by protected characteristics in employment and training, sickness and grievance. All data is collected by self-classification and is therefore a matter of individual judgement. The Service is continually striving for our positive culture to support diversity and have developed a self-service monitoring tool where staff can amend and update the data we hold on them. Staff can update the information we hold on them themselves whether that be their next of kin, contact details or if they have a disability or not. As we are an emergency service, the role titles of our staff is not broken down as is the case with many other employees.