Issue - meetings

To receive the Workforce Monitoring Report 2021

Paul Young, Head of HR and Contracted Services presented the Workforce Monitoring Report 2021.

The Council had a legal duty to advance equality of opportunity, eliminate unlawful

discrimination and promote good relations between people. Part of this legal duty was to report annually on workforce composition.

The report had to be published on the Councils website by the end of March 2022, and Paul raised concerns about the timescales of the report as it didn’t give much time for the report to be discussed before publishing. Through conversations with a number of groups, it had been agreed that the paper would be brought forward for the next year, and it was hoped that it would be brought to the July 2022 meeting of the committee, so the data wasn’t out of date.

Paul highlighted the summary annex and the actions that the Council had agreed to undertake such as ensuring all new starters completed the E-Learning packages in the first four weeks of employment.

It was noted that a high number of the work force had not specified their sexual orientation and religion, therefore this affected the calculations. Staff may be asked to self-declare or an exercise be undertaken to ensure this data could be included. However, this could not be enforced.

Members wanted to make sure that staff members were not under pressure to include this data should they not want too.

Names were removed from application forms when the job closed, therefore the long listing and short listing was undertaken on the application alone. The wording of this would be amended within the report.

Ages were also removed from the application form, however It could be roughly worked out due to dates of qualifications.

The Employment Committee noted the summary data included with Annex A and the resulting actions at 3.5 of the report.