Self Assessment - Local Government Equality Standard - Level 3

Statement by Cate Bowman – Adult Social Care (ASC) - Directorate Equality Lead Officer and member of Directorate Management Team

I am delighted to submit this assessment on behalf of the Adult Social Care Directorate management team. The Directorate Management Team, lead by our Corporate Director, believes passionately that equality is an integrated part of delivering fair access to services. This self assessment seeks to draw together the “story so far” on a road which will lead to the achievement of level 5 of the Equality Standard for Local Government.

The achievement of level 5 is not itself the objective but by doing so we will be sure that our aspiration that those who work for Adult Social Care are being treated fairly and with respect in their employment and those that seek support through accessing our services will receive services which are focused on their individual needs and free of any form of discrimination.

At this stage of our journey we judge ourselves to be operating at the equivalent of Level 3 of the Equality Standard and have a sound foundation on which to build.

Cate Bowman

ASC Head of Care Governance and Director Equality Lead Officer

1.0Introduction

1.1Adult Social Care’s Commitment to Equalities

Adult Social Care has committed itself to achieving level 5 of the local government equality standard by 2010 as part of the wider Cumbria County Council commitment.

In 2004 the County Council published its equality policy, which was followed by the Council’s first equality action plan in April 2006. In April 2007, the Council published the Cumbria Equality Scheme, which is the Council’s first 3 year equality action plan.

Our early focus was on achieving the requirements of Level 1 and from April 2006 to February 2007 the focus was to achieve Level 2. This included the introduction of Equality Impact Assessments (EIAs) across the authority supported by EIA training of key staff and the development of service level agreements with external community groups in Cumbria (AWAZ representing BME groups, Cumbria Disability Network and Gay Cumbria).

1.2Background information about Cumbria

Cumbria is the second largest county in England and covers 689,000 hectares, including a coastline of 245km. The population density is 0.7 per hectare compared to the national average of 3.2 per hectare. There are around 490,000 people living in 209,000 households. One in three live in a rural area, with only 20 settlements having a population of more than 2,500.The main towns are on the edge of the County giving a “polo” effect in terms of population density. The County attracts over 15 millions visitors each year when the resident population can swell to 850,000.

A large proportion of the population is over 60 years old and this proportion is greater than the national average. The number of disabled people is predicted to rise to 1 in 5. Patterns of settlement indicate that older people tend to live in the most isolated areas.

The 2001 census indicated the Black and Minority Ethnic population of Cumbria consisted of 0.7% Black Ethnic Minority groups and1.3% White Minority ethnic groups (this included Irish people and Gypsy travellers).This gave a total BME population in 2001 of 2%. However, although the number of minority ethnic population appears small, their needs are diverse with people speaking 35 languages using public services in the county in 2006. Between 2005 and December 2006 239 people in Cumbria undertook the British Citizenship ceremony. They were from 42 countries with the Philippines, Turkey and India having the highest number of people undertaking the ceremony. National Insurance data since 2002 indicates a steady growth in the diversity of Cumbria’s working population. In particular there has been a steady increase in the number of Eastern European, particularly Polish people, estimated at 1,200 people in 2006.

Cumbria enjoys an outstanding natural environment, however, there are challenging social and economic issues. The economy has a low growth rate and wages are below the national average. There are relatively affluent areas in Eden and South Lakeland however significant pockets of deprivation in Workington, Barrow and Whitehaven. Barrow is currently ranked 323rd lowest out of 354 districts in England on the index of deprivation. Rural deprivation exists even in the more affluent areas with Eden being ranked as one of the most rurally deprived wards in England.

Local industry includes a nuclear reprocessing plant in West Cumbria, ship building in Barrow and pharmaceutical industry in south Cumbria. These maintain their own fire cover, however there is close liaison with Cumbria Fire and Rescue Service and other emergency services.

Transport and communication are problematic in Cumbria. Road safety is a particular concern.

1.3 Information about Adult Social Care

Adult Social Care isthe directorate which deals with Cumbria County Council's social servicesresponsibilities for adults and their carers.

Ourvision is: 'Citizens of Cumbria will enjoy fulfilling lives in diverse ways with dignity andrespect'.

Ourmission is: 'We will work on behalf of people in Cumbria and in partnership with others to ensure people:

  • are able to make a positive contribution to life in Cumbria;
  • can exercise informed choice and control over their lives; and
  • live free from discrimination and harassment.

Through this people in Cumbria will feel healthier and enjoy a good quality of life with dignity.'

Adult Social Care is structured into seven main parts:

  • Older people services providing assessments of need and arranging services for older people andtheir carers;
  • Disability services providing assessments of need and arranging services forpeople withlearning disabilities, people with physical disabilities and people withmental illnesses andtheir carers;
  • Cumbria Care, the council's in house provider of care services such as residential care, home care and day care;
  • Supporting People providing financial help for people needing additional support and services as part of their housing;
  • Support services providing a range of in housesupport services to the Adult Social Care directorate and parts of the Children's Services directorate;
  • Strategic finance providing budget and financial managementsupport to the directorate; and
  • Strategic human resources providing human resources and workforce planning to the directorate.

2.0Equality Standard Indicators:

2.1Equality Standard Indicator 3.1 - Leadership and commitment

2.1.1Target setting

The basis of directorate equality planning has been the Cumbria County Council Equality Scheme, which is included at Appendix A. Council members and the Council Chief Executive and his management team have approved the equality scheme. This provides a “roadmap” to progressively move towards the achievement of level 5 in 2010.

Our annual equality related service plan targets have matured from basic requirements to improve data accuracy and quality and undertake a first series of equality impact assessments (EIAs) to a position which has targets in our 2008/09 service plan identifying improvement targets based on accurate data and EIAs.

Targets for 2008/09 are included at Appendix B. We judge this to be an area for further development given our increasing maturity in terms of data accuracy and our developing approach to EIAs covered later in this document.

Cumbria has been selected as the North West pilot to disaggregate the National Indicator Set (NIS) against the 6 equality strands and this will build further on the links we have to date made against BVPIs. Initial work has been done to map the indicators that relate to equality strands and our EIAs for 2008/09 will be linked to these indicators. This mapping exercise is included at Appendix C.

2.1.2Corporate Monitoring

The directorate works under the umbrella of Cumbria County Council. This provides the structure for monitoring directorate performance as a corporate function and provides important support in terms of policy, practical guidance and significant expertise from the Council equality and cohesion unit lead by an equality and cohesion officer. This corporate structure includes a 6 weekly meeting of Directorate equality leads. This provides an internal review group considering performance across directorates and supports the development of best practice guidance. Achievements and progress are reported to the Chief executive and his management team, which includes the Corporate Director of ASC.

2.1.3Directorate level equality monitoring

Monitoring of key service user information across the equality strands and measuring performance against service plan targets, including equality targets, is now at the heart of the directorate’s performance management and business review processes.

The equality objectives are discussed specifically in the directorate equality group, which is a forum, which meets 6 weekly. This group also includes in its membership representatives from our equality partners AWAZ, CDN and Gay Cumbria thus providing an important “critical friend” role across the range of equality issues.

The importance of accurate service user information across the equality strands is recognised as a key requirement for producing robust EIA’s and service plan targets, which properly deal with identified inequalities.

It would be fair to say that the directorate’s performance in the area of monitoring service user data, particularly in the area of ethnicity, between 2003 to 2006 was poor. The arrival of a new Corporate Director and new Directorate Management Team members created a major catalyst to change the attitude to monitoring moving staff from a view that monitoring was unimportant to service delivery to an understanding that without monitoring it is impossible to test whether our services are accessible in the way in which all social work professionals would in their hearts wish services to be.

The corporate Director took a personal lead to grip the issue of monitoring writing to key staff (Appendix D provides an example), raising the issue with staff during her regular round of communication road shows and it being a feature of management meetings.

A significant amount of work has been focused on cleansing data and ensuring accuracy across the equality strands (excluding sexuality which is covered later in this document). This monitoring is now undertaken at assessment stage using a system called “Care first” which contains all of the demographic assessment and service data of all our 20,000 service users.

The tables below shows that we have closed the gap between Cumbria and the rest of England in the percentage of adults assessed / receiving a service in the year whose ethnicity was ‘not stated’:

“Percentage of adults assessed in the year whose ethnicity was ‘not stated’”
2003/04 / 2004/05 / 2005/06 / 2006/07 / 2007/08
Cumbria / 40.7 / 20.0 / 18.4 / 7.9 / 2.6
England / 10.9 / 6.7 / 4.4 / 3.0 / Not yet available

“Percentage of adults receiving a service in the year whose ethnicity was ‘not stated’”

2003/04 / 2004/05 / 2005/06 / 2006/07 / 2007/08
Cumbria / 28.7 / 20.0 / 16.2 / 4.6 / 1.29
England / 12.9 / 6.7 / 4.0 / 2.7 / Not yet available
Closing the Gap: BME Referrals - Under 65’s

In 2006-7 29% of BME people refused to take up a service following assessment, while only 6% of White British people refused a service.

In 2007-8 we can confirm that 0% of BME people refused a service following assessment. Our Service Plan objective is to maintain this.

Reasons for improvement in this outcome are:

  • Better recording and monitoring of ethnicity.
  • Impact of cultural awareness sessions carried out across social care teams.
  • Developing a more tailored approach to meet the needs of BME people at assessment stage.
  • Lessons learnt from giving a Direct Payment to people from BME backgrounds.

Following assessment 25% of BME people are not offered a service against 21% of White people. EIA’s scheduled for 2008-9 will look at this issue in greater depth, to establish whether future narrowing the gap targets are required.

Closing the Gap: BME Referrals - Over 65’s

While at assessment stage the number of people from BME groups accessing assessments is in line statistically with non-BME groups and take up post assessment is statistically in line with between the two groups, a lesser proportion of BME referrals meet fair access to care criteria (17% BME compared to 33% non-BME referrals). It is critical to understand this and now features as a service plan target.

Further issues are expected to emerge from the 2008/09 EIA process and will take the directorate into the area of developing well focused “closing the gap” targets which will make real differences to peoples lives and our aspiration to provide genuinely inclusive services.

Service Delivery by Equality Strands

Adult Social care have analysed the service delivery data of 2007/08 by 5 equality strands . This has raised some interesting points around the delivery of services to particular groups.

For example the gender breakdown of all service users for all ages shows 63% of service users are female and 37% are female.

Also 72% of service users are over 65 years of age and 28% are under 65.

Religion is most likely to be recorded for Occupational Therapy Equipment and Home Care, and least likely for Professional Support and Respite Care, so these are clear areas of development.

Also service profiles show that for example day care is the most popular service for people with a physical disability, professional support the most popular for people with a Mental Health and Occupational Therapy Equipment the most popular service for people with a disability.

Further analysis is occurring to see what is behind these and other patterns, and if any of these equalities issues require addressing based on these patterns of activity.

All the above, plus much other service related data will be used as important evidence to inform the planned EIA programme for 2008/09 including the EIA Workshop on July 7th, (see section 2.3.2 “Equality Impact Assessments” on page 10 of this document), it will be used to gain understanding of these patterns and form action plans to address any areas of potential inequality.

2.1.4Sexuality - monitoring

Monitoring of sexuality of staff has been a feature of the County Council recruitment and employment record verification process for several years.

Monitoring of sexuality in terms of external service delivery has been a contentious issue for many authorities and a large number of highly rated authorities are yet to implement sexuality monitoring for service users. In Adult Social Care we ascertained through informal discussions with staff that this would be an area of potential contention, some staff believing that the subject was unrelated to a person’s care package and might be considered to be deeply offensive. Adult Social Care management believed that this was an important strand of monitoring and engaged our links with community groups to consider how best to move this forward. A number of actions have taken place or are in hand to enable us to go live with sexuality monitoring from the end of July 2008. The interventions have included:

  • Director including the meaning of modern day equality in her road shows (staff communications sessions across county) and starting a cultural change to enable people to embrace its meaning in a modern age.
  • A Directorate Equality and Diversity Conference (held in July 2007) involving all managers. Appendix E.
  • Inclusion of discussions around monitoring and in particular sexuality in the mandatory training workshop, run by our equality partners (AWAZ, CDN and Gay Cumbria).
  • Specific discussions with customer service advisors who will be undertaking initial monitoring.
  • Corporate guidance developed explaining the benefits and methodology of monitoring - Appendix F.
  • Electronic systems enabled to include a sexuality field

Fundamentally we are seeing a shift in attitudes to one which recognises that there are ways of approaching sexuality monitoring in a constructive way and secondly a recognition that if care packages are to be developed with individual choice at their centre, then engaging in discussions across the equality strands is vital.

It is recognised that sexuality will continue to be a challenge as some staff will have deep rooted socialised views, which may not change. Nevertheless, while at work they are expected to be wholly professional and this point has been emphasised by the Corporate Director in her communication with managers and staff and further emphasised in a forthcoming message in the directorate in house magazine – extract included at Appendix G.

2.2Equality Standard Indicator 3.2 - Consultation and Scrutiny

2.2.1Consultation with partners and stakeholders

The Cumbria Community Strategy (CS) was widely consulted on and the latestLocal Area Agreement (LAA)has been developed from the CS. Strategic responsibility for the Cumbria Community Strategy lies with the Cumbria Strategic Partnership (CSP) (a sub-regional partnership with five Local Strategic Partnerships sitting underneath).

The Cumbria Equality and Diversity Partnership is a sub-group of the CSP chaired by the County Council’s Equality and Cohesion Manager. Cumbria Equality and Diversity Partnership has been consulted on the development of the Community Strategy and is supporting the CSP in writing an EIA of the refresh of the CS.

Healthier Communities and Older People group have been consulted and been involved in the development of the LAA through the thematic group, which includes all the locality public health managers, who are representing all the Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs).

The whole draft Council Plan went out to all CSP partners and was published on the Cumbria County Council website in December 2007.

The County Council have a Scrutiny based system, which engages elected members in the development of the Council Plan. This involves seminars and workshops looking at the objectives in the plan across the Council themes. (Themes: Safer, wealthier, better, happier, healthier and greener).

Internally a service plan development workshop was held in February 2008 and the draft outcomes were subsequently shared with teams, partner organisations and other stakeholders for comment.

Strong working relationships were established during 2007, with our equality partners (AWAZ, CDN and Gay Cumbria), and an SLA is now in place for 2008/09, which has included funding from Adult Social Care. These relationships have grown over the last year. EIAs are now developed in conjunction with our partners rather than a previous approach, which had them consulted once policies were written and Equality Impact Assessments completed. We are now moving to a position where by partners will be consulted and involved at an early stage of policy development thereby ensuring that that a clear understandings of the equality issues are included in the writing of the policy.