Equality, monitoring and data

When we ask you to provide information about yourself in an equality monitoring form, we are doing this so we can ensure that we deliver our services fairly and meet your needs. This is called monitoring. What you tell us about yourself helps us to meet our statutory duties under the Equality Act 2010 by helping us eliminate discrimination, harassment and victimisation, promote equality of opportunity and foster good relations between people who share a protected characteristic and those who do not.

Although you provide us with personal details on forms, it is only sections on age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion and belief, sex and sexual orientation (known as protected characteristics). that we use for monitoring and when we process this information, we do so within strict laws to make sure that we protect the information we collect and deal with it responsibly. Further information about how we do this can be found here.

When you give information about protected characteristics, it will only be used to make things better. When we use protected characteristic data, we won’t know it’s you because it will be processed separately from the data that identifies you (for example your name) and it will be used for statistical monitoring purposes only.

Statistical monitoring helps us to understand any barriers and take actions to ensure that we make adjustments to assist anyone with protected characteristics to overcome these barriers. We hope by doing this it will improve our processes. It helps us to plan improvements to our policies and services in relation to people with these protected characteristics. Without monitoring, it is hard to know whether our policies and services are being delivered fairly or meeting the diverse needs that people have.

An example of how we could use monitoring information

If the monitoring data shows there are lower numbers of successful applications for our staff or volunteer roles from people reporting a protective characteristic, we are able to investigate and identify what barriers might be preventing those people from being successful in their applications and to address them. For example, a pre-recruitment programme could assist people to gain recruitment skills such as completing application forms, interview techniques and understanding our organisation.

If you would like this information in an alternative language or format, please contact us.