Westminster Equalities Partnership – Background and future work
What is Westminster Equalities Partnership (WEP)?
The WEP is a partnership of the three key statutory partners, Voluntary Action Westminster, the Chair of the Westminster Community Network and an Independent Chair who work together to improve equality outcomes in Westminster.
Background
At the beginning of 2009 the Metropolitan Police, NHS Westminster and Westminster City Council pooled funding to develop the Westminster Equalities Partnership with the aim of developing a Westminster wide approach to equality and to act as a “Critical Friend” to the Westminster City Partnership to ensure that its priorities and decisions are informed by equality considerations and best practice.
The statutory partners agreed to appoint an independent Chair and after a recruitment process Shelagh Prosser was appointed as Chair in December 2008. Shelagh is an independent equality and diversity consultant with over 19 years experience of working on equality issues in employment and service delivery. Shelagh has worked with a wide range of public, private and third sector organisations and prior to becoming an independent consultant held senior equality and diversity posts at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, the BBC and London Buses Limited.
It was agreed to tender out to the voluntary sector to employ a policy manager to help implement the work priorities of the partnership. The tender was won by Voluntary Action Westminster in April 2009.
The Policy Manager, Oonagh Smyth was appointed in August 2009 and took up her post in October. Oonagh comes from the Northern Ireland Equality Commission where her most recent project was drafting a statutory Code of Practice on Disability Transport, which was approved by the Northern Ireland Assembly. Oonagh also trained a variety of public, private and voluntary sector organisations on equality and diversity and ran engagement exercises and consultations to ensure that the Commission was engaging with all sections of the community.
Once the Policy Manager was in post the Steering Group concentrated on developing an annual Workplan to shape the work of the WEP and help the WEP achieve its objectives.
Below is a summary of the WEP Workplan and its main objectives. Click on the objectives to go to the corresponding section in the Workplan. You may also look at the full WEP Workplan
The WEP Workplan
Objective 1 – To develop and promote the WEP
As WEP is relatively new one of the three objectives in the Workplan is to develop and promote the WEP. This will be done in a variety of ways, namely;
- By building up a list of experts, individuals or organisations that can be drawn on to elicit views, expertise, guidance and information on equalities issues pertaining to themes and issues identified by the Steering Group and/or its individual members in order to improve equalities outcomes in Westminster
by developing WEP’s communication strategy and methods of communication, such as the WEP website to ensure that the work and key messages of the WEP are visible and the WEP is transparent and accountable
by benchmarking with similar organisations to ensure that WEP is learning from best practice and constantly improving and developing
WEP will draft a statement of the current position of equality in Westminster to inform the workplan and gave a baseline upon which we can improve. WEP feels that such a statement or paper will help to identify current equality issues in Westminster and consequently identify potential priorities for the WCP and thematic networks as well as the WEP Steering Group partners.
Objective 2: Fulfil the role of a critical friend to WCP and the thematic networks
WEP’s primary role is to act as a critical friend to the WCP and the thematic networks. WEP’s role is to ensure that there is a strategic approach to equalities in Westminster and that equalities are considered during the development of strategies and priorities.
Therefore it is important that WEP sits in the most appropriate place within the LSP structure so that it can have influence and be effective. It is also important that WEP establishes and maintains relationships with WCP members and thematic networks to ensure that WEP influences decisions and helps to embed equality within the WCP structure.
Objective 2 seeks to establish WEP in an appropriate place within the WCP after the proposed restructure and to ensure that WEP establishes and maintains relationships with the WCP and the thematic networks so that WEP can be as effective as possible in its role as critical friend. This objective also details some of the ways in which the WEP may fulfil that critical friend role, for example by responding to consultations, encouraging a collaborative approach to equality among the WEP partners, highlighting shared data, priorities or difficulties for example. It also sets out the priorities that the WEP is going to focus on for the next year. These priorities include;
- Promoting a partnership approach to the Personalisation Agenda
- Promoting the economic inclusion of under-represented, disadvantaged and excluded groups
- Helping the partners to undertake the role of place shapers in a co-ordinated way to reduce inequalities in housing, ensure that the shared internal and external physical community space is not a barrier and effectively tackle community tensions and reduce hate crime particularly against [LGBT, disabled, BME] people
Objective 3: Ensure the effective running of the WEP steering group
This objective is an operational objective which sets out the actions required to ensure that the WEP runs effectively. This includes the operation of Steering Group meetings; contract monitoring; reporting, including the presentation of an annual report and monitoring and evaluating the WEP and its effectiveness.