At Cambridgeshire County Council we are committed to equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI), as set out in our EDI Strategy. We are dedicated to to fostering an inclusive, supportive and safe working environment that attracts and retains diverse people who feel valued, respected, and empowered.

Our EDI Strategy

Our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) strategy is a key cross-cutting strategy which will enable the council to achieve its vision and ambitions so that Cambridgeshire can become greener, fairer, and more caring in the ways that are most suitable to the variety of people, and diverse communities we serve. 

This strategy builds on the successes and learning from our 2018-2022 Single Equality Strategy and sets out our approach and objectives moving forward. Whilst we have made great progress to advance our EDI agenda, we must be open and honest about our journey, and we recognise that there is still a lot of work to do. We are truly committed to leading this work, reducing inequality, strengthening and developing good community relations, and challenging discrimination, we must take targeted action to deliver meaningful and sustainable change. 

To drive this work forward, the strategy sets out three themes:  

1. Our workforce: Foster an inclusive, supportive and safe working environment that attracts and retains diverse people who feel valued, respected, and empowered.  
2. Our communities: Further understand and work with our diverse communities across Cambridgeshire, developing local solutions which address the needs of our communities.  
3. Our services: Ensure people who use our services and residents have good quality public services that meet the diverse needs of our communities. 

A detailed action plan underpins each of these themes, setting out how we will achieve our equality objectives.

Disability Confident Employer  

We are a Disability Confident Employer (Level 2) which positively recognises the actions that we take to recruit, support and retain disabled people.   

We are proactive, supporting colleagues’ individual needs, including disability, neurodivergence, mental, physical and long-term health conditions.   Examples of how are supporting colleagues includes:  

• Providing an inclusive and accessible recruitment process, including offering an interview to disabled people who meet the minimum criteria for the job.   
• Supporting employees to manage their disabilities or health conditions through various ways including: a Wellbeing passport, reasonable adjustment guidance, support for applying to Access to Work and a Mental Health support service employer toolkit (Maximus).

Anti-racism

Cambridgeshire County Council is committed to becoming an anti-racist organisation and to delivering meaningful and sustainable change as an employer and a service provider to our diverse communities. To us, being anti-racist means actively identifying and opposing racism, being consciously and visibly anti-racist. We do not accept any forms of bullying, harassment, discrimination or any other unacceptable behaviours in our communities and workplace. We can, and must, do better and we have a responsibility to take action against all aspects of overt and systemic racism. 

As part of our journey to becoming anti-racist, we have formed an anti-racism steering group, the role of the group is to: 

• Discuss and generate ideas on how we can address individual and systemic forms of racism, suggest changes to eliminate racial bias and identify priorities for action. 
• Help to shape innovative approaches to empowering all colleagues to act, prevent racism and to challenge and/or speak out when it occurs. 
• Establish working groups to drive forward outcomes in specific areas.     
• Oversee the UNISON Anti-racism Charter commitment.

Our new values reflect the experiences and aspirations of colleagues, who were directly involved in shaping them, to be collaborative, accountable, respectful and, achieve excellence (CARE), values which all support a culture in which we act on discrimination in all its forms.

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Staff EDI Network – IDEAL  

The Council has an EDI Staff Network, Inclusion, Diversity, Equality for All (IDEAL) and peer support groups. IDEAL is a network for employees, workers, recognised trade unions and elected members.  

Its role is to:  

• Promote equality, diversity and inclusion within our workforce - Support networks that promote equality, diversity and inclusion for employees, workers, recognised trade unions and elected members.  
• Improve the diversity of our workforce to reflect the communities we serve as well as to promote and celebrate diversity across the Council. 
• Raising the profile of equality, diversity and inclusion through engaging with senior management and communication campaigns.  
• Working with partners to link with events and campaigns 

The peer support groups include: Neurodivergence, disability, LGBTQIA+ Peers, LGBTQIA+ Allies, Global Majority, Carers, Menopause Café (Unison).

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