Public Sector Equality Duty: Ensuring the Inspectorate is an inclusive place to work
The Planning Inspectorate is committed to workforce equality, diversity and inclusion, and ensuring we comply with section 149 of the Equality Act.
In our employee equality objectives 2020 - 2025, we have pledged to being an inclusive place to work where employees feel trusted, respected and confident. These objectives are to:
- embed an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) approach to all our work
- build upon our excellent approach to promote wellbeing at work
- ensure that we offer a fair deal to our people.
To achieve our objectives, we have set ourselves 5 key priorities that we are committed to achieving over the next 5 years.
- Continued analysis and understanding of our workforce diversity
- Reducing the Gender Pay Gap
- Developing an inclusive culture
- Attracting, selecting and retaining our talented and diverse workforce
- Implementing Outreach programmes
Using data to target our actions
In November 2021 we published our workforce diversity data. This insight has helped us to identify and understand disparities in outcome and under-representation, and enabled us to target our actions to address these issues.
For example, we identified that the proportion of women, disabled colleagues and Black, Asian and minority ethnic colleagues decreased as the seniority of the role increased
The data also showed that newer staff are less likely to declare their protected characteristics. We continue to encourage all employees to declare their diversity details so that we can improve the quality of our data and ensure we are inclusive in our workforce measures. We have a senior champion who is helping to promote the reasons why it is important for employees to make this declaration.
Alongside our evidence-based approach, we are undertaking a review of policies to ensure the language is inclusive, and we have signed up to outreach opportunities such as 10,000 Black Interns.
Support for disabled colleagues
We are a member of the government’s voluntary Disability Confident employer scheme. This means we offer guaranteed interviews for candidates who declare a disability and meet the minimum criteria.
We support disabled colleagues with our ‘workplace adjustment passport’, which has 3 main functions, to:
- support conversations between an employee and their line manager about a disability, health condition or gender reassignment and any workplace adjustments that might need to be made
- act as a record of that conversation and of the adjustments agreed
- act as a record of any adjustment made for individuals as supportive measures.
This year we have also focused on improving our attraction and recruitment processes to make them more inclusive.
Equality, diversity and inclusion highlights
Some of the EDI actions we’ve taken as an organisation include:
- aspirational goals to improve representation rates throughout the Inspectorate
- increased the availability of our diversity data to inform decision-making
- added Equality Impact Assessments as a mandatory part of our policy and project development procedures
- continued to invest resources in our employee networks, providing a senior sponsor for each network, a budget and time allowance to lead the networks
- introduced gender-balanced interview panels by default
- signed the Race at Work charter and submitted the Stonewall Workplace Equality index for the first time in 2021
- celebrated National Inclusion week and Black History Month, as well as other important days throughout the year by sharing personal insights and interesting information with employees
- ensured our senior leaders have diversity and inclusion goals, encouraging them to lead on aspects of diversity and inclusion they are interested in.
We have made good progress towards treating all employees fairly and making the Inspectorate a great place to work. We will continue to work to achieve these aims.