Liverpool City Council - Achievements in 2005/06

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• Achievements in 2005/06

Our achievements in 2005/06

During the past 12 months we have continued to work on improving our services. We have done this to meet the needs of our diverse customers and communities. We have worked hard to make further improvements to the accessibility of our services by increasing the services available through our call-centre. 

For example, we have introduced Careline. This is a 24-hour service which allows our customers easier access to social workers and specialist advice on social care issues. As this service is provided through the call-centre, it means that customers can get help and advice over the telephone.

Our customer contact provision via the call-centre and one stop shops has been recognised nationally, and we are a leading example to other authorities.   

Other equality initiatives include:

• the provision of a language line on the racial incidents - hotlines to make this service accessible to people who have English as a second language
  
  
• the Community Safety team appointing a community cohesion officer - to work with partners to develop strategies to effectively deal with hate crime incidents across the city
  
  
• the development of a project to give additional support to Black minority ethnic parents whose children have special educational needs
  
  
• investing in bi-lingual teaching assistants to support children in schools who have English as a second language
  
  
• developing the 'Disabled Go' web site was launched in April 2006. This site has accessibility information on over a 1.000 venues in Liverpool, including council offices, shops and leisure facilities, enabling Liverpool residents and visitors to find out if particular venues meet their accessibility needs 
  
  
• working with registered social landlords and the Black and racial minority network to develop the Liverpool Black and racial minorities housing strategy joint housing action plan. This joint initiative aims to meet the social housing needs of local Black and ethnic minority people and ensures we have a joined-up approach to developing sustainable communities
  
  
• establishing a corporate access group to ensure the city's built environment is accessible for disabled people and appointed a technical access officer to ensure that the city council is promoting inclusive design and access for all its citizens.    

During 2006/07 we will maintain the momentum of service improvements. This will be done through our suite of performance measures and targets and by integrating these within service, team and individual work programmes. 

We did not meet our principal equality target for 2005/06, that is, of reaching level 4 of the generic equality standard for local government. This was due to the lack of adequate customer monitoring systems to monitor service take-up by race, gender and disability.  

However, a vast amount of development work took place during 2005/06 and will continue during 2006/07 to improve our customer monitoring systems. This will place us in a strong position to achieve level 4 by the 31 October 2006, joining the other two local authorities in the country who have done so. 

As our schedule of performance indicators shows, we:

• met 53% of our equality targets
• achieved a national top 25% performance rating for 8 of our equality indicators, these were:
• • scoring 84% for our race equality scheme by meeting 16 of the 19 requirements
  • the number of black and racial minority staff we employ
  • the number of disabled staff we employ
  • the number of black and racial minority staff in the top 5% wage band    
• • the number of female staff in the top 5% wage band
  • 79% of our public buildings are accessible to disabled people 
  • for services that are accessible electronically
  • the percentage of statements of special educational need issued within target timetable         

View our progress against the actions we said we would do during 2005/06.


Downloadable version of this section of Appendix 3

Downloadable versions of the whole corporate performance plan, including explanations of symbols and a glossary, are available on the CPP downloads page.