Improving our service
Listening to you
We consult widely on policy and customer service issues. We believe that this is the best way to make sure we are meeting the needs of all parts of society.
So that we are hearing everyone's views, our consultation guidelines now include information on reaching ethnic minority communities.
Below are just some of the organisations that we consult on race issues nationally. There are many more at regional and local levels.
The Experience Corps - is an independent company set up to encourage people aged 50+ to do voluntary work in their communities. So far there are around 190,000 members, including 60,000 people from ethnic minority communities.
Ethnic Minority Business Forum - promotes the interests of small businesses owned by members of ethnic minorities. It advises Government on policy and passes on the views of its members.
The Partnerships Against Poverty - aims to help eliminate pensioner poverty and promote independence in retirement. It is co-ordinated by The Pension Service and has representatives from a wide range of organisations, including ethnic minority and disability groups.
Ethnic Media Group - is a specialist publisher of newspapers and magazines to Britain's Black and Asian communities. It also runs websites, career and recruitment exhibitions, and seminars.
Ethnic Minority Forum - brings together over 800 ethnic minority representative organisations each year to discuss how well we operate.
The DWP Ethnic Minority Working Party - includes over 90 organisations, 25 of which meet quarterly with the others communicating by correspondence.
Meeting your needs
So that we can target our services where they are needed most, we have developed the 'Geographical Information System'. This is a computer-based map that helps us to identify and serve different groups and communities.
We are also developing a monitoring system that will bring together customer information currently stored on different computer systems across the Department. This will help us to identify and target areas and communities that are using our services less than we would expect.
Thinking it through
By law we have to consider the effect of our policies and services on racial equality. To do this we carry out impact assessments. When running an 'impact assessment' we recommend that staff consider all aspects of diversity - so that our policies benefit all parts of society.
We developed this process with the Commission for Racial Equality and several other departments, and it is now being used across Government. We are supporting its use by running awareness sessions and training events for key managers - we ran sessions for 150 people between July and December 2004 alone.
We have also developed Equality Impact Assessment Workshops. Available on our internal website, these help train people to do race equality impact assessments.
Case Study - Spreading the word
We held an event for Senior Managers in January to promote the impact assessment framework. Managers who had used the framework, for example on the centralisation of benefit processing in Jobcentre Plus, gave very positive feedback. They praised the way it helped them to develop policies that were fair to staff and customers.
Speakers included the Department's Race Champion and a member of the Home Office Race Equality Unit. The Race Champion praised the event and said the impact assessment process should be an integral part of the way managers work.
An attendee of the event from the Home Office commented it was a great event to attend, very encouraging from a race impact assessment perspective, and from a personal perspective it was great to meet such a variety of people and see the work that DWP is doing.