WELCOME
from the Chair and Group Chief Executive
At the Accord Group, we understand that as a large housing and care provider we have a responsibility to our communities, colleagues and customers to ensure the standards we set meet or exceed expectations. We are seen as community anchors with an influential and long-term stake in places where we work. We know and appreciate the role we play in shaping peoples’ life chances. We now collectively own almost 14,000 homes and provide care across the Midlands and the north of England to more than 100,000 customers. With a wide-ranging portfolio of services, our customer base and colleague profile are diverse. This is why we pride ourselves on our innovative and forward-thinking approach to ensure we promote, support and create opportunities for people from all types of backgrounds to engage, live and contribute to a cohesive community. This year our Fairness annual report details our colleague, customer and community profile data and highlights our work to date to ensure we positively challenge prejudice and promote fairness, equality and diversity in every aspect of our work.
Akshay Parikh Chair
Chris Handy Group Chief Executive
FAIRNESS AT WORK The Accord Group’s vision is to be a strong, diverse group which makes the most of its individual and combined strengths to deliver positive outcomes to improve life chances for its customers and the wider communities in which it serves. This vision provides customers, colleagues and stakeholders with a clear understanding of what is important to the Group. The Accord Group’s Fairness strategy sets out strategic objectives and the activities required to achieve these goals and support the Group’s vision. The Group believes that diverse organisations are more productive and it appreciates the value of operating in a fair, healthy and happy environment. The Group has identified four key drivers for investing in a Fairness strategy:
1
Better business
2
Legal
3
Moral
4
Personal
Knowing who its customers and colleagues are helps the Group develop services and tailor solutions to ever-changing needs to ensure it is able to deliver high quality services that people want.
The Equality Act 2010 brought together a range of different anti-discrimination legislation, to offer protection to people who share nine protected characteristics. The Group must, as a minimum, have due regard to the need to eliminate unlawful discrimination and harassment.
The Accord Group has a long-standing commitment to fairness and social justice. The ethos of the Group means it prides itself on celebrating diversity and promoting equality of opportunity for all.
The Group respects and understands that human beings deserve to be treated with dignity and that people perform better when they can be themselves.
FAIRNESS FOR STAKEHOLDERS Colleagues
Stonewall Diversity Champion
The Accord Group continues to be a major employer with c3,350 employees across the Midlands and 51 per cent of the Group’s turnover being directly invested into local communities through employment.
Stonewall’s Diversity Champions programme is Britain’s leading best-practice employers’ forum for sexual orientation and gender identity equality, diversity and inclusion.
As a service organisation, the Group relies on its people to deliver customer experiences, protect and promote positive reputations and ultimately support, care for, house and advise customers and communities to their very best of their ability. The Group recognises that ensuring their workplace is fair and a good place to work helps employees deliver excellent customer service. Several measures are in place to educate, inform and promote fairness at work.
Strategy themes The Group’s strategy stretches beyond the nine protected characteristics and understands that fairness also includes respecting peoples’ individual values and beliefs, utilising profiling data to drive business decisions, promotion and action around a positive work/life balance, training and learning opportunities, job creation and job satisfaction and community engagement and citizenship. With this approach, Fairness is a theme that cuts across many aspects of work – ensuring colleagues are aware of the commitments but also the importance of profiling, equality and diversity.
Positive about disability The ‘two ticks’ Positive about Disability symbol is awarded by Jobcentre Plus to employers who have made commitments to employ, retain and develop the abilities of disabled staff. By signing up to the ‘two ticks’ symbol the Group has agreed to five commitments. These include interviewing all disabled applicants who meet the minimum criteria for a job vacancy, to make every effort when employees become disabled to allow them to stay in employment and to take action to ensure that all employees develop the appropriate level of disability awareness needed to make these commitments work.
As a Champion, the Group benefits from a range of services. There is a dedicated point of contact who has a wealth of knowledge of best practice in the housing sector and a policy review service to ensure the organisation’s policies are inclusive. In addition, the Group receives invitations to seminars and other networking forums to learn from others and share best practice.
Awareness events and activities The Group has a calendar of events to raise awareness of key topics over the year. This year, events have included Dementia Awareness Week, honour crime and domestic violence awareness raising and training and supporting Pride.
Employee engagement In 2014, the Group undertook an employee engagement survey, administered by Best Companies, about how they feel about their workplace environment and how engaged they feel. Every member of staff was asked a series of questions about their job, their pay, their manager and their work/life balance. Some key findings from the survey showed that 70 per cent of people feel their manager talks openly and honestly with them and 63 per cent of people feel they get regular appreciation from their manager. Following the survey, the Group is now developing an employee and manager charter in consultation with colleagues, to list some key commitments everyone can expect to see at work. The charter will clearly communicate the Accord Group’s approach to providing a happy, safe and fair place to work. The Accord Group is also committed to ensuring that its Boards represent the people within the company and the community. Work is underway to extend the data it has on its Boards.
AGE Customers†
Colleagues°
6%
0-24
21%
25-34
20% 35-44 21%
45-54
15%
55-64
Community*
11%
0-24
21%
25-34
20%
35-44
29%
15% 65+ 2% Unknown
33% 0-24
45-54
16% 55-64 3% 65+
13%
25-34
14%
35-44
13%
45-54
11%
55-64
16%
65+
DISABILITY Customers†
Colleagues°
16%
82%
2%
3%
Yes
Yes
46%
No
51%
Unknown
81%
Activity unaffected
No
9%
Activity limited a lot
10%
Unknown
General needs only
†
Community*
Activity limited a little
°Not including Direct Health
*Source: 2011 Census, Office for National Statistics, West Midlands region
RACE Customers†
Colleagues°
62%
Community*
72%
White
6% Mixed 13% Asian 13% Black 4% Other 2% Unknown
83%
White
2% Mixed 11% Asian 13% Black 1% Other 1% Unknown
White
2% Mixed 11% Asian 3% Black 1% Other
GENDER Customers†
Colleagues°
40%
59% 1%
22%
Male
78%
Female
Male
49%
Male
51%
Female
Female
Unknown
General needs only
†
Community*
°Not including Direct Health
*Source: 2011 Census, Office for National Statistics West Midlands region
SEXUAL ORIENTATION Customers†
Colleagues°
64%
Community*
72%
Heterosexual
Heterosexual
93% 1% Gay 9% Unknown
1%
26%
38%
Undisclosed
Heterosexual
Gay
1.5% Gay 5% Undisclosed 0.5% Other
Unknown
RELIGIOUS BELIEF Customers†
Colleagues°
19% None
27% None
35% Christian
34% Christian
1% Buddhist 1.5% Hindu 0.5% Jewish 5% Muslim 3% Sikh 2% Other 35% Unknown
1% Hindu 11% Muslim 1% Sikh 3% Other 17% Undisclosed 6% Unknown
General needs only
†
Community*
°Not including Direct Health
21% None 58% Christian 0.4% Buddhist 2% Hindu 0.1% Jewish 8% Muslim 4% Sikh 0.5% Other 6% Unknown
*Source: 2011 Census, Office for National Statistics West Midlands region
Customers The Accord Group serves around 100,000 customers and members of the community from a range of backgrounds. In order to ensure services can be accessed fairly, a range of robust policies and procedures are in place, the development of which includes impact assessments.
Data capture The Group reports to their Boards annually on incidents of anti-social behaviour, hate crime and harassment, complaints and safeguarding. However, the Group does not comprehensively analyse the reports by the protected characteristics – this is something that will feed into future action planning to ensure any correlations between these issues and age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation. Work to ensure data is captured, up-to-date and accurate is a challenge for all housing associations, however, the Group has recently invested in an insight and intelligence resource that will support the capture and analysis of this data.
Engagement Two-way feedback and communication with customers offers the Group opportunities to listen, learn and improve services, whilst customers are able to help shape the way it works. The Accord Group engages with customers in a number of ways to ensure as many people as possible have a range of opportunities to share their ideas and opinions. These include customer events and conferences, telephone and postal surveys, scrutiny panels, forums and meetings, as well as social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter. By offering a wide range of channels, customers have more choice in the way in which they choose to engage with the Group. The launch of the customer portal this year introduces an additional way to contact the Group, as well as offering customers more control of updating their details, accessing their rent account and reporting repairs.
Our Customer Conference at The Bond, Birmingham. September 2015
Official opening of Beechdale, Walsall, and the launch of its TMO. August 2015
Accessibility Community is at the heart of what the Accord Group does, which is why local offices and ‘on the patch’ housing officers are essential to their local ethos. In 2014, the Group carried out specialist Equality Act Audit training to enable colleagues to complete access audits. Further audits are scheduled to be rolled out later this year. Reports will be produced that take account of operational considerations and building constraints, as well as recommending reasonable adjustments to ensure safe access for people. In our existing homes, we have 22 cases currently on our aids and adaptations list which are requested following OT referrals together with housing colleagues who provided matches to existing adapted properties, ensuring homes are fit for purpose for our customers’ individual and specific needs.
Improving our assets The whole focus of our ERDF trials is to make it less expensive for customers to heat and feel comfortable in their homes. We know that under heated homes have an impact on health, ability to work and educational attainment. Customers are struggling to heat properties with resulting significant issues of damp due to large areas of external wall and high ceilings This work is beneficial to all customers regardless of their background and project customers and households we are working with include: l
Female headed households
l
Children with recognised medical conditions
l
Households where English is not the first language or is not spoken at all by some customers
l
Older customers
l
Customers struggling to heat properties with resulting significant issues of damp due to large areas of external wall and high ceilings
l
Customers not in employment.
The works have been designed to minimise the need for customers to manage heating controls so the energy efficiencies can be maximised for their circumstances. We have positively included in proposals the opportunity for local/new SMEs to be able to tender for our works and have been successful in awarding a number of contracts to small companies who would not normally have secured contracts due to lack of three years accounts or the ability to demonstrate cash flow to manage large contracts.
Aims for the future For 50 years the Accord Group has been providing choice, support and opportunity for local people and communities. Going forwards, the Group needs to continue to demonstrate it knows its customers and communities and understands their backgrounds, needs, aspirations and challenges in order to develop and shape services. The following areas will support this continuous improvement at the Accord Group this year:
Area
Task Aligning the format of our data Group wide to match the Census for a better understanding of how colleagues and customers compare to UK / West Midlands figures.
Profiling
Target date 31 March 2016
Encourage greater sharing of personal characteristics of all colleagues through My View 2. Information about Heantun colleagues, for example, is very limited as they do not have access to the system. Increased awareness raising of the reasons why the Group needs to understand disability as the ‘unknown’ percentage amongst colleagues is high. Increased awareness raising of the reasons why the Group needs to improve its sexual orientation data and improve reporting levels. Introduction of transgender measures to ensure full inclusivity. Include data on protected characteristics of customers when capturing and reporting anti-social behaviour, hate crime and harassment, complaints and safeguarding in order to identify any trends that require action.
31 March 2016
Reporting Develop HR policies for domestic abuse and transition in the workplace and associated training and support for Managers.
30 September 2016
Policy development Reviewing the implications of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 and the Care Act 2014 for our business.
31 March 2016
Review schedule of access audits.
31 March 2016
Compliance*
Accessibility
*Legislative and Regulatory
The Group is also working to achieve the Chartered Institute of Housing’s 10 by 2020 diversity commitments. This includes:
Know the make-up of our communities and annually consider how we can improve the diversity of our board, leadership and staff teams. This will be aligned to the targets within the profiling workstream.
Compile diversity-related data on the composition of our Board, Executive team and total workforce and publish it in an accessible format in the annual report.
Challenge all staff (and external agencies) responsible for recruitment to ensure that all shortlists include appropriate candidates from under-represented groups.
Ensure staff members involved in recruitment have completed mandatory training to ensure fair recruitment processes.
Set an aspirational target for board/committee recruitment from under-represented groups to ensure that our governance structure is representative of the wider communities we work in.
Have in place succession and talent management strategies which reflect the principles of inclusion and diversity, so that all staff can succeed and progress, if they have the right skills and values.
Identify and provide appropriate mentoring and coaching opportunities for staff and board members – within our own organisation and/or with external agencies.
Make diversity training mandatory for all staff and use corporate communications and culture strategies to ensure diversity is embedded within our values.
Champion the business case for a diverse workforce and leadership – encourage our colleagues, peers and partners to sign up to the challenges.
Sign up and work towards the CIH Charter for Equality and Diversity.
178 Birmingham Road, West Bromwich, West Midlands, B70 6QG Telephone: 0300 111 7000 Email: customerfirst@accordgroup.org.uk Visit: accordgroup.org.uk Tweet: @theaccordgroup Like: facebook.com/accordgroup Watch: youtube.com/theaccordgroup