How We Did It: Using our equalities strategy to address power imbalances between council and communities
Creating a strategy that is shaped by frontline services as well as those accessing them is vital for local authorities.
We put Head of Strategy and Community Participation Hal Khanom in our ‘How We Did It’ hot seat to hear how the London Borough of Barnet has developed its equalities strategy, Towards A Fair Barnet. Hal tells us how the council arrived at the strategy, how it is being embedded, and how the council is working with residents to ensure impact for all.
Interview highlights
On the context from which the strategy emerged:
We’re one of the few boroughs in London with one foot facing towards inner London and the other facing out to the home counties, and that brings with it a diversity of needs we are responding to. Part of the borough is adjacent to really dense urban areas like Camden, for example, and then others border really suburban areas in Hertfordshire. That kind of diversity of geography or topography is really key to understanding some of our inequalities challenges. We’re also growing really quickly and we’re the second largest borough by population, in fact one of the wards in Colindale is the second fastest growing by population after the Olympic Park in Stratford.
I did a bit of Googling before this and apparently we have more people by population than Oxford, Cambridge, Sunderland or Newcastle. That’s the scale of the inequalities challenges that we have within our borough, where some areas like Colindale and Burnt Oak are high on levels of deprivation, others like Woodside Park are amongst the most affluent, and then there are pockets of deprivation hidden amongst wealth.
We realised that we had to dig into those groups who were feeling less connected and more disempowered, and try and strengthen and deepen those relationships.
We’re also really diverse: 43% of our residents are from outside of the UK. We have the largest Jewish community in the UK, and we have a sizeable Iranian diaspora. Both the diverse geography and diverse population make our inequalities challenges complex and difficult to address unless you start to really dig into each of these groups to understand what their genuine experiences are.
We ran some residents’ perception surveys and about 30% of the people who responded said they didn’t feel informed about what the council does. A further fifth said they didn’t feel we were trustworthy. That was really hard to take. Usually when we hear those sorts of things, we conclude the overarching headline is actually very positive. The majority are really happy with us. But we started to say actually, look at the minority here. This is really important. We realised that we had to dig into those groups who were feeling less connected and more disempowered, and try and strengthen and deepen those relationships.
On the roots of the strategy:
This is our opportunity to shift the council from a lens around equality of access to equity of access and opportunities.
Our new corporate plan introduced the theme of caring – caring for people, caring for our places, caring for the planet. We use the fairness roadmap to tell us how to do that. How do you care for people if you’re not thinking about equity through it? This is our opportunity to shift the council from a lens around equality of access to equity of access and opportunities.
There are three objectives within this roadmap; one is around understanding the whole person, and that’s introducing an intersectional lens and a more structural view of inequalities. The second is about understanding and tackling the place-based causes of inequality, and the third is looking to the horizon and supporting a just transition to net zero.
Those three things sound quite simple, but in practice, they’re hard to achieve. If you think about being person centred, there’s a risk that can end up being reduced to something fluffy or tick boxy. We didn’t want it to just mean that we make our decisions and then just check that people are happy with what we’ve already decided. For us, it’s about both moving from an individual issue lens to a structural one and it’s about relating to residents and their experiences in the round, then using that to cocreate solutions where we can.
We walked into this knowing that money was really tight. But we felt that even with money being tight, we could make strides towards a fairer borough and fairer outcomes. Instead of just injecting a load more cash into the existing things that we were doing for equalities, we decided to change the way that we do things – the way that we work as a council directly and as a convener with our partners.
On starting with people:
Often we start with insight and what the data tells us. Here we started with people and local intelligence. Once we found out what residents’ views were, their feelings about our services and about their local area, we dug deeper and became more qualitative.
Time and time again, we kept hearing about power and privilege, how people feel marginalised by systems
We looked in depth at people’s lives, their identities, how they feel the different elements of their lives interact to create multiple disadvantage. Time and time again, we kept hearing about power and privilege, how people feel marginalised by systems that uphold power and privilege.
And that’s not something we’d really thought about as a council before. Predominantly we’d focused on people accessing our services and how you treat an individual, rather than broader systemic issues.
Because it was a new concept for us, we started using Sylvia Duckworth’s ‘The Wheel of Power, Privilege and Marginalisation’ as a way of opening up new conversations. It’s a helpful visual guide to better understand intersectionality and marginalisation.
On meeting residents’ needs:
People didn’t relate to the term EDI; they preferred the term fairness
We worked with lots of different groups crossing all nine of the protected characteristics. Through this engagement process, we learned that people weren’t just concerned about big ticket items. There were some, like exclusion of Black boys in school and maternal health outcomes, but we also heard about things like language. People didn’t relate to the term EDI; they preferred the term fairness, which is how we ended up talking about fairness, community, belonging, togetherness, access, representation, and respect.
There was another big piece of work happening concurrently, and that was our internal disproportionality reviews. We were not just relying on residents to tell us what they wanted. We were committed to reviewing our services and data and seeing whether or not there was evidence of disproportionate access or outcomes. And that showed up quite a lot of things for us. In some places we could see that certain groups weren’t accessing services as much, and in other areas the outcomes were disproportionate. And we identified a lot of data gaps, which meant we couldn’t really say whether we were recreating any inequalities ourselves or not.
We brought together the lived experience, the outcomes evidence and the disproportionality reviews and used that to design a roadmap that would build on our strengths and address some of the emerging challenges.
On getting buy-in across the council:
This roadmap isn’t just a policy document. It’s really a vision for cultural change – that’s what it’s setting out. For one thing it’s led by my team, the strategy and community participation team, rather than from only a HR perspective. I think that’s quite an important distinction.
The corporate level sponsor is the Executive Director of Children and Family Services. So already you’ve got two different areas coming together. We’re reporting to someone other than our own Director. And I think that’s quite an important way of building in that buy in at the very top across the leadership.
To deliver the corporate plan you have to do equalities properly. That makes it everybody’s business and not just a strategy designed by one service.
Additionally, we made this the guidance towards the corporate plan. The corporate plan is about caring for people, our places and the planet. This roadmap explains what each of these mean through an equity lens – it explains how we care. By linking it so clearly to the corporate plan, we’re saying that to deliver the plan you have to do equalities properly. That makes it everybody’s business and not just a strategy designed by one service.
We called it a roadmap on purpose because we didn’t want it to feel like just another strategy that has an end date. We created a roadmap because we’re on a journey to be a fairer borough.
On how the roadmap is changing how the council operates:
One of the groups that had been feeling the most dissatisfied and disempowered was people with disabilities. We were starting from a position of very low trust. And so we did a number of things to try and deepen our understanding of disabled people’s lives. We started with some ethnographic research that we undertook with Habitus. They worked really closely with people with disabilities and shared a set of recommendations that we incorporated into the roadmap.
We then went more in depth into working with our deaf and hard of hearing residents to understand the challenges and barriers they faced when accessing council services. That was in partnership with London Councils and Neighbourly Lab. The main barrier that people shared was a lack of deaf awareness within the council; us not being aware, not recognising, or really understanding people’s experiences or lived realities. Since then, we’ve done a lot to try and change that. We’ve had training sessions from the Jewish Deaf Association for our frontline and resident-facing services, we have improved our online information and communications, and we’re launching a new deaf awareness hub online.
We’re now actively shining a light on the things people say they care about.
We’re also reporting on things in a more transparent way. Where previously residents would have to look for data in the depths of reports, now they can easily get their hands on it through our central equality strategy updates. We’re now actively shining a light on the things people say they care about.
On what’s next:
Our equalities impact assessments have been quite traditional so we’re reviewing that. Now that we have a new approach, we need to change how we’re assessing impact, going beyond the legal obligation and starting to think about people with care experience, social and economic deprivation and how we review impact in an intersectional way.
We need to provide guidance and support to staff members across different services to be able to do that. So we’ve got a couple of test cases that we’re going to try a new approach with over the coming months, including our long term transport strategy, which we will test this on. We’ll see how that works, refine it, and hopefully get to something that’s more effective.
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