Equality Data – Have you given us your data?
What is Equality Data?
The Council collects data on ethnicity, race, religion, marital status, disability, sex, sexuality and gender reassignment status - these are all protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010 and the data is collected during the recruitment process.
Why do we collect it?
The Council has a duty as a service provider to ensure that everyone, regardless of their protected characteristics, has access to the same services. As an employer, the Council also has to make sure that its recruitment processes and employment practices are fair, nobody is put at a disadvantage because of any protected characteristic, and that it considers how its employees can do their jobs effectively.
Examples of these duties
The Council has a duty to make reasonable adjustments for its service users and its employees. The council has to think ahead of what can be done to ensure that everyone can access its services and that its employees can do their work effectively.
It also has a duty to ensure that everyone is paid the same for the same job regardless of sex, race or disability. If there’s a difference between what women are paid and what men are paid, for example, that’s a gender pay gap. Differences between people of different race is the ethnicity pay gap and differences as a result of long-term health issues is the disability pay gap.
In order to show to what extent, the Council is successful in meeting these duties, it has to publish data regularly. When it comes to service delivery these are published in the Council’s Equality Outcomes. Information about its recruitment practices and pay gaps are published in the annual Mainstreaming Report.
Do we really have to answer them?
Strictly speaking, no. There’s no law that says we have to answer these questions. You may be asking what has my race, religion, disability, sex, age, sexual orientation, gender identity to do with Moray Council?
Keeping your equalities information up to date will help the council to ensure there’s no direct or indirect discrimination in its policies and practices.
The Challenge
One of the difficulties in meeting these duties is that a large number of people do not fill in the equality data. This problem is not unique to Moray Council. It’s a recognised issue across all local authorities. As we said, people don’t have to share information about their protected characteristics, but doing so gives the Council an opportunity to deal with inequality more effectively, so we really encourage you to make sure your data is up to date.
Confidentiality
There are strict laws about what information authorities can collect and how to use them. Authorities can only collect data for specific lawful purposes not, for example, because it would be nice to know. It can store data only for a limited time.
Only people involved in data processing can see the full data
Data can only be published if employees are completely anonymous. This means that if there is only a limited number of employees who share a particular characteristic the Council cannot publish this information, even if it is done anonymously. This is due to an increased risk of an individual being identified from small data sets.
What can you do?
All employees are asked to complete their equality data when they join the council and to update your records should your personal circumstances change. This is completed by you via the Employee Self-Serve Portal. You use this portal to add your bank details too, so all the information is in the same place.
Updating your information is straight forward. All Moray Council employees have 24/7 access to the fully secure easy-to-use Employee Self Service portal (ESS). Your username and password will have been emailed out to you by the Payroll department when you started, but if you need help resetting it please get in touch with Payroll at payroll@moray.gov.uk
Information on how to launch the ESS portal is available on Interchange including how to access the portal and find your way round it. Your profile area of the portal holds all the personal data you’ve shared. You should review this regularly to ensure it remains up to date.
We encourage you to have a look at your data now to make sure it is accurate and by doing so, you’ll help the Council understand the make-up of our workforce and assess more accurately that we are meeting our equality obligations.