This is Anne McCubbin here to talk with Claire Richards and Douglas Black about our report The Impact of the race equality duty on council services. Claire, first of all, what does this report look at?

Our report’s called The Impact of the race equality duty on council services. By that we really wanted to find out whether council services are aware of all sections of the communities they serve, including minority ethnic communities, and whether they’re taking account of these diverse needs when they’re planning and delivering services.

The race equality duty is really designed to promote race equality and good race relations. Councils should be able to use the arrangements they already have in place to do this.

We looked at race equality partly because the duty has been introduced since 2002, so there should be some signs of progress. But we also looked at it as an illustration of how councils are approaching their equality duties in general, such as their gender and disability duties. So we hope that where we’ve identified some improvement areas councils will be able to apply these lessons more widely to all equality aspects of their work.

So Douglas, what did you find?

Overall councils have done quite a bit of work to establish policies and processes and to formalise arrangements but what’s lacking is for them to feed through into the way that services are delivered day to day for a whole range of people in minority ethnic communities.

Now that’s not to say that some good things aren’t happening. There are good things happening in individual services, in libraries for instance we found publications being ordered in a whole range of Eastern European languages and councils doing good work through libraries to signpost immigrants to services within the councils and elsewhere. 

But where services have developed to cater for minority ethnic communities it’s often because staff in individual services have taken the initiative themselves, rather than because there’s been a corporate initiative which has cascaded at all levels through the organisation to the frontline.

As part of our work we did interview quite a lot of people through focus groups from people from minority ethnic communities to see what they thought of council services. By and large they were fairly happy with the way the council is organised, but people did tell us that councils need to do much more to develop an understanding of the needs of individual communities.

So what can councils do to make improvements here?

Councils need to get better at delivering services for people in ethnic minority communities. To do this they need strong leadership from the top to give the whole organisation with the importance of race equality, and other equality duties. 

They need better data on the communities that they’re serving, knowing how many people, what their different needs are, smarter approaches to consultation so that they genuinely understand what people need. They then need to feed that information back into a set of corporate priorities, which reconcile all sorts of competing demands on resources, and services that are fine-tuned to the needs of the different communities overall.

So Claire, Douglas has mentioned different things councils can do to make improvements. What will the benefits be?

If councils improve their performance on race equality they’ll be in a stronger position to deliver benefits to minority ethnic communities. They’ll be able to engage more effectively with them and, as a result, they’ll be able to deliver services which are more appropriate.

There should be more informed decision making and better targeted policies. 

It’s really about councils knowing all sections of their community and having good management practices in place so they can respond to these needs. Everybody stands to benefit from this approach.

Also councils themselves stand to see some benefits. Council staff should be more confident and able to respond to people and their needs and the council will also become a more attractive employer and attract the best candidates for the jobs.

Finally Claire, how will you follow up the study? What happens next?

Progress by councils in response to our report will be tracked through our audits of Best Value and community planning and by our local audit teams in each council.

Audit Scotland also looks at equalities in general when it does performance audit work, its national studies and the SPIs. (By SPIs I mean the statistics we gather on councils’ performance.) In addition we’ll be liaising with the national bodies on equalities, for example the Scottish Government and the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Claire and Douglas, thank you very much.