Camden Council achieve Stonewalls Top 50, Gold award!

In September 2019 Camden entered the Stonewall Workplace equality Index, with the support of colleagues in our Rainbow Network. The index is the definitive benchmarking tool for employers to measure their progress on lesbian, gay, bi and trans inclusion.

On Wednesday 23 February 2022, we celebrated our fantastic achievement of getting into Stonewall's list of top 50 employers for LGBT inclusion. We ranked at 47^th place and top out of all local authority entrants. This is something we are really proud of!

We have also received Stonewall’s Gold Award for our efforts in making Camden a truly inclusive organisation for our LGBTQ+ colleagues.

Liz Ward, Director of Programmes at Stonewall (she/her) said: “We’re delighted for Camden Council who’s incredible work towards LGBTQ+ inclusion this year has seen them land at 47^th place in the Top 100.”

How we got into the Stonewall top 100 list

Here’s a summary of the actions we’ve taken over the last two years:

• Making our HR policies LGBTQ+ inclusive– including enhancing our Family Support Leave policy to represent all types of families and updated our Dignity at Work policy to be clear about what homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying and harassment looks like.
• Adding non-binary gender options to Oracle – recognising that not everyone's gender matches the sex they were assigned at birth, and that this may not be recognised by formal documentation. We have also added the option for staff to tell us if they identify as trans.
• Providing you with the option to add gender pronouns to your email signature– to help remove another barrier for our trans and non-binary communities, to help us get used to talking about pronouns and prevent mis-gendering.
• Continuing to share a diverse range of staff stories and celebrating important days for our LGBTQ+ communities– including Pride month; Black Pride; Trans Pride; LGBT+ History Month; International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia; Bi Visibility Day and Transgender Day of Remembrance.
• Updated our commitment to trans equality statement– to help ensure that our trans staff are treated with respect and that we provide a positive and supportive working environment. The statement also includes guidance for managers and colleagues whose team member is transitioning and links to resources that trans staff may wish to access in order to receive further support.
• Building our commitment to LGBTQ+ equality into our procurement processes – to help us work with businesses whose values align with our own, and to use our position of power to positively influence. We are beginning to ask businesses to demonstrate their commitment to LGBTQ+ equality before we procure them.
  ​​​​​​​
• Developing a truly inclusive approach to recruitment – we have reviewed where we advertise our jobs and have partnered with Stonewall and Proud employers.

Continuing our journey

Despite the progress we’ve made, we know that we still have work to do to become a truly inclusive employer for our LGBTQ+ colleagues. We will soon receive in depth feedback from Stonewall which we will use to develop a comprehensive plan of actions we need to take.

In the meantime, we are working on:

• In depth interviews with LGBTQ+ staff – to get a better understanding of experience and barriers,
• Reporting discrimination - to understand what changes we need to make to create safe, trustworthy routes for reporting discrimination,
• Toilet provision – working towards introducing gender neutral toilets into our buildings.