For us, equality is about local people having fair access to our services, people from all groups feeling at home in our teams, and our staff/customers knowing we'd support them if they faced discrimination. In a recent survey we carried out in Autumn 2020, some customers felt confident that we live these values, but others were not. We want these scores to be higher and know we have much more to do - but it’s an important for us to understand what is working and what isn't, so we can take practical steps to move forward.

The results showed:

• 68% agreed that B3Living staff treat them with respect.
• 54% feel comfortable around their neighbours.
• 45% feel confident that B3Living would support them if they experienced hate harassment.

So, what we did...

• We’re rolling out customer service and diversity and inclusion training for all staff this year. These interactive training sessions will talk about the importance of customer service, treating people as individuals, showing respect and trying to provide a flexible service for people’s different circumstances.
• We are providing refresher training for staff on recording customer disabilities and any additional requirements accurately and making sure this is checked before calling our customers.
• We have strengthened our Anti-Social Behaviour team. We know that 2020-21 has been a difficult, especially when customers have been at home all the time. We have also published information on what our Neighbourhood team can and can’t do which you can find here.
• We are working with the Broxbourne Society of Caribbeans and Africans (SOCA), the local police, Catalyst Housing and the Hertfordshire Equality Council to investigate the levels of racism in the borough so that this can shape the work that we and other local organisations do.
• We have launched our Customer Community to allow our customers to have more say in how we communicate and deliver our services, making sure it is inclusive for all. You can join our Customer Community here.
• We have communicated more about our partnership with J9 and how we are a third party hate crime reporting centre. This means that anyone can report hate crime or hate incidents to us, regardless of whether they live in one of our properties or not, and we can help you to access support.
• We are recruiting new members to our board, welcoming those from underrepresented groups such as the black and minority ethnic community, people with disabilities, the LGBT+ community and all people from different backgrounds to help support with our diversity decision making and to more widely represent our community and staff.
• We are using interpreters when needed (Inc. e.g. British Sign Language) and offer translations or transcripts of our key policy documents, tenancy agreements and wider communications if needed.
• We are encouraging more customers to update their language/print preferences via our myB3Living app so we can tailor our communications and provide additional support where required.
• We are actively engaging with other housing associations and diversity groups such as the Housing Diversity Network and Housing Quality Network, in order to keep up to date with changes and new initiatives around diversity and inclusion.
• We have set up an Equality and Diversity steering group alongside a group of Customer Ethos Champions who are working towards embedding a strong customer ethos amongst our staff.