Equality & Fairness Report 2020 Fairness Annual Report 2020 | Page 59

Accord Equality & Fairness Report 2020 Locality Based Working Community is at the heart of what we do and all the Directorates within Accord have been working to deliver our pro-active locality working model. This is supported by our Digital Inclusion strategy and the roll-out of technology and upgraded website and “Chat-bot” features to enhance our service offering and mean we can truly work from anywhere and be more responsive to our customers, tailoring services to their needs, being inclusive and impactful to the communities we serve Case study Birmingham & Coventry Team. We hold the principles of equality and inclusion at the heart of everything that we do. We are committed to developing services and housing provisions which are representative and reflective of the communities that we serve. The Accord Way - Respectful According to the 2001 Census, Birmingham is more ethnically diverse than London. It was confirmed that 19.5% of the people of Birmingham were Asian, 6.1% were Black and 2.5% were mixed race. In Coventry, 16.3% of the population are from Asian/Asian British background and 5.5% were Black. In order to best serve our customers, eight of our community housing officers and support staff based in the Birmingham & Coventry Locality are from Asian and / or East Asian background with two members of staff being black and three members of staff being white. The teams speaks a range of community languages and we have two female housing officers who able specifically able to engage with female customers who prefer to deal with women-only staff. We have seen some excellent benefits of diverse workforce in the Birmingham & Coventry Locality. We are able to engage fully with our customers by speaking to them using their own languages. It also brings a variety of different views, perceptions and concepts when reviewing policies and procedures enabling us to be more creative and innovative with our decision making 57