Questions posed to the Leader of Liverpool City Council, 8th July 2009 - Q26

Question
Can the Leader say what Equality and Diversity training have each of the Chief Executive, Executive Director’s and Assistant Executive Director’s had since the publication of the Equalities Act in 2007, to update themselves on the new legislation?

Answer
For courses booked via i-learn (corporate training system) 2 AED’s have attended
Managing Equality and 1 has attended Disability Equality training.

Verbal supplementary
The answer to q11 tells us that around 30 senior staff (there are 85 in this group) have undertaken “Managing equalities” training for managers. However this further question makes it clear that they must have been almost exclusively business heads.

The review in 2000 chaired by Cllr Fielding found, and I quote “Huge inconsistencies in the way equal opportunities policies are interpreted and implemented across the council.” it found “evidence that managers and staff were largely unaware, ignorant or insensitive about applying equal opportunities in their day to day work.”

Now here we are, 9 years later. And we learn that only 2 individuals out of our most senior team, the 23 people who make up the CEO, the Exec Directors and the AEDs, only 2 of them (for I am pretty sure that the person who took the disability training also took the managing equalities training) have undertaken any E&D training at all in the last few years, despite new legislation having been introduced and despite all of our many rejoinders for them to take this seriously. Does the leader agree with me that this shows a complete disregard for this vital area and a very serious failure of leadership, by both the Exec management team and also the cabinet? Does he agree with me that we have made no progress in the intervening years?

Verbal response

The Leader said that many of the Executive Directors and Assistant Executive Directors were only recently in place, so we could not say that they had not had training in their previous posts, also that their training records might not be up to date, he was sure that they were all actively undertaking the necessary training.