How Metro carries out its responsibilities to promote equality and respect diversity.
“Metro is committed to promoting equality and values diversity, encouraging fairness with equal chances for all to work, learn and be free from any barriers, discrimination or victimisation.”
Metro's equality aims
Metro is committed to ensuring that its customers and employees are treated equally and fairly, through pursuing two aims:
- Ensuring that everyone in West Yorkshire has equal access to our services.
- Managing diversity within our workforce to benefit employees and organisational performance.
The Equality Act 2010
The Equality Act 2010 replaced and harmonised all previous equality law contained in the Race Relations Act, the Sex Discrimination Act and the Disability Discrimination Act.
Equality and Human Rights Commission website (opens in new window)
Metro's equality responsibilities
The Equality Act places a 'Public Sector Equality Duty' on public authorities like Metro to eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunities and foster good relations between people.
How Metro achieves its equality aims and fulfils its equality responsibilities
To achieve its aims Metro implements a policy on Equality and Diversity.
Equality and Diversity policy (pdf, 72k - opens in new window)
Metro also sets objectives to achieve specific equality outcomes. As with all of Metro's work, these objectives flow from, and help to deliver, the third West Yorkshire Local Transport Plan (LTP3).
Equality Objectives (word, 39k -opens in a new window)
Metro also achieves its equality aims and objectives through promoting equality internally, through its Equality and Diversity Policy. Employee Equality & Diversity Policy (pdf, 47k - opens in a new window)
Diverse recruitment report April-June 2012 (pdf 45k - new window)
Diverse recruitment report, July-Sept 2012 (pdf 50k - new window)
Equality Impact Assessments
Metro considers the equality impact of any new project or service that it is planning to introduce, and any significant change in existing projects and services. We assess impacts early in the process of change in order to build equality from the start, using a consistent analytical approach that incorporates best practice.
Recent examples of Metro's equality impact assessments include:
Equality information
In setting equality objectives and considering equality impacts we analyse a wide range of information relating to its customers and its employees. However, Metro is unable to collect or publish some information relating to one or both of these groups. This is often because there is insufficient justification, under the provisions of the Data Protection Act, for requesting and holding the data (for example, collecting data on bus passengers' religious beliefs or sexuality).
In other instances the numbers of Metro staff sharing a protected characteristic are so low, because we have a relatively small workforce of only 400, that there is a serious risk that publication could lead to identification of individuals.
For these reasons the list of information relating to equality and diversity that Metro publishes is necessarily limited. The information that we can publish is: