Equality, diversity and inclusion

Our Board says

We believe that equity, diversity, and inclusion are integral to how we treat our customers and how we treat our colleagues. This is because of the social value it brings and the business benefits that arise, which help us fulfil our purpose; ‘Building Homes and Change Lives’.

We believe that being an inclusive organisation with a diverse workforce gives our customers greater confidence that we can understand their needs, and it improves our ability to attract skilled and talented colleagues. Through our One Raven Culture Framework, we are committed to building an environment in which managers understand the critical importance of trust and colleagues feel accepted, respected, and valued, which is reflected in the services we provide to our customers.

Our commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion is reflected at all levels of the organisation. Our workforce currently has an even split between male and female colleagues and is representative of the local population in relation to age and ethnicity. We have Level 2 Disability Confident accreditation and use specialist agencies to widen our talent pool when recruiting for Board members and Leadership Team, as well as encouraging applications from all minority and underrepresented groups for all positions.

We have a robust Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Plan below that brings together the priorities from our Delivering What Matters strategy and supporting plans. We will monitor progress against the targets set out in our EDI plan and publish a 6-monthly update starting from March 2025.

Our Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Plan

April 2024 – March 2027

Introduction

Why is EDI important at Raven?

Our purpose is to Build Homes and Change Lives, and our mission is to be amongst the country’s most trusted affordable housing landlords and to transform our homes so they are fit for the future.

We serve a customer population with a wide range of characteristics, needs, and experiences. Equity, diversity, and inclusion are therefore integral to everything we do, as it’s only through knowing our customers, understanding their requirements, and effectively using these insights to make decisions and shape our services in a way that is fair that we can deliver our purpose and achieve our mission.

It is vital that EDI is at the heart of our organisational culture, since the more inclusive we are as an organisation, and the more representative our workforce of our customer population, the better we can be at knowing and understanding what our customers require from us. There are other business benefits too, such as better staff retention, increased readiness to innovate, and higher revenue.

What is our overall aim?

In our previous EDI Strategy 2021 to 2024, we set out our ambition to deliver a proactive and impactful approach to EDI in ways that are important to our customers and colleagues, rather than simply responding reactively to societal trends.

This ambition remains the same under our new EDI Plan for 2024 to 2027, which also aligns with regulations within the social housing sector, evolving legislation, and the existing focus on EDI within the NHF Code of Governance.

Through this approach, our overall aim is to provide services to our external customers that effectively and consistently take account of individual needs; and to build a fair and equitable organisational culture in which colleagues feel valued and comfortable being themselves.

Our Delivering What Matters strategy sets out our 3 strategic goals over the next 3 years, which have been identified through collaboration with customers and colleagues. These are:

1) We know our customers and consistently deliver what matters to them.
2) We invest in everyday improvements and transformational regeneration to provide good quality homes, fit for the future, in neighbourhoods that are safe, secure, and clean.
3) We provide more affordable homes, and make sure the homes we have best match the needs of our customers.

Equity, diversity, and inclusion form a lens through which this overarching strategy has been created and is a cross-cutting theme within all supporting plans and activities.

Our new EDI Plan brings together the key EDI-related priorities contained within our corporate strategy and supporting plans, grouped into 3 overall outcomes. In this plan, we summarise how we intend to achieve our priorities and why. The detailed actions are contained within the specific plans that support our corporate strategy and are noted in the sections below.

Our reason for taking this approach, rather than creating a standalone EDI strategy, is because we appreciate the social and business value of EDI and therefore consider it a necessity to be embedded across all strategies and plans, rather than a ‘nice to have’ that is considered separately.

We have updated the terminology we use from ‘equality’ to ‘equity’ within the title and content of the plan, which is in line with best practice and signifies our commitment to treating customers and colleagues fairly and in line with their needs, which does not mean treating everyone the same.

Board responsibilities

We’re signed up to the National Housing Federation (NHF) Code of Governance, which requires that our Board:

Demonstrate a clear and active commitment to achieve equality of opportunity, diversity and inclusion in all of the organisation’s activities, as well as in its own composition. It has policies and statements which meaningfully demonstrate this commitment, and sets priorities and objectives for the organisation to achieve.

(1) The board seeks regular assurance about how these commitments and objectives are being delivered in practice, and tracks progress against the priorities it has set.

(2) The organisation annually publishes information about its work to deliver these commitments and objectives, and the progress it has made.

The membership of board and committees comprises people with diverse backgrounds and attributes, having regard to the diversity of the communities the organisation serves and in line with the organisation’s stated commitments to equality, diversity and inclusion.

As part of these responsibilities, we publish an EDI statement from the Board on our website, please see updated statement at Appendix ii.

Chairs’ Challenge

In addition to the above, the Chair of our Board will sign up to the NHF Chairs’ Challenge, a public commitment to understanding how diverse and inclusive the Board is now and to developing a vision for the Board to become more equal, diverse and inclusive, taking active steps to fulfil this vision.

Outcomes and priorities

Outcome 1: We have an accurate and comprehensive knowledge of our customers’ characteristics and needs.

Why this outcome is important

Understanding our customers is the key to being able to deliver a service which meets their needs. To be an inclusive organisation, we need to know who is ‘behind the door’ of our homes and how their needs and characteristics affect their daily lives. By gathering and recording this information we will be able to design and adapt our services to ensure that they are equitable for all. The Regulator’s Consumer Standards require housing associations to have accurate and comprehensive data so that we can take specific needs into consideration.

Priorities to achieve this outcome

The Customer Data project as part of the strategic programme will see the development and implementation of new customer data fields in iPC (our CRM system), which reflect protected characteristics, health conditions, and vulnerability. A data collection drive will be co-ordinated across the Customer Experience directorate, and customers will be encouraged to update their own personal data through the portal.

Staff will receive training to be able to gather, record, and access the data correctly, understand how those conditions and circumstances impact the lives of customers, and be able to use the data to make well thought out decisions about the services we provide.

Outcome 2: Our key services are equitable and inclusive, better meeting the diverse needs of our customers in an efficient and cost-effective manner.

Why this outcome is important

Inclusive services foster trust and respect and create a positive user experience. Using customer data, views and feedback, we will shape the design of our services, which will contribute to creating a fairer, more inclusive customer experience. We will make adjustments to our services where reasonable to accommodate additional needs, and we will use a fair and transparent approach to decision making on those adjustments. This will also meet the Consumer Standards which require social landlords to have reflected the needs of customers in the delivery of housing services.

Priorities for achieving this outcome

We will complete the design and implementation of the Onboarding (start of tenancy) service, and the redesign of the Repairs service, which will consider the diverse needs of customers and include pilots and testing with customer groups in the process.

As part of our Standards for Success project we will hold documented ways of working for our most important services so that delivery is standardised and repeatable. As part of this work we will ensure that all standards and procedures take the needs of our customers into account and include levels of decision making. Staff will receive in-depth training on how to make robust decisions using the available data and information.

We will also be reviewing our partnerships with other organisations to determine that they are the right ones to enable us to deliver the best possible outcomes for diverse customer needs. We are most keenly focused on partnerships which lead to the best outcomes in mental health and the regeneration of the Preston Estate.

Our Customer Engagement Framework, Every Interaction Matters, aims to ensure that we actively seek and use the diverse voices of our customers which contributes to improving the equity and inclusiveness of our services and decision making. We will be taking special measures to hear the voices of our more vulnerable customers, especially where the impact of decisions could affect them more acutely. EIM will also ensure that customers are able to share their views through a range of channels which suit their individual needs. We will also be reviewing how we communicate with customers, seeking to ensure that information is available across a range of different channels and communicating a reminder of all of the accessibility features on our website.

With the introduction of Awaab’s law in 2025, we will investigate and repair reported hazards relating to damp, mould and condensation within the required timescales. Using our data and interactions with customers, we will determine their needs and vulnerabilities and prioritise work timescales accordingly. Relevant staff will receive training on aids and adaptations which will ensure that we more effectively meet the needs of our disabled customers.

Outcome 3: We have a workforce that is more reflective of the communities we work with; an inclusive organisational culture; and colleagues with the knowledge, skills, and behaviours to deliver services in a way that takes account of customers’ needs.

Why this outcome is important

We believe that the more representative our workforce of our customer population, the better we can be at knowing and understanding what our customers require from us. However, it’s only with an inclusive culture in which all colleagues feel accepted, respected, and valued, that individual differences can genuinely be embraced and inform the design of our services and how we work.

Furthermore, all colleagues need the knowledge, skills, and behaviours to be able to effectively consider the characteristics, needs, and experiences of others when making decisions and providing services, so that we can provide a consistently great experience for our customers and for one another. This concept is engrained within our One Raven culture framework and is in keeping with the drive for increased professionalism in the sector as set out in the Consumer Standards.

Priorities for achieving this outcome

We will carry out a further staff data drive to improve our records and then use this information to more accurately measure ED&I improvements and perform robust equal pay audits covering race and disability as well as gender, the former anticipated to be required under upcoming legislation.

Our main area of focus for increasing representation in the workforce continues to be disability, since a significant percentage of our customer population are disabled. We currently have Level 2 Disability Confident accreditation and a priority over the next 2 years is therefore working towards and achieving Level 3 accreditation, which is externally validated and as it is significantly more comprehensive than level 2, will support a step change in how we recruit, support and develop colleagues who are disabled.

We know from research carried out with an external partner that neurodiversity is a specific consideration for us, due to the impact on how customers interact with and experience our services. We are already a member of the Sunflower Hidden Disabilities Network, via which we have access to various resources including training videos about neurodiversity. We will build a specific learning pathway on iLearn (our learning management system) incorporating these resources, so they are more visible to colleagues. We will continue to communicate and signpost to available resources and determine how best to include them within our new starter induction programme.

More broadly in terms of protected characteristics, we already issue a mandatory EDI training course to new starters and a refresher to colleagues on an annual basis, but as part of the launch of our Reasonable Adjustments for Customers Policy, will provide a more comprehensive package of training including an in-person ‘awareness raising’ session to help colleagues appreciate the importance of EDI to Raven, within their roles, and to them personally, since we know from a staff survey last year that a significant percentage do not consider EDI relevant to themselves. This training supports our One Raven culture framework embedding activity too, particularly our ‘Put Customers First’ and ‘Always Be Curious’ statements.

In addition to this awareness-raising training session, we will continue to roll out our Raven Human Library podcast, which we launched in 2024 and through which we intend to increase understanding amongst colleagues about individual differences and the impact of these. We will continue promoting this initiative and aim to add at least 4 recordings to the library by the end of 24/25.

It is anticipated that as part of the new Competence and Conduct standard for housing we will need to have an L&D policy in place that clearly sets out our approach to ensuring colleagues have the appropriate knowledge, skills, and behaviours to provide a high quality, respectful service to our customers, of which EDI forms a key part. This L&D policy is currently being developed in line with the proposed standard, alongside an annual L&D schedule.

We launched our new management development programme in July 2024, and this aligns with our One Raven Culture Framework. The intention is that the programme will support managers to consistently demonstrate and embed our key behaviours, as described within our baseline behaviour expectations. The baseline expectations for managers include EDI-related ones such as, ‘support team members to view things from a customer’s perspective and take this into account when delivering services’. We will bolster this manager training with further ED&I focused sessions.

During 24/25 we will finalise the redesign of our Customer Experience directorate. A key aspect of this work is the identification of the skills, knowledge, and experience that are required now and in future based on internal and external drivers and which will ensure we can deliver equitable and inclusive services. This redesign also provides the opportunity to consider our approach to workforce planning including how we can build further flexibility into the working arrangements for Trades positions, given the anticipated changes to flexible working legislation and the greater ability that flexibility can create to attract female candidates to these positions – a consideration that supports our aim to improve female representation in Trades roles based on customer needs.

In relation to flexible working arrangements, this is an area we plan to better communicate during recruitment, since external research shows it helps to attract a more diverse pool of applicants, plus given that many organisations are now asking their employees to return to the office or making their hybrid working arrangements more rigid, our Hub, Home, Roam policy is a useful differentiator.