Inside the Land Registry
Diversity and equal opportunity
Our diversity awareness and valuing inclusion training programme for
managers continued. We intend to pilot an e-learning package on diversity
for all staff by June 2003. During the year we published a new guide
for staff on cultural diversity issues providing information on religious
and cultural observance, belief, language and naming systems.
We published our Race Equality Scheme in May 2002 and have been working
to develop a policy-screening template and identify priority areas for
action. An ethnic monitoring re-survey of all staff has been completed
with an encouraging overall response rate of over 90%.
We ran an outreach workshop for local Personnel Managers to look at
ways to widen diversity of applicants. Regional Personnel Manager Syndicates
and Head Office have subsequently developed action plans designed to
help increase the number of applications we receive from members of
ethnic minority communities. We have continued to work with the assistance
of Inland Revenue to provide our customers with documentation in alternative
formats and major consultation documents have been produced in electronic
format and on audio-cassette.
We established our first Disability Focus Group as part of our contribution
to the 2003 European Year of Disabled People. The group will initially
be looking at re-writing our disability survey questionnaire and providing
feedback on access issues.
The then Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine of Lairg, opened our seventh
on-site nursery in March. The nursery at our Hull office demonstrates
our commitment to extend childcare provision across our network of offices
in order to aid retention and recruitment of staff. We believe that
Land Registry is leading the way, with the best ratio of nursery places
to staff in the Civil Service (roughly 1 nursery place for every 25
members of staff). Every office has on-site/off-site nursery provision
and we plan to open or expand more nurseries, including one at our new
Information Systems Directorate office in Plymouth.
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