Question
The Black residents of Wokingham are suffering from the weight of discrimination they endure in their daily lives, going about their business of living and working in Wokingham. What contact have you had with representatives from the Black community of WBC and what tangible or practical action have you taken to assuage these discriminations?
Minutes:
Question
The Black residents of Wokingham are suffering from the weight of discrimination they endure in their daily lives, going about their business of living and working in Wokingham. What contact have you had with representatives from the Black community of WBC and what tangible or practical action have you taken to assuage these discriminations?
Answer
As I have stated in the previous question, due to the global pandemic, for the past year our engagement activities with the ethnic community groups and ethnic minority groups have been primarily focused on the most urgent need to promote Covid safety advice, supporting groups to deliver Covid safe activities and to encourage participation in the vaccination and testing programmes that have been quickly implemented to stop the spread of the virus and get us back to normality as quickly as possible.
These activities have been largely successful with positive vaccination rates for ethnic minority residents and the avoidance of significant Covid outbreaks. What you can do to help is to ensure that all members of the communities that you are engaged with have a hundred per cent vaccination rate. That is a task which eludes us all at the moment.
Internally we have several staff support groups including the Ethnically Diverse Staff Network which meets monthly and a Members’ Equality Group who worked together to provide oversight of the launch of our Equality Strategy earlier this year.
Our support for the external review of the BME Forum has continued, including contacting representatives from the Black community to participate in the one to one interviews and focus groups. This review is expected to be completed soon and its findings shared with the BME Forum to assist it in deciding what the next steps it wants to take for its future activities.
This is in line with the Council’s target within its Equalities Strategy Action Plan of supporting the BME Forum to deliver on its objectives, purpose and activities.
The Council is also engaging with our ethnic minority residents in partnership with the police through their Independent Advisory Group which has a particular focus on understanding residents’ experiences of hate crime.
As mentioned in my previous response, this Council is also working on a comprehensive plan to foster stronger engagement with local communities. But if there is anyone who has an insight into how we can promote equality further, please don’t wait. I would ask that they can get in touch with us so we can listen to them immediately.
Supplementary Question
That is a long list of words and promises. But as the Leader of the Council and the Chief Executive, Susan Parsonage, of Wokingham Borough Council what do you suggest to the residents of Wokingham Borough Council what more can we do to get the Council to take its knees off our collective necks?
Supplementary Answer
I think as I have said the real issue we are facing at the moment is to attack vaccine hesitancy in our Borough and the health inequalities with minority ethnic groups are very substantial. So, what you can do to help is, particularly with the Caribbean community, is to ensure that everybody is vaccinated, two jabs that is the really practical part.
The other thing you can help us with is on the BME Forum which we are reaching out now to get the BME Forum up and running. The BME Forum is not the property of the Borough it is the property of the BME Forum and we would like to have it up and running; hopefully as soon as we can physically start meeting in the later half of the year.