Equality and Diversity
Rotherham Council is committed to ensuring all parts of the community can access, engage with and benefit from services, and its Equalities Strategy sets out the three key priorities of:
- Understanding, listening, and engaging across all communities
- Delivering fair, inclusive, and accessible services
- Empowering people to engage and challenge discrimination and to promote good community relations
Having access to good quality and affordable homes and support is important for all of our diverse communities.
The Homelessness Prevention and Rough Sleeper Strategy seeks to remove barriers which people can face in accessing housing and homelessness support.
People experiencing homelessness can have multiple disadvantages, which can include people with learning difficulties and or autism. In particular, those individuals with ‘mild’ learning disabilities, where their difficulties may not be obvious, so other people and services may not provide necessary support and may be at a greater risk of becoming homeless.
The Council’s specialist learning difficulties housing officer will drive the importance of removing such barriers and act as an advocate where appropriate raising awareness of best practice within housing services.
The strategy will support the need to increase staff awareness through training and development on how to identify when individuals require additional support and appropriate reasonable adjustments. This may include assisted communication or specific approaches and strategies that are known to be helpful to best engage and support the individual.
Where an applicant’s first language is not English, the Council will provide translated information and interpreting services and publicise the availability of these services to residents and community organisations.
The Council will use data, engage and consult a diverse range of people to understand Rotherham’s communities and what is important to them to ensure all the priorities within the strategy meet the needs of all groups of people, in particular those who are the most marginalised in our communities. We will continue to engage with our communities including people who have experienced homelessness and make sure current and future service provisions meet the need of our communnities.
