Objective 2 – Improving Life Chances
We want everyone living in Manchester to have a good quality of life and equal chances. We aim to remove disadvantage and prejudice from people’s lives and make sure that everyone has access to the services and opportunities that will help them to fulfil their potential. We know that for some groups in Manchester this is not already the case and we will work with our partners to take a positive approach to removing inequalities.
We have 6 aims to support this:
1. We will work towards providing the best economic opportunities and outcomes for families, whilst continuing to work with our public and VCSE partners to connect residents to those opportunities. We will equip residents with the skills and qualifications to enable them to access the City’s opportunities, developing approaches that are flexible, accessible and inclusive of residents’ language, learning and other needs. We will build the digital capacity of our communities as the City’s digital infrastructure grows.
2. In addition to the ongoing development of Manchester’s housing and commercial stock, we will continue to develop accessible, inclusive travel networks to connect people to opportunities. We will work to more fully understand the interaction between equality issues and environmental issues, ensuring that our work to advance our priorities in each does not impact negatively on the other.
3. We will continue our work with partners to reform, strategically plan, jointly commission and deliver a range of provision to support children, young people and their families at the earliest opportunity. We will reduce adverse child experiences and invest in children and young people’s growth and development by ensuring we have a deeper understanding of the root causes. Our children and young people will be supported to have the best start in life and equal access to high quality education, continuing to narrow educational gaps between the UK average and Manchester and between different identity groups in the City’s schools.
4. Building on the City’s successes in integrating health and social care services, we will continue to reduce health inequalities and provide health and social care services on a locality basis to suit everybody’s needs. We will use our growing knowledge of the differing health trends across Manchester’s communities of identity and tailor services to meet those needs.
5. We will take a strengths-based approach to reducing homelessness in Manchester, working across services and partner agencies to ensure people are not discharged from services to the street, and that access to housing is complimented by access to skills, education, employment and health. We will work to prevent personal circumstances from being a barrier to opportunities, and provide support for those in the greatest need.
6. We will embed programmes of work to enable the Council’s workforce to be more reflective of the communities it services. In particular, we will increase the proportion of BAME and disabled people in the Council’s workforce overall, and introduce measures to make sure these groups are more represented in the organisation’s senior leadership.
Read more about our equality objectives.