This Strategic Equality Plan sets out the key things that we are committed to doing over the next four years in order to help eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunity and foster good relations.

We published our previous Strategic Equality Plan in September 2022, setting out the key things that we intended to do over the period 1 April 2022 to 31 March 2026 to help meet the General Equality Duty. In that time, we made good progress in delivering a programme of work that helps us meet our legal duties and achieve our equality objectives. Progress made on delivering that programme of work was reported each year in our annual equality reports. Our Equality Report for 2024-25, published in October 2025, highlighted meaningful and sustained action to embed equality, diversity, and inclusion across the organisation – from recruitment and staff support, including equality considerations in our audit work, through to our engagement with the public.

We are pleased with the progress we have made but recognise that there is still room for us to improve. As such, we have developed a revised suite of three equality objectives which we believe will help us better perform the General Equality Duty over the next four years.

We have not developed these objectives in isolation. Towards the end of 2025,we developed initial proposals for what our revised equality objectives should be, after reviewing the effectiveness of steps taken and progress made towards meeting the previous objectives. We then ran a public consultation on our proposals from 8 December 2025 to 30 January 2026. The Consultation was published on our website, promoted through social media and circulated directly to a broad range of stakeholders, including those representing individuals with protected characteristics. All responses to the consultation were carefully considered when finalising the content of this Plan.

We look forward to working collaboratively with colleagues both inside and outside the organisation to realise the aims and objectives set out in this strategy.