Equality, Diversity and Inclusion monitoring

In line with established good practice the Churches, Circuits and Districts should ask all employees about their personal characteristics so that they can:

• build a picture of their staff diversity profile,
• evaluate how other policies and processes affect different groups of staff, and
• identify and resource the services they need to best support their staff.

This information will enable the Methodist Church to deliver its Strategy for Justice, Dignity and Solidarity.

Information about protected characteristics will usually be classed as ‘special category personal data’. However, the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) do not preclude the collection of employee data for this purpose. The reason for this is that the data is collected for a legitimate purpose i.e. the compliance with legal obligations under the Equality Act 2010.

It is important to be aware, however, that extra protections would be required to obtain this data and ensure its security. In practice, it is essential that Churches, Circuits and Districts obtain employees’ consent for this type of data and ensure their Privacy Notices reflect that. For further information and guidance please refer to TMCP Data Protection website.

Churches, Circuits and Districts are required by Equality Act 2010 to  monitor job applications to ensure their appointment practices are consistent with equal opportunity standards and to be able to assess how their Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Policy is working in practice. It is essential to ensure that a process is established and implemented to monitor the data, and that the findings are used to inform subsequent relevant management decisions relating to EDI.

Important:

• Ensure you have an internal agreement about how you will process the data that you are asking to collect. The data form should only be sent out once you have a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) in place so as to identify and take steps to minimise and avoid the risks of processing such sensitive data.
• An Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Monitoring Form  should be sent out to a job candidate with the application form. 
• Upon receipt of the completed application the EDI monitoring form must be separated from the rest of the application by someone not involved in shortlisting.
• All Equality, Diversity and Inclusion monitoring forms will be removed from applications and retained safely as confidential, and not made available to recruiting panel members. 
• Anonymised, aggregated data from the forms should normally be reviewed at regular intervals (e.g. annually) in order to identify any patterns and potential concerns in order to monitor how the Church/Circuit/District’s recruitment and selection processes are working in practice.
• When reviewing the data care should be taken to ask about who is applying for jobs, why certain groups may not be applying, whether there are ways of recruiting from a more diverse group of people. Of course this will depend on local context but it is good to ask these questions as part of the Church’s commitment to equal opportunities.