Treating everyone we deal with fairly and equally is central to the work we do.

Last updated: 3rd February 2020
 

On this page

  1. Our approach
  2. Our partners
  3. Our customers
  4. Our staff
  5. Our community outreach work

Our approach

We’re committed to equality, diversity and inclusion in:

  • the service we provide
  • how we treat our customers
  • how we recruit and manage our staff
  • our community outreach work

We work with charities and independent advisers to make sure our approach is relevant to the changing needs of our customers, staff and stakeholders.

We produce a yearly report on equality, diversity and inclusion to review the progress we’ve made and assess what we still need to do.

Our partners

We want to make sure that we treat our customers and our staff as fairly and as equally as possible. To do so, we work with the following partners:

  • Business in the Community
  • Business Disability Forum
  • Charities Aid Foundation
  • Disability Confident
  • East London Business Alliance
  • Employers Network for Equality & Inclusion
  • Equality and Human Rights Commission
  • Living Wage
  • Pennies
  • Purple Space
  • Stonewall
  • Time to Change
  • Whitehall & Industry Group
  • Women in Finance Charter
  • Working Families

Our customers

We’re committed to:

  • making sure our service is accessible to everyone
  • drawing on our understanding of equality law, where relevant, in our responses

You can learn more about the diversity of the people who use our service from our annual review.

Our staff

We’re committed to attracting and developing people from a wide range of backgrounds. We want our staff to reflect the diversity of our customers and the population as a whole. Being diverse and inclusive means that we can better understand people’s different perspectives and backgrounds, which is fundamental to our job resolving financial complaints.

Our employee-led networks help us understand what really matters to our staff, as well as providing everyday support. They include the following: 

  • carers’ group
  • Christian fellowship
  • Embrace (our black, Asian and ethnic minority network)
  • Enable (our disability network)
  • Hindu network
  • Jewry (our Jewish network)
  • mental wellbeing network
  • Muslim network
  • OutRight (our lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender network)
  • parenting network
  • women's network

We’ve also signed the Women in Finance Charter, which commits organisations to the improvement of gender diversity in the financial services sector.

We report each year on diversity, inclusion and wellbeing, including the work we've done to make our organisation more accessible to potential employees and people using our service, while preparing for the future and nurturing our culture of openness.

Our community outreach work

We want to reach groups of consumers who:

  • are less likely to know about their right to complain and the free service we provide
  • are under-represented in their contact with us
  • may face barriers in bringing complaints to us – for example, because of language difficulties or disabilities

To do this, we:

  • volunteer with local communities
  • run awareness-raising campaigns
  • meet with businesses and trade associations across the UK
  • educate our staff on people’s different needs, especially if they’re vulnerable
  • learn from the charities and other partners we work with

Find out more about our events with businesses and trade associations.