Main actions from our first gender action plan

Deciding what our priorities should be

Although we have made good progress on our action plan over the past three years, we know that we still have work to do in the following areas.

• Equipment - although we have made vast progress in gender specific uniform, there are still issues to address with equipment e.g motorbikes and guns.
• Gender representation in specialist areas - the issue of number of vacancies and availability of opportunities needs to be addressed
• Flexible working opportunities in specialist areas

We will also take full account of the good work that is already in progress around the service to identify gaps in service delivery and avoid duplication.

Tell us the top three priorities you think we should be working on.

Actions from our first action plan

To help you identify the priorities you think we should be working on, the following is a list of the main actions from our first Gender Action Plan:

• Leadership - active commitment to achieving gender equality
• Policy and practice - ensuring that neither men nor women are adversely affected.
• Employment practices - elimination of discrimination and harassment
• Equal pay
• Training on the gender equality duty
• Family and child care - a working environment that supports childcare and elder care responsibilities
• Uniform dress standards and equipment that both meet the specific needs of men and women
• Learning and development - supporting career development
• Mainstreaming the gender equality duty
• Role models - senior employees acting as role models through their working patterns and work/life balance
• Estate
• Procurement
• Domestic violence - staff and public protection and support
• Public safety - confidence
• Sexual offences - quality of service for victims
• Accessibility to information
• Reporting crime in a variety of ways
• Victim and witness care – support related to individual needs especially for transgender/ transsexual people
• Communications – keeping people informed about police activity (confidence)
• Hate crime - gender and trans-phobic
• Drugs and alcohol
• Prostitution and human trafficking
• Police custody environment - specific needs met, receiving a respectful and dignified service, in particular transsexual men and women.

View the full Single Equality scheme.