Report of the Chief Executive (Manchester City Council) and Placed Based Lead – Manchester Integrated Care Partnership (MICP) attached

The Board considered a report of the Chief Executive (Manchester City Council) and Placed Based Lead (MICP), which set out the work being undertaken to ensure the MICP met its public sector equality duty and its approach to embedding equality and engagement into our ways of working.

The Joint Director Equality, Inclusion, and Engagement - NHS GM integrated Care (Manchester locality) and MCC outlined the key headlines from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on the Census 2021 data for the city of Manchester relating to race and ethnicity, religion, national identity, and language highlighted

·                Ethnicity: The non-white population had increased from 33.4% to 43.2%, including an increase in all Asian ethnic categories from 17.1% to 20.9%, and an increase in all Black ethnic categories from 8.6% to 11.9%.

·                National identity: 77.2% of residents most identified with one of the various British categories, down from 83% in 2011

·                Language: 89% (191,800) of households had at least one person who could speak English as their main language. Around 4% (21,400) of residents said they could not speak English well or very well. Across the city, 94 languages were spoken with the highest numbers being Urdu, Arabic and Polish

·                Religion: The Christian population had decreased from 48.7% to 36.2%, Muslim population increased from 15.8% to 22.3%, and those identifying as ‘no religion’ increased from 24.7% to 32.4%

The 2021 census in England and Wales also asked about sexual orientation and gender identity for the first time. Nationally, 89.4% of respondents identified as straight of heterosexual and around 3.6 % identified as LGBTQ+, in Manchester that figure was c6%. 

With the creation of the ICS and Manchester Integrated Care Partnership there was potential to further build on integration by drawing collective strengths together.  There was ample evidence of how policies and practices could inadvertently adversely affect the health, well-being and outcomes for communities that experienced discrimination and disadvantage. There therefore needed to be a sustained focus to support the work of the partners to deliver the ICS’s statutory equality objectives and ensure that responsibility for tackling inequalities sat at every level across the system.

The report highlighted a range of examples of work being undertaken to meet our public sector equality duty but more importantly our approach to embedding equality and engagement into our ways of working.

It was reported that in Manchester there was a clear locality commitment to taking a system wide approach to addressing inequalities with shared ownership across system leaders including VCSE partners.  Further development would take place over the next few months to ensure that all of locality resources supported a common framework to take this work forward in collaboration with partners, in order to advance and embed equalities across the system level and provide the locality with the expertise to deliver its equality priorities aligned to the MPB.

The Leader welcomed the paper and the practical focus it had on some of the areas the health and care system needed to address outcomes of tackling inequality.  It was commented that it would be good to showcase the positive work of Community (previously Covid) Health Equity Manchester (CHEM).

The VCSE representative sought clarification as to whether escalating equality inefficiencies should be looked at by the MPB.  The Joint Director Equality, Inclusion, and Engagement - NHS GM integrated Care (Manchester locality) and MCC advised that there was need to improve how information was capture and where this was then presented.  The Leader added that it would probably depend on what information was being received as to where it would be considered as there might be other appropriate avenues that issues could be addressed by rather than the MPB.

Decisions

The Board:-

(1)      Support the work of the locality Equality and Engagement team with MPB partner organisations to ensure it continues to build community and patient voice into its approach to engagement and involvement across the system

(2)      Support the opportunity to work with partners to strengthen its approach to embedding equality, and inclusion across the locality to enable delivery on its ambitions by scaling up and accelerating action to reduce inequality.