GOVERNMENT funding will pay for a project to improve poor-quality private rented accommodation and tackle rogue landlords with the aim of helping new arrivals to the borough.
The scheme is outlined in the council’s Equality Scheme annual report, which was presented to senior councillors last week.
It says the council has won a Home Office grant to help support the integration of new arrivals to the borough and that the funding will be used to deliver a project to target poor-quality private rented accommodation, used mainly by new arrivals, and to tackle rogue landlords and potential exploitation.
The Equality Scheme is designed to tackle social exclusion, working with groups such as My Barnsley Too Disability Forum and the Barnsley Deaf Forum.
The new arrivals integration scheme is just one of the successes listed in the annual report. Others include a month-long LGBT festival to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality and a Purple Flag initiative which promotes a safe and inclusive evening and night-time economy.
Despite these successes the report also suggests the council faces significant challenges, to which the council is looking forward to overcoming, Coun Alan Gardiner, cabinet spokesman, told colleagues.
One of those challenges concerns the quality of data the council holds on employees’ diversity which is said to be poor.
“We only know whether about half of all staff are disabled or not, about two thirds regarding their ethnicity and only one quarter for their sexual orientation,” the report says. “This means we cannot be confident whether or not our efforts to improve workforce diversity are proving effective or not.”
It is planning to make improvements to the employee database to keep this information up to date for all employees.
Barnsley has seen significant increases in the number of reported hate crimes and incidents over the last year, according to the findings, with a marked increase after the result of the vote to leave the EU, and possibly affected following terrorist attacks in London and Manchester.
“We are currently updating the Hate and Harassment Strategy and will work with the local community to see what else can be done to protect local people from hate crime and to encourage reporting,” the report says.
Further work is also needed to ensure there are continued good relations between different communities in Barnsley.
There has been an increased number of new arrivals to the borough, mainly migrant workers from Eastern Europe, and the report says most work really hard to learn English.
However, the council said it is ‘aware that new arrivals can have an important impact on local services and differences in culture’ and a lack of knowledge about local procedures and customs can ‘cause conflict with other local residents’.
Coun Gardiner added: “It is one of our priorities to have strong and resilient communities and so we will continue as part of that work to welcome and to help new arrivals integrate with the local communities that they now live in.”
