Equality information on our ways of working

Satisfaction rates and complaints handling

The Commission is committed to providing a high quality service to everyone we deal with. In order to do this we welcome feedback about our services.

We recognise that quality of service is an important measure of our effectiveness and we have in place a complaints policy which enables us to resolve complaints as quickly as possible.

We treat any complaint as an expression of dissatisfaction with our service which calls for a response. We listen to each complaint, treat it seriously, and learn from it so that we can continuously improve our service.

Equality information relating to the subject matter of the complaints can be viewed in our equality progress report.

Procurement of goods and services

The Commission spends a significant amount of its funding each year on third party goods and services.

To ensure equality considerations are embedded within our procurement activities we undertook an equality impact assessment on our procurement processes. This informed the development of our procurement policy.

We recognise that by collating equality information on our procurement practices and our supply base we can identify ways we can advance equality in how we buy our services and work with our suppliers.

To understand more about the diversity of our supply base and better understand their actions and commitment to promoting equality, diversity and human rights we undertake a monitoring exercises. The surveys target the Commission’s top 75 suppliers with whom we spend 90 per cent of our budget.

We also ask all our suppliers to complete an external survey to benchmark their equality and diversity practices and performance and report on this annually in our equality report.