We actively monitor the strategy and measure our performance against the following targets for 2026:

• Increasing the proportion of customers who are satisfied that ‘my landlord treats tenants fairly and with respect’ from 67% to 75%.
• Ensuring the profile of involved customers reflects the overall customer profile – relevant to the locality.
• Ensuring there are no significant differences between satisfaction levels in the quality of our new homes across protected characteristics, where sample sizes allow.
• Ensuring there is a measurable increase in number of Board and Committee applicants with protected characteristics.
• Increasing the diversity score in our Board members’ self-assessment.
• Ensuring the proportion of colleagues who identify as ethnically diverse paid in the upper quartile of our pay distribution remains above 25%.
• Improving our collection rates for data on the protected characteristics of colleagues and customers by 50%.

These have included:

• Consideration of our customers’ diverse needs being key to discussions about the way we develop an integrated operational delivery model over the next year, in the context of the new Consumer Standards and the Housing Ombudsman’s work on vulnerabilities.
• Developing our approach to tailoring our services and communications to reflect the needs of customers including how we offer ‘reasonable adjustments’ to our services
• Development colleagues accessing neighbourhood level diversity data to use in project initiation and planning processes to make key decisions about the mix and type of new homes being built.
• Seeing our approach to recruitment to board and committee role vacancies resulting in a significant shift in the ethnic composition of the governance community, to better reflect the diversity of the customers we serve, with two key appointments to our board being from an ethnically diverse background.
• Reviewing our training to raise awareness of ED&I issues with colleagues, supporting them to deliver a customer-focussed service, with the skills to assist customers with diverse needs. This includes raising awareness of mental health, learning disabilities and neurodiversity.  
• Reviewing our approach to collecting and storing customers’ diversity data to enable colleagues across the organisation to use it to support customers who may require adjustments to be made to service delivery and communications
• Merging our colleague networks, with an executive sponsor for each network and agreed terms of reference and workplans.
• Expanding our network of Wellbeing Champions who are Mental Health First Aid accredited and the ED&I Champions network, who promote awareness of ED&I issues throughout Riverside, helping to embed a culture of inclusion, fairness and respect.

In general terms our performance has been positive, with some good signs of progress, with:

• A marginal improvement in customer perception that they are being treated fairly and with respect from 67% to 68%
• The profile of customers involved in our new Customer Involvement Task and Finish Group being diverse and generally representative of our customer base, with disabled customers, ethnically diverse customers and females being overly represented
• No significant difference between the satisfaction of customers with protected characteristics with their new homes compared to customers overall, with some disabled and LGBT customers being more satisfied

However, there are some areas for improvement:

• We need to continue to work hard to attract a more diverse group of applicants for governance positions, although we have been very successful in driving greater diversity at Group Board level.
• The proportion of ethnically diverse colleagues with salaries in the upper pay quartile has fallen significantly, widening our ethnicity pay gap. Whilst this is principally an indirect consequence of integration, we need to continue to deliver growth and progression opportunities through our leadership development and guaranteed interview programmes.
• We need to improve our collection of customer diversity data, to ensure equality of outcomes across protected characteristics and for customers with support needs or vulnerabilities, the way we collect diversity data from our customers and the way we use it.

We committed to the National Housing Federation’s Chairs’ Challenge in 2023, which we believe is crucial for driving and embedding ED&I at board level. It has enabled our Chair, Terrie Alafat, to work with Board members to set the right culture and behaviours for ED&I to thrive at Riverside and to create our own vision and roadmaps to success.

As part of this commitment, we have worked hard over the last 12 months to review and improve our advertising and recruitment processes to ensure that when a board or committee member role becomes vacant, we have a diverse range of applicants to choose from. This new approach is improving the diversity of our governance community and Kei-Retta Farrell, one of our new Board member appointments has told us:

Our governance community members complete the same ED&I elearning module as our colleagues, and as a result of this, Board members have told us they are becoming increasingly confident about their understanding of ED&I issues, which will help them in their governance role.