September 2025 update - here's what we have achieved against our commitments over the last six months:
Attracting and retaining more diverse colleagues from leadership down who share our values and purpose and are representative of the communities we serve
We recognise that having a Board reflective of our colleagues and communities is important and therefore we set out to increase our Board diversity by September 2026, starting with signing up to the National Housing Federation Chairs’ Challenge. We have successfully recruited a new member to the Board who has taken up the role of Co-optee and who brings valuable diverse perspectives to the Board table. We are aware that there is more to do and remain committed to increasing future diversity of our Board and leadership though working with third party agencies and maintaining fair and transparent recruitment processes. As a new initiative early in 2025, our reverse mentoring programme (where a diverse group of colleague’s mentors our Board and Senior Leadership team) continues to bring diverse perspectives and lived experiences of underrepresented groups to the board and leadership table.
We are also committed to increasing our overall colleague diversity. Since May this year we have been working with two external partners who specialise in generating opportunities and experiences for underrepresented groups across our operating area. In autumn of this year, working with Ductu, we hope to bring students from disadvantaged or SEN backgrounds into our workspace for them to experience Alliance Homes as a future employer. Similarly, we are engaging with Women’s Work Lab to bring opportunities for women who wish to return to work after time raising a family. We are optimistic that both of these programmes will allow those involved to experience our inclusive culture and ultimately drive future diversity for us. We have continued with training for managers on fairness and equity in the recruitment process and have adopted automatic redaction of applications on our recruitment system along with guaranteed interviews for applicants form underrepresented groups meeting the minimum criteria.
We are pleased that we have made progress in increasing our colleague diversity. Our colleague diversity of non-white colleagues has almost doubled since the end of the last financial year. We recognise however that there is more to do to around disability diversity as our colleague mix is not reflective of the communities we operate in. First and foremost, we need to understand our data more in terms disabilities, and we are working without EDI champions group on how we do this as this will help us understand how we can support our colleagues and continue building our inclusive working environment for existing and future colleagues. We will focus on continuing to be an inclusive workplace though our disability confident leader status and showcasing this to drive diversity in this area.
Through data we will ensure fairness and equity on our practices for colleague and customer
We recently published our 2025 gender pay gap report and are pleased that we have made steps forward in narrowing the gap between what our female colleagues earn compared to our male colleagues. This year, we have also completed a diversity pay gap analysis. This is new for us this year and our data sizes are relatively small. We will use the next few months to discuss with our EDI champions group what this means and what actions we will take of the back of this data.
In 2025 we held a customer data collection campaign called, Life through your Lens. The campaign focused on asking customers to tell us more about themselves and their needs in an effort to better understand our customers so that we can improve the services we provide. Gathering and analysing the data allows us to see where there may be gaps in our service offer and delivery. Knowing more about our customers allows us to tailor our services and ensure customers have fair access to our services and benefit from more equitable outcomes. From what the data has already told us; we have already begun to make changes to the way we operate our services.
Our data capture size remains small, and we continue to work with our customers to gain more data though our business-as-usual contact activities with customers.
Our next steps are to define how we use our customer data to test equity in the services we provide.
We are also in the process of setting up a customer EDI focus group with the aim of hearing directly from customers about their experiences, ideas, and expectations when it comes to equality, diversity and inclusion. We want to understand what’s working well and what could be better. This group will start to meet from Autumn 2025.
All of this rich data and information will inform our decision making.
Providing education and awareness opportunities to customers and colleagues to break down barriers
As part of our plans, we are committed to engaging with our colleagues and customers in diverse community group activities. In June, we proudly supported Weston Pride demonstrating our commitment to inclusion and allyship. North Somerset LGBTQ+ forum attended our offices to talk to colleagues about the importance of our support both financially and as allies to the community. This allowed colleagues from the business to connect and reflect about the importance of celebrating these events.
To strengthen our commitment to education and breaking down barriers, we made some important changes to our colleague EDI group by recruiting new chairs of the group who have lived experiences. Working closely with the Housing Diversity Network, our Director of People and Communications became the Chair of a South West EDI forum which focusing on collaborating and sharing of ideas to bring meaningful change and we launched our recruitment process for our first customer EDI focus group giving customers a platform to share views, help shape practices and policies and ensure a diverse customer voice is heard.
We have successfully refreshed and retained our Disability Confident Leader accreditation in July 2025 as a sign of our ongoing commitment to driving awareness and removing barriers around disability. We’ve also signed the LGBTQ+ Housing Pledge which demonstrates our commitment to our LGBTQ+ residents’ equality and support. In the coming months we will be able to share more progress about this.
In summary, we continue with our commitments to drive diversity and inclusion within our culture. We continue to collect data when it comes to our customers so we can understand their needs and ensure they get an appropriate bespoke service designed to them. By continuing to analyse the data and working with our customer EDI forum we aim to better understand not only our individual customer needs but the diverse needs our underrepresented communities may need and aim to ensure all voices are heard in decisions that may affect them.