Linguistic Skills Strategy
The council is committed to providing equality in service delivery to every resident and community within the county borough. One way of achieving this is by providing those services in a range of languages other than English. This commitment to language diversity is backed by UK legislation in the form of the Equality Act 2010 and the Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011, and is also contained in the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, of which the UK is a signatory.
The various aspects of equality of language choice in service provision, customer care, staff development and recruitment and selection form part of the Equalities and Welsh Language Objectives and Action Plan 2012, which will take the council forwards in a positive and realistic way given the linguistic background of the county borough.
Part of its aims and objectives are to:
- Ensure that residents of the county borough are given the services they need in their chosen language.
- Ensure that our customers are treated equally whatever their language needs and however they interface with the council.
- Ensure that our staff have the proper training so that they are able to deal effectively with customers, whatever their language needs.
- Ensure that recruitment and selection practices within the council reflect the need to provide the above.
- Ensure that a team of staff is developed to enhance the work undertaken in the above to demonstrate our ongoing commitment.
- Ensure that internal monitoring is undertaken to provide meaningful statistical information to enable us to note areas of good practice and areas where further development may be needed.
We monitor our staff to find out what language skills are already present in the workforce and the latest figures from December 2011 show that 23 languages other than English are spoken or used by staff members. The process is ongoing and any updates will be noted here, however the current list is available to download below:-
Caerphilly CBC Staff Language Skills Audit (PDF 60kb)