James Butcher HA is committed to equality of opportunity for all the services we provide and aims to ensure that all residents, members, employees, applicants for housing or employment and stakeholders, receive equal and fair treatment, free from direct or indirect discrimination.

As a registered social landlord and as an employer, our policy applies equally to the provision of housing and services and recruitment, employment and training of staff.

The policy aims is to ensure that no applicant for either housing or employment, residents, members, employees or stakeholders receives less favourable treatment on the grounds of race, colour, ethnic or national origin, sex, age, marital status, disability, sexual orientation, religion or trade union membership nor is disadvantaged by conditions or requirements which cannot be shown to be justified.

For a copy of the Group's equality and diversity strategy, click here

• We aim to employ 5% of staff members from Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) groups
• We aim to have 5% of our Board members from BME groups
• We have a target to let 5% of our homes to people from BME groups.

We keep files on your tenancy, which include personal details about you and your household, so that we can carry out our job as your landlord. We keep these details confidential and we will not pass them on to another organisation unless:

• it is to do with your tenancy, for example, if we are helping you to claim Housing Benefit

• the law says we must, for example, we have to tell the local authority who is liable for Council Tax

• you give us permission.

Data protection

Under the Data Protection Act 1998, you are entitled to see the personal information we keep about you on file or on our computer system. If you ask to see all the information we hold about you on all our systems this is called a 'data access request', we may charge you £10 in advance for providing this information and we have 40 days