your Equality Monitoring form? You can choose whether or not to complete an equality monitoring form, if you are sent one. They are optional and voluntary and will not affect your access to our service or the outcome of your complaint. Why do you need to collect equlaity and diversity data? As a public body dealing with individual complaints it is important that our service is open and accessible. Equality monitoring has an important role in achieving this. It tells us about who complains to us, in relation to which types of bodies and which types of public service. This data taken as a whole can tell us important trends about whether certain services are nationally failing certain types of people more than others, or are seen more negatively. It is also important to have equality and diversity data on what types of people use our services in order to better understand who are our user group is so that we can construct services accordingly. Collecting equality data is an important corporate objective for us, in order to find out if the groups monitored use our services in similar proportions to how those groups use local public services. It is also one supported by the Government in passing the Equality Act 2010. The Act includes a specific duty for public bodies over a certain size. This new duty further emphasises the importance of collecting equality data from service users, from which we will then be expected to set equality objectives.