tiintax

Well this is interesting. Cat Smith, Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities,  asked in a written parliamentary question on 13th January

when the Government plans to publish the equality impact analysis of the Autumn Statement 2016 to comply with the Public Sector Equality Duty.

David Gauke’s reply said amongst other things that

 There is no statutory requirement to prepare this information in a particular form or to publish Equality Impact Assessments.

Now, there is no requirement to assess and publish the impact of the Budget or the Autumn Statement as a whole, a giant loophole in equality legislation that was opened up or at least exposed by the Fawcett case (when the Fawcett society brought a judicial review of the 2010 “emergency” Budget).  Nor is there a requirement to prepare a separate document called an Equality Impact Assessment.

However the outcome of the Fawcett case was – I always understood – an undertaking from the Treasury that they and HMRC would assess the impact of individual measures in a better, more systematic way.  And – I always understood – this was reflected in the design of the TIIN, which includes a specific field for the result of the work done on assessing the impact on equalities.  If you refer back to May 2012 where I published the TIIN instructions you will see they included this passage:

Equalities Impacts

This test concerns people with protected characteristics. All policies must be signed off as compliant with this statutory test. At each stage of policy development you must comment on what work you have done to see whether you have given due regard to any impact on people with these characteristics and say so explicitly if you think it has none. You must keep an audit trail of your consideration, and retain this written record in the policy area so that the Department can show it is fully compliant with the law, now and in the future.

The policy is likely to impact on Equality and therefore required to complete a separate equality assessment if you answer yes to any of the following five questions:

Will the policy or its implementation have a particular impact onindividuals with one or more of the equality groups below?

Are particular communities or groups likely to have different needs,experiences and/or attitudes in relation to the policy or itsimplementation?

Are there any aspects of the policy or the way that it is implemented that could contribute to inequality?

Could this policy or its implementation have a positive impact on equality groups?

Could the aims of the policy be in conflict with equal opportunity,elimination of discrimination, promotion of good relations?

There are 10 protected characteristics that you need to consider:

Racial Group, Gender, Transsexual/ Transgender, Disability, Carers, Age, Sexual Orientation, Religion or Belief, Marital Status/ Civil Partnership, Political Opinion (NI only).

It is important that you look at the Departmental guidance and liaise with [Personal data redacted under Section 40 of the FOI Act 2000] in ICD when considering Equalities impacts as they now ‘own’ this part of the process.

And this is what it says in the current TIIN instructions, which I published last week:

Equalities impacts

This box needs to show we have had “due regard” for equality to comply with section 149 Equality Act 2010 (and similar Northern Ireland legislation). So it is not enough to say that the measure does not discriminate. A mistake that is often made is to say that there is no equality impact when there is: just about any change to personal tax for example will have an equality impact, because it will tend to affect some groups differently to others. A lot of business tax changes do too.

If the measure affects people this box should be used to say what we know about who those people are (men/women, young/old etc). The Customer Equality team in Central Customer Directorate (CCD) can advise.