I have seen this Independent article circulating on social media quite a few times in the last few days: Louise Haigh MP talking about the government’s “cavalier attitude” to equalities in not conducting an equalities impact assessment before announcing the closure of some 78 Jobcentres. The DWP helpfully agrees it “will be conducting a full impact assessment as part of our planning”.
Let’s unpack this a little.
First of all, what do we mean by an “impact assessment”? The kind that I know most about is the Regulatory Impact Assessment. This is an examination of the costs and benefits of bringing in a new regulation. For tax, this is now conducted as part of producing the TIIN, tax information and impact note, which contains the table of impacts produced as part of the TIA (tax impact assessment). See the instructions on how to prepare a TIIN and the TIA which forms part of it, published on this blog here and here.
However because there was a helpful modernisation back in the noughties, when the word “regulatory” was dropped so the process became known as “Impact Assessment” (IA), there is now some confusion about the different forms of assessment that are required for different types of impact.
Mostly, assessing different specific impacts is folded into the process of producing a (regulatory) impact assessment, under the “other impacts” section. This is also true for a TIIN: the list of “other” impacts contained in the latest TIA instructions includes two different tests each, unblushingly, called PIA: the Privacy Impact Assessment and the People Impact Assessment.
Equality Impact Assessment is different. There is actual statute involved, whereas the IA, RIA, TIIN etc are basically justiciable via the concept of “legitimate expectation” (there’s clear, public, commitment to undergoing the process so theoretically you could bring a judicial review to try to overturn a decision which was made without undergoing that process).
There are two big caveats, though: equality legislation requires equality to be considered (given due regard) when reaching a decision but this doesn’t require the publication of a formal equality impact assessment document. And government is allowed to consider, yes, this will screw this particular group of people over, but – balancing the conflicting priorities of government – we’ve decided the overall policy objective is more important than the impact on [X] group of people so we’re just going to do it anyway.
So, dammit, DWP can probably get away with thinking about whether unemployed people with no money and multiple issues like disabilities can make it across towns without buses or bus fares to log onto the computers they don’t have to apply for the jobs that don’t exist and deciding, well, yes, but they have *all day* to walk miles and we’ll save money. And do it any way.
What the legislation does require, however, is that they decide to screw their customers before they make the decision to close down the services they need, and not just assess how badly they’ve screwed them over after they’ve done it.
tiintax 