What is Equalities Impact Assessment?

Impact assessments are most likely to be needed for public bodies during the process of developing equality schemes. However, they are also extremely useful tools for systematically assessing policies to ensure that they are not having an unintended negative impact on any equality strands or disadvantaged groups.

Doing impact assessment on the policies will help you to determine whether or not they are robust enough and promote equality in the workplace.

• An Equalities Impact Assessment (EIA) involves gathering and using evidence to make a judgement about how a particular policy affects, or is likely to affect different groups of people when it is implemented.
• The assessment should identify whether the policy and its related procedures affect people from different equality strands in different ways and, if they do, then it should establish whether the differential impact is positive, negative or neutral.
• If the policy is identified as having a negative differential impact that cannot be justified, action will need to be taken to remove, reduce or mitigate this impact. This might involve amending the policy, introducing an alternative policy or taking other measures to offset the effects.

It is important to remember that doing an equality impact assessment is not an end in itself, but a means of ensuring that your policy or procedures do not result in unlawful discrimination, and that they promote equality.

Download the
Equalities Impact Assessment Flowchart
[PDF, 194kb]

Key Stages of an Equality Impact Assessment

An equality impact assessment is not an end in itself, but a means of ensuring that your policy or procedures do not result in unlawful discrimination, and that they promote equality.

Full assessment of a proposed policy should:

Identify all aims of the policy
Consider the evidence
Assess likely impact on equality groups
Consider alternatives
Consult formally
Decide whether to adopt the policy
Make monitoring arrangements
Publish assessment results

New policies
It will be necessary to undertake an Initial EIA when developing new policies or when considering changes to an existing policy.

Consultation
There will be a range of circumstances when further information needs to be gathered on a policy through consultation. These include, where:

• the data collected as part of a Full EIA is inconclusive
• different data collection methods used as part of the Full EIA contradict each other
• a policy has been radically rewritten to try and mitigate a negative differential impact
• a new measure has been introduced to mitigate any negative differential impact
• a new policy is being developed which is assessed as having high relevance to equality and diversity

Concluding the EIA process
Central record of the outcomes of all Initial and Full EIAs, including any actions that have been identified as part of the process need to be kept.