Officials at the Government Equalities Office (GEO) decided to carry out an EIA into the Equality Bill itself in 2009.
The resulting 89-page report admits: ‘This Equality Impact Assessment is unusual in the sense that the entire purpose of its subject – the Equality Bill – is to tackle discrimination and promote equality of opportunity.’
The report also acknowledges that the Bill was drawn up ‘in consultation with a wide range of government departments and stakeholders including equality representatives, trade unions and businesses’.
The EIA examined each of the Bill’s measures in terms of their impact on race, age, disability, gender, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, religion or belief. It concluded that the proposals would ‘have a positive impact on all the equality strands’
So prior to passing the proposed legislation into law, the entity that would have responsibility for enforcing it did two things: (1) conducted consultations with a broad range of affected stakeholders, presumably to obtain their views about how the legislation would affect them, whether positively or negatively, and (2) presumably on the basis of those consultations and whatever other information was available, conducted its own assessment of whether the legislation would be effective in achieving its intended objectives.
Last week The Mail on Sunday revealed that several Whitehall departments had spent money on reports – called Equality Impact Assessments (EIAs) – to ensure new and existing policies were in line with requirements of the Act.
So the government of the day passed a piece of legislation, and several government departments subsequently conducted reviews of their own policies to ensure that they were operating in compliance with said legislation, presumably so they could make any necessary adjustments to their own policies, if required, in order to bring them into compliance.
Forgive me for being dense, but I'm not seeing anything particularly egregious about either of these courses of action. In fact, I would think that it would only be common sense, and should be REQUIRED for ANY piece of legislation, that there should be evidence provided that the proposed law will do what it sets out to do prior to passage, and that subsequent to passage, any government department affected by the legislation should take steps to ensure that it is operating in compliance.
If I were a legislator considering a change in tax law, I would want there to be consultations with those affected by the tax changes being proposed, I would want some sort of report that shows me that the intended impacts of the tax change (whether in terms of effect on tax revenues or increased economic activity or whatever) will be achievable, and I would want any government departments having a hand in collecting the tax to make the required policy and procedural changes to give effect to the tax changes. Any reason why it should be any different in this case?