Chapter and diverse

We are all familiar these days with the language of equality. It is widely accepted that successful workplaces are actively challenging discrimination and welcoming a wide range of people that reflect the communities they serve.

Modern organisations boast robust equality statements, acknowledging their legal obligations and the business case for equality, as well as human rights imperatives. But with public policy embracing six key strands of equality and diversity, and a wider range of issues to get to grips with, how can we keep track of how we are doing, and be sure we are actually practising what we preach? Equality and Diversity Impact Assessments are one way of finding out.

The assessment is a systematic process of analysing a proposed or existing policy, strategy, service or project. It helps you identify its effect, or likely effect, on different groups in the community. This means you can anticipate any adverse effects and take steps to eliminate or minimise them. It is about ensuring your organisation's activities and plans are fair to everyone.

Negative impact

The assessments originate from the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, which places a duty on public sector organisations to carry out impact assessments. Along with Race Equality Impact Assessments, emerging legislation now also requires impact assessments for disability and gender. In addition to this, we now have laws to protect people from discrimination on the grounds of age, faith and sexual orientation, both in terms of employment and service provision.

An assessment can be designed to pull together all these areas and pick up on potential impacts on people from different ethnic groups, people with disabilities, women and men, people of different sexualities, people of different ages and people who practise different faiths, or none. There are no statutory duties, however, to promote sexual orientation, age or faith equality. But not having a public duty which obliges you to monitor and scrutinise what you are doing does make it much harder to prove you are complying with the law if someone does make a discrimination claim.

The government is looking to redress this, potentially though a Single Equality Act, which could lead to a more efficient way to promote equality across all six strands - so organisations carrying out assessments now are getting ahead of the game.

All this may sound unwieldy but it doesn't have to be: it is simply about ensuring everyone can enjoy the right to equal treatment and not suffer discrimination as a result of careless planning, or indeed unlawful practices.

Ottaway Strategic Management director Brian Pote-Hunt has been carrying out assessments for nearly seven years. His view is pragmatic: 'Equality impact assessments are often seen as an administrative burden rather than a tool for improvement,' he says. 'They're an opportunity to assess where your policies, practices and services are at. They're not a judgement on how credible or legitimate your operation is - they're a basic tool, like any other management tool, to enable you to improve and to mitigate risk.'

Risks involve negative impacts, or differential impacts, where the impact on one group is likely to be greater than on another. An example of a negative impact could be a staff meeting which is scheduled for Friday afternoons. This would have a detrimental impact on Jewish and Muslim staff.

Another example might be a special leave policy which recognises women with childcare responsibilities, but fails to provide for men with childcare responsibilities, or people with caring duties. Assessments are a systematic way of picking through this type of detail and flagging up potential issues.

In terms of positive impacts, an example could be a harassment policy which makes specific reference to discrimination on the grounds of the different diversity strands.

Equality and Diversity Impact Assessments are not an exact science, and a degree of common sense is involved. There are similarities with risk assessments - you have to anticipate or predict the impact of a policy or procedure on a wide range of different people with different needs. They are generally done using an established framework or template which asks a consistent series of questions. Tools are available on the internet and many organisations have developed tailored systems in-house.

'The design of the assessment can be as complex or as simple as you want,' says Brian, 'as long as you ask a few basic questions and focus your answers on the different equality groups'.

He suggests these include: what does this policy or initiative do and who does it target? What is good about it from an equality and diversity perspective? What gaps or barriers does it create? What do we need to do to mitigate negative impacts? What systems need to be in place to effectively monitor and review equality impacts in the future?

It is important that everyone involved is fully briefed and understands its scope and purpose. The assessment can also be informed by the legislative framework, scrutiny and monitoring systems, data or research, and the results of consultation.

Homelessness and social care organisation St Mungo's has recently commissioned an assessment. It wants an independent review of all its employment and service policies and practices to identify strengths and weaknesses around equality and diversity. This is informing a wider audit of all its services and functions, involving consultation with managers, diversity networks, frontline staff and service users.

Serious damage

Equality and diversity adviser Amanda Egan explains. 'St Mungo's wants to be an employer and a support provider of first choice. Embracing diversity and enabling equality of opportunity is absolutely central to that.

'We realise that in order to make this meaningful we need to fully understand how we're impacting on our staff and clients in practice. We need to know about any problems or gaps so we can do something about them. Our staff carry out incredibly demanding and often stressful work with some of the most vulnerable and challenging people in society - we want to create an environment in which everyone can realise their potential.'

It is in everyone's interests to ensure that not only are we complying with the law, but that we also create workplaces and service delivery environments where our policies and practices enable fair treatment and equality of opportunity. An assessment can help an organisation to examine how it impacts on different groups of people, and to weed out any negative potential impacts before they cause serious damage - either to an individual or to the organisation itself.