Equality and Human Rights Impact Assessment

Equality and Human Rights Impact Assessments, or EHRIA's, help us to make sure we have paid 'due regard' to the impact any changes to our services, procedures or policies may have on residents, visitors or staff with protected characteristics (as defined by the Equality Act 2010) and also helps with our compliance to the Public Sector Equality Duty. EHRIA's also ensure that we have looked to see if we can improve our services, and that they do not, without knowing or by mistake, disadvantage or discriminate against any protected group, as well as helping us to improve our employees' understanding of the equality issues involved in their service.  

We have already completed a wide number of assessments of our policies, procedures and services which are available on request, and new EHRIA's are completed with every significant change proposed.

The process of considering the equality and human rights impacts of policies and procedures on our District, has recently been reviewed and simplified to make it more accessible and easier to use. It also now incorporates questions around Social Deprevation, Health Inequalities and BAME disparities in relation to potential Coronavirus transmission. We now complete an Equality and Human Right Impact Matrix (EHRIM) first, which operates as a risk-based equality analysis tool, to assess our services, functions and policies, for their likely or actual effect on people with respect to the protected characteristics, human rights, social deprevation and health inequalities. If the EHRIM shows a significant negative impact on any of the protected charactersitics, human rights, those living within areas of social deprivation, or those with health inequaities, a full EHRIA document will be completed to allow for 'reasonable adjustments' in accordance with the Equality Act 2010 to take place.