Equality Impact Assessment
What is an Equality Impact Assessment?
Equality Impact Assessments (EIA) helps you place fairness and equality at the centre of decision making, policy and practice.
EIA is a process which helps you assess the likely or actual impact a decision or recommendation, practice, policy, procedure, project, strategy, product, service or function has on different sections of the community (including employees).
The main purpose of an EIA is to pre-empt the possibility of a function that could affect some people unfavourably. In this respect, the 'people' refers to groups or individuals who belong to specific equality strands i.e. race, gender, disability, age, sexual orientation and religion or belief.
The benefits of Equality Impact Assessment
Equality Impact Assessments help us to:-
- Comply with legislation
- Promote good relations
- Manage risk
- Promote the Group as a good employer, service provider and service enabler
- Improve Service Delivery
- Mainstream Equality and Diversity
- Enable us to engage with our service users
- Combat unlawful discrimination against all protected characteristics as outlined in Equality Act 2010
The results of the Equality Impact Assessment are used to set equality objectives that become part of Service Plans, leading to improvements to services and employment practices. They may also highlight that we need more information about our customers and service users, for example through monitoring or consultation.
Cestria is currently undertaking Equality Impact Assessments (EIA) on all our service areas. EIA forms and reports will be available on completion. If you have any queries please contact Corporate Services on 0191 385 1442 or e-mail equality@cestria.org.
Equality Impact Assesments and Action Plans
In 2009/2010 Cestria completed Equality Impact Assessment Service Reviews assessing 15 different service areas. Although impact assessments generally assess policy and procedures, Cestria took a more thorough approach as this was the first time Cestria completed EIAs. Cestria has produced a report for each service review detailing the outcomes from the EIAs for the relevant service area. The reports can be viewed by clicking on 'EIA Service Reviews 2010' link below. All the outcomes from these reviews have now formed part of our Single Equality Scheme 2010-2013 action plan and will be monitored by our Corporate Equality & Diversity Working Group. If you wish to see the detailed assessments please contact us.
Following the service reviews Cestria has completed EIAs on individual policies at the time of policy review or developing a new policy. These EIAs can be found be clicking on 'Equality Impact Assessments' below.