Councillor Robert Rams tweeted a
link to Conservative Home calling for an end to Equality Impact Assessments.
Instead, it suggests equality issues should be considered from the outset and
form part of the planning.
The difficulty with this is that
equality issues are often not properly thought through at the outset of
planning a new policy and recognising the effect a policy has on some groups
requires some specialist input. So having a formal assessment focuses the mind.
The difficulty is that
politicians believe that equality impact assessments stop them introducing
policies they want to and are a barrier rather than a positive thing. I don’t
think this is true. I think they strengthen policies and ensure they will work
in practice.
Let’s look at two local examples.
Cashless Parking
The Council controversially
decided to introduce pay by phone parking because it would save them money on
collecting cash from meters and repairing others which had been vandalised in
order to steal the coins.
The only equality impact
assessment performed was on the effect on staff, not residents or users. As a
result, the Council failed to recognise that 40% of older people do not own a
mobile phone and that those with hearing impairments have difficulty using them
in noisy roads. They did not appreciate how vulnerable people, particularly
women, would feel using mobile phones in the street.
As a result they ploughed ahead
with the policy, which was an abject disaster. Footfall on local high streets
fell by 35%, shops closed, and parking income fell dramatically.
If they had thought it through,
they might have considered having an option to pay by card in a machine as well
as pay by phone. I think all drivers have cards and can chip and pin. The
savings could have been made without the devastating impact on the policy.
Channel Shift
Barnet council wants to put all
its services online and encourage people to use their website. This is much
cheaper for them. If it is cheaper for them, then there is more money for other
things, so this is a good plan.
Figures I have seen quoted
elsewhere say that an online interaction costs the councils 18p, telephone
interactions cost £2.62 and a counter service costs £8.30.
But unless the Council takes into
account that 60% of older people have never been online they will not achieve
the savings they aspire to, and will foster resentment amongst residents.
Disabled people are also more likely to be digitally excluded. Both these
groups are big users of council services.
An equality impact assessment
should highlight this. There is also a simple answer. Not abandoning the
policy, but putting some investment, a tiny percentage of the cost of the
channel shift project, into teaching older people to get online.
This means that the policy will
work and the cost can be easily covered by the savings which may well meet the
projections. Which means, of course, that the funding for this should come from
the IT/ Communications budget, not Social Services. This is another scary
principle for our politicians, but in my view totally appropriate.
Communication is about communicating with everyone and, despite the fact that
there are other benefits to helping people become digitally included, Social
Services’ budget should primarily be about care and support.
So
Yes, Conservative Home is right
to say that the tick box is not the most important thing. The important thing
is to integrate equality impact assessments into the planning of a new policy
and to view them as a vital and important part of that planning. EIAs don’t
work if they are an add-on, tagged onto the end. But that does not mean that
they have no value. As Conservative Home says, equalities impacts are important
and until thinking them through is wholeheartedly embraced then an assessment
is a useful process to go through. If you use the information you gain.
Julia Hines
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Guest blogs are always welcome at the Barnet Eye
No comments:
Post a Comment