Report of the City Solicitor

This report describes the process for and the role of Equality Impact Assessment in the budget process for 2021-22. It outlines how this process has been evolved from previous years as well as highlighting how the service planning and business planning processes have also evolved, to ensure that equality considerations are more fully embedded. The report gives a high level overview of some of the Equality Impact Assessments linked to the 2021-22 budget proposals.

The Committee received a report of the City Solicitor which described the process for and the role of Equality Impact Assessment (EIA) in the budget process for 2021-22. It outlined how this process had been evolved from previous years as well as highlighting how the service planning and business planning processes had also evolved, to ensure that equality considerations were more fully embedded. The report gave a high-level overview of some of the EIAs linked to the 2021-22 budget proposals.

The main points and themes within the report included:

• Assessing inequalities in the budget process;
• Equalities in service and business planning;
• The Equality Duty in the Equality Act 2010; and
• The initial assessment of budget related EIAs.

The Chair informed Members that he would discuss with the Chair of the Resources and Governance Scrutiny Committee how the work of the Race Equality Working Group would be scrutinised.

Some of the key points that arose from the Committee’s discussions were:

• When had something been changed as a result of the EIA process;
• Concern that mental health was not mentioned and how had that been considered in the process;
• How the level of deprivation in different wards was taken into account in the EIA process; and
• Whether EIAs could be produced earlier in the process for future budgets to inform the discussion on the proposals.

The Director of Policy, Performance and Reform drew Members’ attention to appendix 2, which included examples, in particular from Children’s Services, where mitigations had been put in place to address inequalities in impact which had been identified through the EIA process.  The Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Manager informed the Committee how his team provided quality assurance support to services, including to identify equality impact which was not immediately obvious, and that part of the review of the process would be to formalise the team’s role in this.  He advised Members that the purpose of EIAs was to inform the decision-making process and that his team was working with services to support the completion of EIAs in a timely way.  In response to a Member’s question, he confirmed that poverty would continue to be included as a characteristic in the Council’s EIAs.  He advised that mental health fell within the protected characteristic of disability and that his team would need to do some work with services to ensure that they were considering mental health as part of their EIAs and to strengthen this as part of the review.

The City Solicitor reported that the review of the EIA process would include ensuring that assessments took place earlier in the budget process so that concerns and mitigations could be explored at an earlier stage.  She informed Members that she would take forward the issue raised about mental health and, as part of the review of the EIA process, ensure that mental health considerations were incorporated into the process.  She advised the Committee that EIAs were undertaken on the basis of protected characteristics rather than on a ward basis but that an analysis was taking place of the cumulative impact where particular groups were identified as being impacted by a number of the proposals and that that would have some geographical impact; however, she reported that she would take away the issue raised about a ward based analysis as part of the review.

Decision

To note the report.