Impact Assessments

The council is required to review its main functions, policies, procedures and services to identify those that are relevant to equality of opportunity. This review needs to take account of each of the ReGARDS equality groups (religion/belief, gender, age, race, disability and sexual orientation).

This reviews will form the basis of the council's programme of equality Impact and Needs/Requirements Assessments.

Impact Assessments will enable the council to check for discriminatory effects or different outcomes for certain people.

It will also ensure that we take into account the needs and concerns of people from all racial groups, women and men, people with disabilities, people of all ages, religions/beliefs and sexual orientation.

If a negative impact on a group (or groups, in the case of multiple discrimination) of people in Derbyshire is found, we will put in place immediate measures to tackle this.

The council has awarded the responsibility for undertaking these assessments to departmental senior management teams, although the practical carrying-out of the assessments has been assigned to individual service managers within each department.

Through the assessments, managers will ascertain:

the level of awareness in different communities of their service
ease of access to services
appropriateness of services / policies and proposed policies
degrees of community involvement in service and policy development
appropriateness of services which have been procured through a partnership / contract process

The assessments will consider:

the definition of the function, policy, procedure or service
which equality groups it is relevant to
what monitoring data and other information is available
what consultation has taken place
if benchmarking has been undertaken
what barriers have been identified
complaints and other feedback received

We have prioritised our functions, policies, procedures and services and an action plan, in the form of a three year timetable, has been developed which sets out our commitment to undertaking equality Impact Assessments.

For full timetables of proposed Impact Assessments and completed year one Impact Assessments, please use the appropriate links on the left.