What do service areas do?

Service areas would ordinarily carry out a screening assessment, or stage one equality impact assessment. This enables energies to be focussed on review and monitoring and ongoing evidence collection about the positive or negative impacts of a service change upon groupings in the community, and for any adjustments to be considered and made accordingly.

These screening assessments are recommended to be undertaken at timely points in the development and implementation of the proposed service change.

For example, an initial or stage one ESHIA would be a recommended course of action before a consultation. This would draw upon the evidence available at that time, and identify the target audiences, and assess at that initial stage what the likely impact of the service change could be across the protected characteristic groupings and our tenth category of social inclusion. This ESHIA would set out intended actions to engage with the groupings, particularly those who are historically less likely to engage in public consultation eg young people, as otherwise we would not know their specific needs.

A second stage one ESHIA would then be carried out after the consultation, to say what the feedback was, to set out changes proposed as a result of the feedback, and to say where responses were low and what the plans are to engage with groupings who did not really respond. This ESHIA would also draw more upon actions to review impacts in order to mitigate the negative and accentuate the positive. Examples of this approach include the Great Outdoors Strategy, and the Economic Growth Strategy.

Meeting our Public Sector Equality Duty through carrying out these ESHIAs is very much about using them as an opportunity to demonstrate ongoing engagement across groupings and to thus visibly show we are taking what is called due regard of the needs of people in protected characteristic groupings

The screening template is kept under review in order to take account of the local factors we have mentioned, and in order to adjust it in the light of feedback from service areas about which bits they are finding tricky and which bits are working well.

In June 2023, we updated the ESHIA for the new cycle of committee reports. This is in order to amplify not only the health and well being element but also the duty that now applies in law to have due regard to the needs of veterans and serving members of the armed forces and their families. We have also made what we hope will serve as useful clarifications to the guidance. This guidance is provided to officers via the council intranet, along with the worked example from July 2023, also reproduced on this page.