Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many equality impact assessments his Department produced in each year since 2006.

The Department is committed to providing services which embrace diversity and which promote equality of opportunity. As an employer, we are also committed to equality and valuing diversity within our workforce. Our goal is to ensure that these commitments are embedded in our day to day working practices with all our customers, colleagues and partners.

The Department is legally required to consider the impact of our policies and processes on people who share a protected characteristic, and to document our findings in order that we can provide evidence on this if challenged.

Following changes to equality legislation, the Department began moving away from the previous formal Equality Impact Assessment (EIA) to Equality Analysis (EA) in April 2012. DWP takes very seriously its duty under the Equality Act 2010 and Equality Analysis is the Department’s approach to paying ‘due regard’ to the requirements of the Equality Act and enables equality to be considered as part of everyday decision making processes.

It is the responsibility of individual policy areas to decide what is appropriate and proportionate for them when developing or implementing policies, services or changes that affect customers and DWP staff as the Equality Act does not specify a prescribed Equality Analysis process. As such we do not hold a central record of the number of equality analyses produced by the Department.