The Work and Pensions Committee has accepted and published Ecas' submission to its New Year inquiry into the Equality Bill proposals. The submission summarises our experiences trying to hold local authorities to account in relation to the disability equality duty. The full submission is available in the 'downloads' section of this website and is summarised below.

A primary means of complying with the DED is to undertake ‘equality impact
assessments’ of key policies and budget decisions. We believe the Council is failing to
undertake these assessments, or otherwise have ‘due regard’ for disability.
• The only means of privately enforcing the DED is judicial review – even after
instructing senior counsel, we have found this to be unworkable in practice:
• Apart from the prohibitively high legal costs involved, we found that the Council
refused to release information about its equality impact assessment;
• To obtain evidence, we were forced to resort to the freedom of information appeal
process – because this is a very lengthy process, by the time the evidence is
available, enforcement via judicial review is time barred.

The new Equality Act should remedy this by providing:
o a) a specific duty, on the part of public authorities, to publish full information
about initial screening and equality impact assessments undertaken;
o b) further specific duties allowing the public and organisations to be provided
with documentary evidence that decision-makers (e.g. councillors) were
informed of the predicted impact of their decision within a specified timescale
(e.g. 10 working days) of the request being received;
o c) stronger mechanisms to require and enable the EHRC to enforce
compliance with public authority equality schemes.