GREENS have condemned the Prime Minister for ‘calling time’ on checks to make sure that sections of society aren’t discriminated against as a result of government decisions.
Last year the Government changed the rules so that these ‘Equality Impact Assessments’ weren’t essential to produce when making decisions, but authorities like Brighton & Hove City Council recognised their value and continued doing them.
In an announcement yesterday, David Cameron said that he would be forcing central government departments that had continued this work to stop.
Councillor Ben Duncan, lead for Equalities at Brighton and Hove City Council, said:
“Looking at the embarrassing assessments of some government decisions, it’s no wonder they’re looking to hide this information.
“Equality Impact Assessments are an important and useful way of understanding the effects of decisions that politicians make.
“I’m really proud that we at Brighton & Hove City Council have continued doing them, and that our work has been recognised for being among the best in the country.”
“How will making it easier to implement government policies that could discriminate against women, BME communities, or LGBT people help economic growth or tackle inequality in this country?
“It seems that the Prime Minister is more interested in fast-tracking uninformed and unfair decisions than making sound ones.”
Brighton Pavilion MP, Caroline Lucas, said:
“Not long ago, David Cameron was attacking civil servants as ‘the enemies of enterprise’, yet now he wants only the ‘smart people in Whitehall’ to consider fairness and equality issues in policymaking – making it far more difficult for civil society to hold him to account.
“Where is the evidence that so-called ‘bureaucratic rubbish’ is holding back the economy? This claim, driven by the Conservatives’ ideological obsession with deregulation at any cost, is nothing more than a smokescreen for the absence of real ideas at the heart of this government.
“What’s really keeping our economy down and hampering businesses is not regulation to prevent discrimination or to improve environmental protection – it’s the failure of the government to give policy certainty to industry and to invest in jobs-rich projects to get the economy back on its feet.”
ENDS