Government asserts Treasury complies with Public Sector Equality Duty
30 January 2017
The Women and Equalities Committee has published the Government's response to its report on Equalities analysis and the 2015 Spending Review and Autumn Statement.
- Government Response: Equalities analysis and the 2015 Spending Review and Autumn Statement
- Government Response: Equalities analysis and the 2015 Spending Review and Autumn Statement (PDF 93KB)
- Women and Equalities Committee
Greater transparency necessary
The Committee's report was published in November 2016. It noted that the Treasury's Equalities Impact Analysis (PDF 272KB) on the 2015 Autumn Statement and Spending Review had been criticised as 'insubstantial'. It also noted that, with reference to the 2010 Spending Review, the Equality and Human Rights Commission had said greater transparency was necessary to show that the Treasury had complied with the Public Sector Equality Duty when formulating its policies.
The Committee had requested oral evidence from the Treasury and written responses from other Departments on how the Treasury had fulfilled this duty in respect of the 2015 Spending Review, but was not satisfied with the response to these requests.
Independent evaluation
The Committee concluded that, without more information, it was unable to form a view of how robust the equalities analysis of the Spending Review and Autumn Statement had been, and it recommended that the Treasury be independently evaluated on its compliance with the Public Sector Equality Duty. The Committee recommended that similar evaluations should be commissioned for equality analyses accompanying all future spending rounds and fiscal events.
The Government has rejected the recommendation that its approach be independently evaluated. It asserts that the Treasury fully complies with the Public Sector Equality Duty, and argues that making any further information available about the process would compromise candid discussions between the Treasury and other government departments.
Chair's comment
Committee Chair, Maria Miller, said:
"Transparency is a crucial element of the Public Sector Equality Duty requirements. An independent evaluation would provide evidence that the Government fully complies with the duty when setting spending policies. Such an evaluation need not entail putting sensitive policy discussions into the public domain.
Furthermore, we are not persuaded that government departments should cite parliamentary scrutiny as a contribution to fulfilling their own responsibility to analyse equalities impacts, as this response appears to do."
Further information
Image: PA