Competence for an equalities impact assessment

If you are asking who writes an equalities impact assessment for a planning application, the more useful question is whose duty it discharges. The answer is that it discharges nobody's duty but the council's, and the council cannot delegate that duty to you.

Section 149 of the Equality Act 2010 places the public sector equality duty on public authorities. In exercising its functions, the authority must have due regard to the need to eliminate unlawful discrimination, advance equality of opportunity, and foster good relations between people who share a protected characteristic and those who do not. Deciding a planning application is such a function.

So an applicant's assessment is evidence the authority can use. It is not the assessment the law requires.

Whose duty the assessment serves

The duty sits on the decision maker. That means the planning committee or the officer acting under delegated powers, advised by the officer's report.

Nothing in the Equality Act requires anyone to produce a document called an equalities impact assessment. The duty is to have due regard, and the courts have been clear that a document is not a substitute for actually turning your mind to the issues. What a well-made document does is provide the evidence and the analysis that make due regard possible, and provide the record that shows it happened.

There is no licence, register or protected title for authors. Planners, social researchers, health impact practitioners and specialist equality consultants all write them, and the discipline matters less than whether the author can handle population data and consultation evidence without overstating either.

What the duty requires of a decision maker

The case law, particularly the Bracking line of authority, has produced a set of principles that officers and their lawyers apply.

• The duty must be exercised in substance, with rigour and an open mind, not as a box-ticking exercise after the decision is effectively made.
• It is a continuing duty, so it applies as the scheme changes during determination.
• The decision maker must understand the practical effect on people with the relevant characteristics, not merely note that a characteristic exists.
• The duty cannot be delegated to a consultant or an applicant.
• Keeping a record of how the duty was discharged is strongly advisable, because an absent record is hard to defend.

The duty is to have due regard, not to achieve equality of outcome. An authority can lawfully grant permission for a scheme with adverse effects on a protected group, provided it understood those effects and weighed them. Losing that distinction is the commonest error in applicant-prepared documents, which often read as though a finding of any adverse effect defeats the proposal.

Applicant-prepared assessments and their status

A developer's Equalities Impact Assessment is a supporting document with a specific job: to give the officer the population evidence, the identified effects and the proposed mitigation, in a form that can be lifted into the committee report.

Write it accordingly. That means stating the data sources, being explicit about what is known and what is assumed, and separating effects during construction from effects in operation.

Three types of scheme generate most of the demand for one. Developments affecting a facility used disproportionately by one group, such as a day centre, a place of worship or a community hall. Developments proposing specialist accommodation, where age or disability is central to the housing need case. And schemes where the loss or relocation of an existing use affects a group with a protected characteristic, which includes Gypsy and Traveller sites, since Romany Gypsies and Irish Travellers are recognised ethnic groups for the purposes of the Act.

Some authorities ask for one routinely on major applications. Ask at pre-application stage whether they expect a document, and whether they have a template, because a document in their own format gets used and a document in yours gets summarised.

Evidence on protected characteristics

The nine protected characteristics are age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation. An assessment that works through all nine with the word "neutral" against eight of them is the version officers have learned to distrust.

Better practice is to identify the characteristics plausibly engaged by this proposal in this place, say why the others are not, and then do real work on the ones that are.

Census data from the Office for National Statistics is the usual spine, supplemented by the local authority's own evidence base, including the joint strategic needs assessment and any accommodation assessments.

Avoid presenting national prevalence figures as local ones. If you use a national rate, say so, and say why it is the best available figure for the area.

Engagement with affected groups

Engagement is what separates a document with content from a document with assertions.

The methods that produce usable evidence are small and specific: a meeting with the management committee of the affected facility, a session with a residents' group arranged through a known contact, a short structured conversation with the existing site occupiers, or correspondence with a representative organisation.

Record who was spoken to, when, what they said and what changed as a result. Where nothing changed, say that and explain why.

Where the engagement forms part of wider community involvement, the record belongs in the Statement of Community Involvement as well, and the two documents should not contradict each other on dates or attendance.

Where the authority must do its own analysis

Even with a good applicant document, the authority has work it cannot avoid.

It has to reach its own view on the effects, using its own knowledge of local services and communities. It has to consider effects the applicant has no reason to raise, including effects on groups who did not object. It has to apply the duty again if the scheme is amended. And it has to record its reasoning in the officer's report in a way that would survive scrutiny.

Where an authority refuses to engage with an obvious equalities issue, that is a potential ground of challenge by judicial review, and it is a ground that has succeeded in planning cases. For the applicant, the practical consequence is that helping the officer discharge the duty properly protects your own permission.

Common weaknesses in submitted assessments

The recurring faults are easy to list and easy to avoid.

1. A table of nine characteristics with no data behind any of them.
2. National statistics presented without a local comparison.
3. No engagement at all, or engagement limited to the statutory consultation.
4. Conflation with health impact work, when the two have different scopes. A Health Impact Assessment deals with determinants of health across the population, and the overlap is partial. The division of labour between the two documents is set out further in who can prepare a health impact assessment.
5. Mitigation expressed as aspiration rather than as something a condition or obligation could secure.
6. Produced after the design was frozen, so nothing in it could have changed the scheme.

That last one is the real test. An equalities assessment written during design can move a step-free entrance, change a lighting layout, keep a community room or phase a relocation so that users are not displaced. Written afterwards, it documents decisions already taken.

The honest uncertainty is weight. Courts have overturned decisions for failures of process under section 149, but the duty does not dictate outcomes, and how much weight equalities effects carry against housing delivery or economic benefit is a judgement that varies case by case.

Browse all 66 report types on PlanScope to see where the equalities and health documents sit in a major application pack.

This is general guidance, not legal advice; check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.