Welsh Assembly and the lost equality impact assessment

[thatdamnedwoman]

The Welsh Assembly produced a 'Welsh Government Action Plan to advance equality for transgender people' in 2016

gov.wales/atisn13028

and said that an impact assessment had been carried out.

A Freedom of Information request was issued on March 2019 asking to see the impact assessment. The Impact assessment appears to have been lost. No trace of it anywhere — even though the Action Plan to Advance Equality for Transgender people mentions the importance of Impact Assessments. Here's the correspondence:

tinyurl.com/y6kxt29n

(I've had to do tinyurl as the original link was so long) It links to whatdotheyknow.com

If anyone here is sitting around at home today with nothing special to do you could check your local council (and possibly also town council and even parish council) on line and find out what resources/ action plans/ policies they have relating to transgender issues. If you find any, you could then use the letters in the whatdotheyknow link above as a template for making an FOI request asking about impact assessments.

My guess is the Welsh Assembly won't be the only body pushing change through without considering the impact on half the population. Let's help reveal this as the scandal we know it to be.

And possibly in two languages, too, SirVix! It may have eaten two lots!

This is so bloody anti-democratic. As is the pretense that it was done, that it existed only as a single copy / single source with no related paper-trail, and then that it mysteriously disappeared without trace. How dare they behave in this way. Duplicitous and potentially damaging to the rights of women & girls.

Watching with interest..they must be held to account.

Here's what they should have done - bit of a gap between theory & practice.
“Monitoring the Impact of our Policies and Practices
Within our Welsh specific equality duties, listed bodies must also ensure they continue to monitor the impact of their policies following an Equality Impact Assessment. Equality Impact Assessments are live and continuous assessments which last the lifecycle of the decision or policy and, in some cases beyond.
In Welsh Government, on completion of Equality Impact Assessments, an action plan and review date is required. At this review date, the original assessment of impact on protected characteristics must be reconsidered and evaluated. Where new impacts are identified,
or evidence has been gathered which supports our original assessment of impact, these are incorporated into the assessment.” From www.assembly.wales/.../gen-ld10885/gen-ld10885-e.pdf

Honestly, I get a bit despairing when I look at the Westminster UK government these days; but now that we have the Welsh Government, I really should get off my arse and start contacting my Assembly Members.

The person who sent in the original FOI also sent in a complaint / request for an internal review. Their complaint was rejected without any clear rationale: "An internal review has been conducted and I am satisfied that all reasonable steps have been taken to ascertain whether the information is held by the Welsh Government.The document cannot be located.Therefore I uphold the original response in the letter reference ATISN 13028 that was emailed to you on 3 April."
In other words 'bog-off'. From the "Director, Communities & Tackling Poverty".

The fact that a Welsh Government Action Plan to advance equality for transgender people was produced in 2016.

But with no trace of any Equality Impact Assessment in either Welsh or English, that we can trace.

And no trace of consultation with women. It all talks of consultation with trans groups. No women's groups mentioned, apart from Welsh Women's Aid; and Welsh Women's Aid has a transgender bias, because it is reliant on Welsh Government funding.

Have trawled through my local council's website and although LGBT groups are mentioned and in some cases trans groups appear on official charts/EIAs, I can't find any mention of women being expected to share spaces as council policy. As far as I can see it's left to individual businesses. For example, the recently opened Primark has unisex changing rooms.

There is a difference between private enterprises (e.g. your recently opened Primark) and our public services. Government-provided public services must carry out Equality Impact Assessments, first of all., before making policy. This is a statutory requirement.

interested? non Brian, we are not

Brain seems to be spamming this over many threads that are "inconvenient" for the TRA cause.

So no one thought to keep paper files as well in case this happens? I refuse to believe that there is no electronic or paper trail despite what is being claimed.

Its also incredibly unprofessional for the Head of Gender Equality Review for the Welsh Government to answer FOI's with the sign off "[a]ny of the statements or comments made above should be regarded as personal and not necessarily those of the Welsh Government, any constituent part or connected body.".

I know @OccasionalKite hence the reason I mentioned that individual businesses are left to their own devices.

Have reported Brain06626 on other threads. They're just being pathetic.

oooh...please tell me there was a complaint further to the 6th june response?

Did E WIlliams go back and ask for all emails? Welsh and ENglish? All minutes? Did they go to the information commissioner? Lodge a formal complaint at westminster? I am ridiculously invested in this - and outraged.

the Welsh government issues guidance on how to do a EIA here

I want to write and ask for the documents by step now!

I suspect a lot of arse covering now going on.

@thatdamnedwoman

I'm in Wales, this is scandalous. When you said "If others could contact local councils"
did you mean outside Wales?

Happy to contact my local Welsh council but obviously no point if same replies as yourself etc

Sorry, I'm rushing!

Bump

Scandalous. Thank you for posting - placemarking for a proper read later.

Thanks to Tryptychdebbie for checking her LA: I've checked mine and can't find anything either but I think probably Vale of Glamorgan council have something — the MP there is very woke and I've heard rumours of toolkits and so on being rolled out in schools so I'll find time to do a search this evening.

Thank you to all who've done the fine reading in English and Welsh. Yes, to have lost the document in both languages is a convenient coincidence, isn't it? If the EIA is supposed to be an ongoing project, with reviews and updates, it's even more troubling that it doesn't apparently exist. I'm going to contact my AM about it: others in Wales might contact theirs. This needs to be investigated.

Thanks for raising this OP - twitter has also been full of it. It absolutely does need to be investigated. Careless, patronising and inadequate at best; anti-democratic and corrupt seems more likely. Another sign of regulatory capture it seems.

I just wanted to pop a note of this here from another thread:

We wanted to bring your attention to an article in the academic journal Scottish Affairs, which has been published today. It’s about gender self-identification, Scottish public policymaking and policy capture, a topic we’ve seen debated in FWR on more than one occasion!

We’re delighted to say the article is published on an open access basis, so you can all read the full text and share it as you see fit on social media and elsewhere.

www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/scot.2019.0284

Thanks for sharing this, what a shit show indeed. Checking my council now.

Also here:

wgscotland.org.uk/discussion-papers/

Losing Sight of Women’s Rights: the unregulated introduction of gender self-identification

Tracing the piecemeal introduction of self-identified gender identity principles from 2001 onward, the analysis shows how decision-making on the sex question has been shaped by a reference to a limited group of interests that have excluded those of women.

The current policy direction, which conflates sex and gender identity, carries significant risks in terms of data quality and reliability.

It is clear that public authorities have repeatedly failed to assess properly the impact on other groups who have specific protections under the Equality Act 2010, as the Act requires, and that little thought has been given to the possibility that such policies might be open to abuse by individuals with malign intent, irrespective of gender identity.

There has been such a persistent failure to consider the possible wider impacts of gender self-identification, especially on women, and the adequacy of institutional safeguards against well-organised lobbying.

Can’t seem to find anything relevant about my local council....