The patience of saints ECHR compliant Policy Writing thread for Civil Servants, Third Sector and HR people.

[woollyhatter]

Interesting to see that some of the more strident activist groups that have led the government and many other services up, what might politely be described the garden path, are being sidelined for the rewrite.

Since Mumsnetters are doing a rather marvellous job of the NHS audit of their existing trans policies for them how about we outline some of matters they will now have to attend to urgently?

Rather than having a seat at the table at the Scottish government‘s senior civil servant tea party, as reported in The Times, could we be like mother pouring the tea and generally pushing things along in a direction that is rather more sane than the last decade?

There is a lot of energy, intelligent and sensible advice here on this forum, but it’s difficult to get the threads out especially when we have the distraction and derails of drive-by scoldings. We can leave that to other threads. No doubt they will continue to be as lively as ever.

But this may be the place to speak truth to power in a constructive manner so we can start rebuilding from the mess that has been made by Stonewall, Scottish trans, Engender et al.

Sadly, it is not as though we can go back to version 1.9 pre 2014 since the shiny, brave and stunning 2.0 versions of trans rights uber alles policy

The social contract has been broken in some ways and we are now forced to emphasise the obvious that rights have to be properly balanced, and safeguarding is paramount and that affects all protected characteristics. The basic premise is that now no protected characteristic should impinge on the rights of another group with a protected characteristic.

So to kick off I am setting out a stall Equality Act compliance principles that should inform any new policies.

Principle 1

Any revised policy under the Equality Act should involve a written audit that has considered the rights of each of the nine groups with protected characteristics, outlining the advantages, detriments and neutrality of a proposed policy.

Guidance should be owned by the organisation publishing it. If it is written by a lobby group it should be clear that this is their view and not organisational or Government policy.

I’ve been doing a review of Dept of Health guidance on eliminating mixed sex wards over on the audit thread. It’s astonishing how much Dept of Health guidance in 2007/8 was actually written by trans lobby groups, much of it driven by Christine Burns of Press For Change.

From what I can see, this is where ‘getting ahead of the law’ and ‘trans people can choose their own toilet/ward/bathroom’ became official NHS policy.

Bump. There is such a lot of good work on this thread! I do hope it finds a wider readership.

Does anyone have an example of a good EqIA which maybe work as a good base for others to be developed from?

The Royal Marsden had a good description of each of the 9 protected characteristics.

But it’s the evidence base & consultation stuff which would be good to see for - say - a changing room…

Principle 1
Any revised policy under the Equality Act should involve a written audit that has considered the rights of each of the nine groups with protected characteristics, outlining the advantages, detriments and neutrality of a proposed policy.

Please may I suggest a tweak to your first principle OP? I think it should refer to having considered the rights of ALL RELEVANT GROUPS WITHIN EACH OF THE NINE PROTECTED CHARACTERISTICS rather than nine groups.

It's a great idea for a thread - thanks for starting it. Lots of thought-provoking posts - and lots of scope to take it further.

There should be two “formats”.

The first should be a “screening” to consider what impacts might affect which groups. If there are any negative impacts then proceed to step 2 for those affected.

A full EqIA then looks in more detail at the affected PCs. With evidence and consultation. That’s the difficult bit?!

I'm an analyst and I agree wholeheartedly. Linking this here re data collection and statistics in case you haven't already read it:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/independent-review-of-data-statistics-and-research-on-sex-and-gender/review-of-data-statistics-and-research-on-sex-and-gender-executive-summary

I've never seen one that actually identified an impact let alone proposed a change to what was planned.

The problem is women won't be seen as relevant (again).

Well they're one of the two obvious groups within the protected characteristic of sex.

My point was more that there aren't 'nine groups', there are 'nine protected characteristics'.

Sadly, I agree.

Same here. Makes me want to actually google for one useful example. In my work we are always risk assessing with collated data, then putting in mitigations as part of our role in a regulated sector. Hadn’t stopped long enough to think what actual contribution our political overseers add to the mix.

Amend away since Hive brain of mumsnet is rather brilliant.

Agree thoroughly with PP saying how difficult it can be to do meaningful public engagement / consultation and how certain demographics are overlooked / under-represented. This isn't just a problem in the sex realism area either - the local consultations for LTNs in my nearest city were really poor in that they excluded a huge demographic of people travelling into the city to work, and totally ignored impacts on this large group of people. Caveat that this is as far as I can tell - I gave up on trying to provide input after a while, because it was taking far too long and was too complicated and obviously I wasn't getting paid and decided quite quickly I was unlikely to influence anything.

At the very least documents should be clear and easy to understand so that if members of the public wish to participate they can do so. I remember attending many training sessions about writing in 'plain English' in my youth (!). But the NHS has not only NOT used 'plain English' it has unilaterally, and without telling anyone, redefined the meaning of basic words. 'Woman', 'man', 'single-sex' and 'harassment' would be my top 4 words that the NHS (in general) uses in a different way than the average person in this country.

So the average person has no hope of reading their policies and understanding what they mean in practice.

Whilst in some policies terms are defined, it's pretty clear those meanings then carry across to other policies where terms AREN'T defined. Particularly the new mixed-sex meanings of 'man' and 'woman'.