Equality and Human Rights Commission

The Commission’s enforcement powers

The Commission has formal powers to enforce the public sector duties, and to issue compliance notices.  Compliance notices require authorities to provide information on what steps they will take to meet the duties. If the authority fails to provide that information or take those steps, the EHRC can apply to a county court for an order requiring compliance. The court can make an order requiring compliance, and if the authority ignores it, the authority may be found to be in contempt of court.

In addition, the Commission or any interested individual can take a judicial review of the decisions of public authorities based on their obligations under the duties.

The Gender Equality Duty and the Map of Gaps

The Equality Act 2006 puts all public authorities in Great Britain under a statutory duty, while carrying out their functions, to ‘have due regard to the need to eliminate unlawful [sex] discrimination and harassment and to promote equality of opportunity between women and men’.   

This means that they must take into account  the different needs of men and women in all decision-making and policy development  concerning the provision and targeting  of services.

Violence against women is  a major cause of inequality for women .  This issue remains so common across Britain (affecting  three million women each year) that there is  unlikely  to be area of the country unaffected by it.   We would therefore expect all public bodies to have come across the issue when collecting evidence and consulting on the main gender equality issues for their service users. They should therefore have given consideration to prioritising work on violence against women and be able to prove this.  If they have chosen other priorities for action, they should have clear evidence of why they made those choices. 

The Commission has written to all local authorities that were identified by Map of Gaps 2 as having no specialised support  services for women experiencing violence.  We asked them to inform us of their current and planned provision of VAW services, and how they had taken into account the Gender Equality Duty when determining the extent and type of services , including the information and consultation they used when setting their gender equality objectives.

Based on the information received, we evaluated the authority’s compliance with their legal obligations. In total responses from 93 authorities were evaluated.

We are now requiring those authorities who have not satisfied us they have met their obligations under the gender duty to take steps to comply  and to provide evidence of compliance within a specified timescale. In the absence, the Commission may use its statutory enforcement powers under the Equality Act 2006, which include the powers to conduct a formal Assessment and/or to issue a Compliance notice requiring a public authority to take specified steps . 

What we looked at when evaluating the responses

The factors which we took into account when evaluating the responses included:

• whether the authority had a published Gender Equality Scheme (or Single Equality Scheme) which contained the authority's overall objectives for meeting the GED duty and the other information required by the Code of Practice. 
• whether annual reports describing the actions the authority had taken to implement the Scheme ‘s objectives. Had been published
• whether there was sufficient evidence of consultation with stakeholders, for example service users and voluntary sector organisations, and whether the findings of the consultation were taken into account in order to determine the extent of the need for violence against women services.
• whether there was sufficient evidence that the authority had gathered and used information about gender inequality,  such as the needs of victims of different forms of violence in the context of the social and ethnic makeup of their authority.
• the steps the authority had undertaken to determine the need for VAW support services in their area and whether they had  taken steps to identify any groups with their authority as more vulnerable to VAW.

Finally we looked at what provision exists within the local authority area for women seeking help in relation to violence and whether there was access to any shared specialist services in neighbouring authorities. Where services were only available outside the authority we examined the location and distance of these services from the authority, the accessibility and cost of public transport, and whether any financial or other support was provided to ease access.

The outcome

Letters and guidance were sent to all 93 Local Authorities by 22 September 2009.  Of these:

• Four of the local authorities do not appear to have published their plan for addressing gender inequality - a legal requirement since April 2007.
• A further 13 local authorities do not appear to be currently compliant with the legal requirements of the Gender Equality Duty.  Most have not consulted their communities or gathered any information to assess what women in their area need - as they are compelled to do by the Duty.
• 17 local authorities were evaluated as fully compliant.
• The remaining local authorities  have been made aware of areas of their gender equality duty that require improvement in order to fully comply with the duty.

Due to our responsibilities as a modern regulator, we are not able to name those local authorities who are not currently compliant and who are therefore at risk of enforcement action. 

Find out more about the gender equality duty and the other public sector duties.