How can we turn an exercise in box ticking into a powerful tool for challenging the impact of the spending cuts on the poorest and most vulnerable?

The public spending cuts are hitting people and communities across the country as cuts to jobs, services and benefits combine to devastating effect.

The Centre for Human Rights in Practice at the University of Warwick School of Law believes that Human Rights and Equality Impact Assessments can be a powerful tool for making sure that the impact of policies on different groups, particularly the poorest and most vulnerable, are taken into account when policy is made. However we also know that Impact Assessments can be seen as little more than tick box exercises. Our own research has shown that many impact assessments carried out by public bodies are poorly resourced, lack analysis and can seem like a justification for a decision already taken.

But it doesn’t have to be like this. For the last three years we have been working with voluntary and community groups to use Human Rights and Equality Impact Assessments to uncover the impact of the spending cuts on different communities. These local impact assessments, carried out by those directly affected by the cuts, can provide a powerful evidence base for local campaigning and lobbying as well as feeding into national debates about what the cuts mean in practice.

In partnership with Coventry Women’s Voices we have produced three reports on the impact of the cuts on different groups of women in Coventry. These reports have been described as ‘invaluable’ by the leader of Coventry City Council and have provided a model for reports in other parts of the country and for a toolkit published by the TUC. We have been really pleased to see other groups doing similar projects and creating toolkits of their own.

Our work in this area shows that there are groups up and down the country who want to demonstrate what the cuts are doing to their communities, but who are not sure where to begin. So to start meeting some of this need we are producing a database of resources, bringing together all the toolkits, research reports and local data sets that might be needed to carry out a local impact assessment. We’ve also created a list of legal challenges to the public spending cuts taken using the Public Sector Equality Duty as a resource for anyone considering their own legal challenge.

This is very much work in progress. We will continue to add to the database as new reports are published, new toolkits developed and new legal judgements made. We plan to develop some tools to help people get the information they need out of statistical databases. And we hope that people using the database will let us know where there are gaps, or information that they think we should include.

The database is just a start. But we hope that as it grows and is added to we will see more and more groups and networks carrying out their own assessment of the equality and human rights impact of the cuts and using the evidence to support local and national campaigns.