This web page is designed to provide an accessible source of information demonstrating how Chesterfield Borough Council is playing its part in making society fairer by tackling discrimination and providing equality of opportunity for all.

In order to demonstrate our compliance with the duties in an accessible way, we have broken down the required information below. For further information about the duties, please see our Equality Act page.

Equality objectives

Our Council Plan for 2019–2023 includes the council's vision, aims and objectives including the council's overarching objectives in terms of equality. 

Information about our policies and services

The Equality Act requires public bodies to consider how the decisions that they make, and the services they deliver, affect people who share different protected characteristics. Guidance from the Government Equalities Office states that public bodies should take a proportionate approach when complying with the Equality Duty – in practice, this means giving greater consideration to the Equality Duty where a function or policy has the potential to have a substantial effect on discrimination or equality of opportunity for the public or the public body's employees, and less consideration where the potential effect on equality is slight.

We have worked with colleagues at Bolsover District Council and North East Derbyshire District Council to establish a unified approach to the information we publish about services and policies and to ensure that we focus on those services which are customer facing. To view this data, please see our information about our policies and services. Where we have identified gaps in the information we collect, a gap action plan has been developed to demonstrate our commitment to publishing a complete and proportionate set of information about our services.

Equality Impact Assessments (EIAs) are one way in which the council has due regard to the three aims of the Public Sector Equality Duty is by undertaking Equality Impact Assessments (EIAs) whenever a policy, project, service, function or strategy is reviewed, created or changed. EIAs are undertaken before decisions are made by the council so that councillors are able to consider any impacts and agree mitigating action where appropriate. 

Our EIA process allows the council to identify and mitigate against any potential negative impacts of our services on different groups. It is completed before the policy, project, service function or strategy has been set up, to ensure that mitigating action can be included in our plans. During our Peer Challenge Review against the Equality Framework for Local Government, the challenge team reported that the EIA process at Chesterfield Borough Council is comprehensive and demonstrates examples of challenge at all stages.

We use EIAs to:

• stop direct and indirect discrimination from happening now and in the future
• highlight diversity as a strength and an integral part of our work, not just an add on
• recognise the fact that we don’t all have an equal chance in life, and find ways to address this through our work
• make sure that our services are accessible to everyone in the community
• help improving the way we treat our customers 
• help with the decisions that we need to make 
• improve relations with our residents by publicising our commitment to equality as an organisation 

To view the Equality Impact Assessments undertaken by Chesterfield Borough Council, please visit our Equality Impact Assessment page.