Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many equality impact assessments her Department carried out in each year between 2010 and 2016.

The Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) in the Equality Act 2010 ensures that public bodies take account of equality and consider the potential impact of decisions on groups with protected characteristics. All bodies exercising public functions who are subject to the PSED need to understand the impact of their policies and services on people with different protected characteristics and be able to provide evidence that this has been taken into account during the decision-making process. However, the legislation does not prescribe how this information needs to be recorded and it is not a statutory requirement in England to prepare or publish information in a particular form, such as an Equality Impact Assessment.