Northern Ireland Office did not follow own rules on ‘equality screening’ for Troubles legacy plans

The equality watchdog said that the web of regulations governing “equality screening” in the Province mean that the NIO was obliged to provide a certain document upon request – but that it had failed to do so.

The saga has its roots in 2014’s Stormont House Agreement. This deal tasked the NIO with drawing up new laws dealing with the aftermath of the Troubles.

Ever since then, the government has tried to come up with viable legislation on the matter – a process which ultimately led to it unveiling a proposed amnesty for all Troubles crimes in July 2021.

Well before that, back in March 2020, the government had begun signalling that it was preparing to draw up “a revised legacy system”.

Then four months later, in July 2020, the UK’s junior defence minister Baroness Goldie told Parliament that “a Northern Ireland Bill is coming forth... the NIO is currently in the process of preparing it”.

Two complainants – the Pat Finucane Centre and the Committee for the Administration of Justice – then wrote to the NIO a week later asking for “a copy of the Equality Screening exercise [which has] preceded the preparation of this bill”.

The NIO’s own rules state that “screening documents will normally be... made available on request”.

The two complainants then went on to contact the Equality Commission, to complain they had never received the document.

The commission decided to investigate the matter in November 2020, and the probe got under way in earnest in February 2021.

Its staff spent the following eight months combing through the NIO’s equality policies, the laws which underpin them, and all the e-mails sent to-and-fro between the NIO and the complainants.

The outcome is an extremely complicated and densely-written 9,000-word report, published today.

The upshot of it all?

That the NIO should have sent an equality screening document to the complainants, but did not, because it was not ready.

The report concludes: “At the time of request for the screening form, the NIO stresses that the screening exercise was ongoing and so, in these terms, the NIO did not have a completed and approved screening form which it could provide to the complainants.”

The Equality Commission also told the News Letter: “It was clear from our investigation that when the announcement was made in March 2020, the proposals weren’t apparently informed by a specific equality assessment...

“Screening must be taken into account by policy makers before and at the time that a particular decision or policy is being considered, and not afterwards.”

According to its most recent annual report, the Equality Commission has 69 staff, and annual expenditure of roughly £5.4m.

Northern Ireland Office did not follow own rules on ‘equality screening’ for Troubles legacy plans – new report