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Due to essential maintenance, the following systems will be unavailable from 6.00pm on Monday 2 October until 8.00am on Tuesday 3 October: our online council tax, business rates and housing benefit services, and our welfare assistance form. You will also not be able to register to pay council tax online, make a change of address for council tax or cancel single person discount. You are still able to make a payment during this time. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

Equality Impact Assessments


Equality Impact Assessments (EqIAs) help us to identify the actions needed to improve equal opportunities for people and reduce or remove any negative impact when making difficult financial decisions. The actions are included in our team, service and council plans.

Why do equality impact assessments?

Impact assessments play an important part in removing barriers, reducing negative impact and identifying improvements to ensure that our services, employment and decision-making are inclusive. As a public sector organisation we must remove unlawful discrimination, advance equal opportunities and promote good relations between people. This is called our public sector equality duty. 

We can't assume that everyone benefits equally from our decisions, policies or services. We need a process to check that we are taking reasonable steps to tackle disadvantage and meet the diverse needs of all our communities.

The impact assessment process requires us to record any potential or actual impact for different groups, whether this is positive or negative, including any action we need to take to address impact.

The evidence we use to do this should be from a range of sources including consultation, statistics, regional comparisons and customer or user feedback. Any decisions must be based on evidence, and any potential or actual negative impact must be addressed.

We publish our equality impact assessments on our website with relevant decision making reports, you can click on the link to the right to view our meetings, agendas and minutes

Contact us
Equality and Diversity
03000 268 019
Our address is:
  • Room 4/139
  • County Hall
  • Durham
  • County Durham
  • United Kingdom
  • DH1 5UF