Article 55 Review 

 

These reviews, which are commonly known as Article 55 Reviews, must be conducted at least once every three years.

The Commission provides documentation to assist employers complete their Article 55 Reviews. The following links provide access to this documentation relevant to your business/organization´s current make-up:

Click here if you employ 51 employees or more.
Click here if you employ 50 employees or less.

At the relevant time for completing a review, the Equality Commission will send to each employer the pro-forma review template, together with guidance on how to complete it. This guidance will also set out the prescribed period for completing the review and information on how to contact the Commission to obtain further advice and assistance.

 

The precise way in which a particular employer carries out a review will depend on his or her own individual circumstances, although in both large and small organisations the review will have to be conducted in a formal manner with a written report being prepared. The pro-forma review template supplied by the Commission will assist most employers in this regard.

 

Unlike the annual monitoring returns there is no requirement on employers to submit their Article 55 Review report to the Commission by a specific date. The Equality Commission has a duty to ensure that employers comply with their legal obligation to carry out Article 55 Reviews and therefore requests employers to periodically submit their Review to the Commission. It is therefore very important that employers complete their Reviews within the required period and that it is made available on request to the Equality Commission.

 

The fifth of the key duties that FETO imposes on employers is that when they carry out their Article 55 reviews, they must have regard to the advice contained in the Fair Employment Code of Practice. You may also click here to view this document in Word format. 

 

Determine whether there is fair participation

The primary purpose of an Article 55 review is to enable the employer to determine whether he or she is providing, or is likely to continue to provide, fair participation in employment to members of the Protestant and Roman Catholic communities.

 

A determination of what is fair depends on the circumstances of each particular case. The term fair participation means that employers should be working continuously, as an integral part of their personnel and management functions to ensure that equality of opportunity in their employment is offered to members of the Protestant and Roman Catholic communities. It also means that where such equality of opportunity is not being provided employers should be making sustained efforts to promote it through affirmative action measures and, if appropriate, the setting of goals and timetables. It does not mean that every job, occupation or position in every undertaking throughout Northern Ireland must reflect the proportionate distribution of Protestants and Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland.

 

An indicator that fair participation is not being provided to one particular community may be, for example, that the numbers of applications for employment from members of that community are regularly lower than the numbers that ought to be expected when compared to the community background composition of the available workforce in the appropriate catchment area. A catchment area refers to the geographical area from within which an employer would normally expect to recruit for the particular job in question and the proportionate distribution of the Protestant and Roman Catholic communities in that area.

 

Another indicator that fair participation may not exist may be that the

proportion of appointees from a particular community are regularly lower than the proportion of applicants from that community: or, in other words, the success rates for job applicants from that community are regularly lower than the success rates enjoyed by job applicants from the other community.

Where an employer has, in addition to community background data, also collected monitoring data on the racial groups of his or her job applicants and employees, he or she should analyze all of this information to ensure that the Review reaches valid conclusions about the provision of fair participation in the workforce and whether there is a need to take affirmative action.