Gerald Nash
Question:465. Deputy Ged Nash asked the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform if an equality budgeting statement will be forthcoming in budget 2022; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [39870/21]
View answerTuesday, 27 July 2021
Questions (465)
Written answers
Built on the performance budgeting framework that has been progressively embedded into the budget cycle, Equality Budgeting in Ireland has been developed over recent years with a view to enhancing the role of resource allocation policies in advancing equality, reducing poverty and strengthening economic and social rights.
Equality objectives and indicators are published every year in the Revised Estimates Volume (REV) and the Public Service Performance Report. Twelve departments are now reporting Equality Budgeting metrics. An Expert Advisory Group was established to guide development of Equality Budgeting policy, and has met regularly since September 2018. To further support the implementation of Equality Budgeting across all Departments, in March of this year, Government agreed to the establishment of an Inter-departmental Group on Equality Budgeting.
In 2019, my Department, in liaison with the then Department of Justice and Equality, commissioned the OECD to undertake a Policy Scan of Equality Budgeting in Ireland. This was published in tandem with Budget 2020. The report reviews Ireland’s equality budgeting programme and provides recommendations on its further development, in light of international experience.
In line with the OECD recommendation to develop an equalities data strategy, the CSO completed a data audit in cooperation with my Department, to ascertain the availability of public service data that is disaggregated by equality dimension. A report on this audit was published in October 2020.
Another OECD recommendation was the development of tagging and tracking functionality for departmental expenditure. My Department is working on this recommendation as part of an overall project to create a new architecture for Performance Budgeting. This project is funded under the EU Structural Reform Support Programme.
The OECD Policy Scan also raised the issue of an Equality Budgeting Statement. My Department is reviewing the different approaches to Gender Budgeting statements published by other OECD countries. The timing of publication, and the level of detail, vary greatly across OECD countries. This work will be used to inform future developments in this area taking into account: the level of detail in relation to Equality Budgeting currently published including in the REV and Public Service Performance Report; analysis published as part of the Spending Review process; existing tools such as the ESRI’s SWITCH Model; and linkages with the development of the Well-being Framework. In particular, this work will need to reflect that the approach to date with Equality Budgeting has been to embed equality perspectives across the whole-of-year budgetary process by setting out targets in the REV and reporting on performance versus targets in the Public Service Performance Report, with analyses such as Social Impact Assessments also supporting this whole-of-year approach.