Dáil Éireann Debate, Thursday - 21 September 2023
142. Deputy Thomas Pringle asked the Minister for Finance whether his Department is in the process of carrying out gender and equality proofing of revenue and taxation proposals as part of this year's budgetary process; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [40879/23]
View answerThe 2020 Programme for Government, “Our Shared Future”, contains a commitment to “Expand the Equality Budgeting Programme across government departments and agencies.”
Work has already been done to mainstream the approach to equality budgeting across Government, led by the Department of Public Expenditure, NDP Delivery and Reform and the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth. As part of this work, an Equality Budgeting Interdepartmental Network was established in order to fully implement equality budgeting across all departments, co-ordinated by the Department of Public Expenditure, NDP Delivery and Reform. My Department also participates in the Expert Advisory Group on Equality Budgeting which comprises representatives from Government departments, academic experts and civil society bodies.
Equality Budgeting from a Tax Perspective was published as part of Budget 2022, which detailed the Department’s work in developing a process for equality budgeting in Ireland with respect to taxation policy.
Budget 2023 documents included a publication called “Beyond GDP - Quality of Life Assessment. Chapter 5 of this document advances the work on equality budgeting from a tax perspective, analysing the effects of incremental budgetary policy and tax policy on a range of equality-related metrics and societal groups.
The Department continues to provide more information on the impact of tax policy measures on different groups in society, for instance the distributional analysis of the Budget published alongside recent Budgets and in recent years, equality considerations have been included in some of the published Tax Strategy Group papers.
However, a key challenge identified, not just for the Department but across Government and internationally is around the availability of data. For instance, tax returns capture limited data on equality characteristics. Data that are captured, such as gender and age, tend to concern only the relevant earner for tax purposes, rather than the person qualifying for the particular expenditure.
Regarding the ongoing nature of such work, the confidential nature of the Budget process means that I cannot provide an update on any analysis being conducted in respect of tax and welfare measures prior to the Budget.
