Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 10 May 2022
296. Deputy Mark Ward asked the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform the ways in which Budget 2023 will be delivered in an accessible, inclusive and transparent manner in line with Ireland’s obligations under article 4.3 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [23101/22]
Amharc ar fhreagraThe Equality Budgeting and Well-being Budgeting initiatives are part of the ongoing development of Ireland’s performance framework that also includes the Performance Budgeting and Green Budgeting initiatives, the ongoing development of the Public Spending Code, the Establishment of the Irish Government Economic & Evaluation Service and the Spending Review process.
Within this broader performance framework, the Equality Budgeting and Well-being Framework initiatives are seeking to increase the focus on policy goals and the impact of public policy on people’s lives. In addition to a common focus on policy goals and outcomes, both initiatives also have an explicit focus on people’s experiences and how the impact of public policy can differ between groups of people. These differences have the potential to support and inform the policy process by providing a more refined description of the policy challenge, articulating clearer policy goals and identifying who may benefit from more targeted policy interventions.
Beginning with a pilot programme introduced for the 2018 budgetary cycle, Equality Budgeting is a way of approaching and understanding the budget as a process that embodies long-standing societal choices about how resources are used, rather than simply a neutral process of resource allocation. In practice, this means that equality budgeting attempts to provide greater information on how proposed or ongoing budgetary decisions impact on particular groups in society, thereby integrating equality concerns into the budgetary process.
Equality objectives and indicators are published every year in the REV and the Public Service Performance Report. The initial focus of Equality Budgeting was on gender, following which the initiative was extended to other dimensions of equality including disability and socioeconomic inequality.
In 2019, the OECD published a report on Equality Budgeting in Ireland, providing 12 recommendations on how to drive this initiative forward. Implementation of the report's recommendations is now at an advanced stage.
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.
In order to support the continuing development of performance budgeting in Ireland, the Department of Public Expenditure & Reform has been successful in its application to the EU’s Structural Reform Support Programme (SRSP). The project that the EU is funding under this Programme is providing Ireland with the opportunity to work with technical experts from the EU and OECD as well as other international experts in order to take stock of how effectively performance budgeting has been working and to consider future directions for ongoing reform drawing on international best practice. This project also takes cognisance of the other reform initiatives (e.g., equality budgeting, green budgeting, and well-being budgeting).
An inter-departmental group has also been established for Equality Budgeting to facilitate the embedding of the initiative across all Government departments. This group plays a key role in guiding the continued progress of Equality Budgeting.
In Programme for Government – Our Shared Future, the Government set out a commitment to developing a set of well-being indices to create a well-rounded, holistic view of how Irish society is faring. In terms of setting out an overall well-being framework, in July 2021, the Government published the First Report on a Well-being Framework for Ireland. The Report sets out an overarching vision of the Well-being Framework: enabling all our people to live fulfilled lives now and into the future.
As noted in the Expenditure Report 2022, the next phase of the Department of Public Expenditure & Reform's work in this area is to develop an approach for associating public expenditure with the various dimensions of the Well-being Framework. The intention is to develop over time a way of setting out budgetary decisions on the basis of well-being dimensions; an approach that would complement the existing Vote Group approach to presenting such decisions.
