Ms Orla O'Connor:

On the Chairman's question, an example of a country other than Scotland that uses gender budgeting is Iceland. It is a good example as it also experienced a huge financial crisis and recession. It has also used processes of gender budgeting and equality budgeting. The Icelandic experience is interesting in its use of these processes. It implemented austerity measures but it used those processes to ensure that they did not particularly impact on women and women with children. After each budget it assessed where things fell and in one budget it highlighted that a measure had a particular impact on women and reversed it in the next budget. Therefore, it used these processes as a tool. We had a speaker over from Iceland who spoke about this and that speaker said that now that Iceland has shifted into growth it also using this process - having regard to all the data that has been gathered by using a gender budgeting process - to highlight what it needs to focus on, who got particularly hit from measures and who needs to be focused on now. In its last budget, it increased payments such as children's allowances. That is one example of the use of that process. While they have not necessarily called it gender budgeting, the Nordic countries have used a series of indicators around women's equality and they have been using those for a long time.

On the issue of consistency, I agree it is important.

I agree that it is important. It is difficult. The gender pay gap is an example of where there has been real attempts across the EU to bring up consistency of data in order to get good comparisons. There are areas where the work on consistency has already happened. The other area is child care. The Barcelona targets have been set for preschool child care places. Data have been brought up to a level where they can be consistent. I accept it is an issue but a lot more work is being done, in particular now through the new European Institute for Gender Equality which is based in Vilnius.