Ms Shirley Comerford:

I totally agree with the Deputy. There is a huge responsibility on us, as the PAS, to realise the aspirations and ambitions that we have in our strategy. We have done something. We have established an equality, diversity and inclusion, EDI, function, which is very important because we need to have structures in place that enable us to engage and enable us, most importantly, to listen. As the Deputy rightly said, we have made significant progress in the disability sector, so we know there are things we can do. I am absolutely not saying that sector is the same as the Traveller community but there are things that we have learned can work and that we can use. We have shared some of those things with the committee today, for example, diversifying our board members, looking at networks, outreach work and visibly sponsoring Travellers. All of those things are very important and we know they have worked because they have worked before for us with the disability community.

I would love to be able to say there is something we could do that would effect an immediate change but, certainly in my experience, it is an incremental process, one block on top of another, to actually get there. We and our board are very committed to the ambitions we have in our EDI strategy.