John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Thank you. As I have to go to the convention centre to chair a session at 10:30 a.m., I will do what politicians often do, which is to speak and run. No disrespect is intended.

I thank Mr. Downes for his presentation and thank the witnesses for attending. On equality budgeting, the assistant secretary general will know that was an initiative of the last Committee on Budgetary Oversight, of which I and Deputy Richard Boyd Barrett were members. It is excellent to see it embraced. It resulted from a lot of consultation and the Scottish Parliament was particularly helpful to us on that. For the benefit of newer members, although they may know anyway, until that point there was always a danger that budgetary measures could have a disproportionate impact on different members of society. The social protection cuts in 2011 were a classic example in that they disproportionately hit women more than men. The Committee on Budgetary Oversight had people from a range of equality backgrounds present to us and equality budgeting was originally an initiative and recommendation from this committee. The Minister, Deputy Paschal Donohoe, embraced it in the first year it was introduced, and it has been embraced since. It would be nice at some stage to have a report on its impact, where it has worked and what difference it has made.

I want to make a general point in regard to public service performance, as a public representative interfacing on behalf of the public with the public sector. My experience is that there have been heroic performances by Departments, and maybe that is because some are more visible. The Department of Social Protection has performed miracles in the last year in keeping society afloat, particularly those who have become dependent on it, including those who might not have been used to being dependent on it. I have also found the HSE incredibly responsive. However, there have been Departments where there is remote working, which I think is going to be an indicator in the future, and the witnesses might have a comment to make on how we measure the performance of remote working as it becomes a significant part of the work of some Departments. What I liked about the Department of Social Protection and the HSE, just to use those two examples, is that the officials who were available to us pre-Covid remained available to us. Officials in other Departments, which I will not name, cannot be reached and have been unreachable directly for a year without going through a Minister's office. That is part of public service performance.

I have a couple of further points on remote working as an indicator. Has the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform looked at its impact in different Departments? What are the plans? What impact has the provision of remote working had on public expenditure? I also ask Mr. Downes to follow up on the equality budgeting piece. Is there an opportunity to integrate the metrics regarding the implementation of the public sector duty into the public service pension reduction, PSPR? On green budgeting, which has also become a staple of the way we move forward, does the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform provide reasoning for its own choice of indicators or are there any other choices of performance indicators? Can Mr. Downes explain why it chooses the indicators it does and what is the basis for that? Is any further examination undertaken by the Department as to the correlation between outcomes and impacts? How does the Department measure those? Those are my questions. I thank the witnesses again.