Mr. Ed Hearne:

I will respond to the Senator's questions on procurement, environmental impacts and so forth, and Ms O'Loughlin will comment on equality. I will not go too much into procurement policy because it is not what we are here to report on. I take the points made by the Senator about the scope within procurement to take account of factors that go beyond cost. There is plenty of scope in the European procurement directives, to which we are obviously bound.

The Senator mentioned green procurement. My colleagues in the Office of Government Procurement have worked on that. They have seen how we can bring in broader considerations about the sustainability of procurement within things like overall award criteria and so forth. It is obviously a very tricky environment in which to work because it is so characterised by legal challenge and bound up in European directives, but there is scope there. I know that my colleagues on that side of the house are actively working on this matter.

Senator Higgins asked a number of questions and made a number of comments on how to better account for the climate impact of individual spending decisions. That is particularly relevant in capital. We are doing a number of things. In the run-up to the national development plan, which the Government published last year, a climate assessment of every spending measure was set out. That was a big step forward and was not something that we had done before. To the best of our knowledge, it is not something that had been done on such a comprehensive whole-of-government basis elsewhere, certainly not across the EU. As part of that analysis, we looked at the likely climate impact of each measure across seven dimensions: climate mitigation; climate adaption; air quality; water quality; nature and biodiversity; waste and the circular economy; and the impact of the programme on just transition. It was a step forward for us to have that assessment, at least, and to have information to enable us to rank programmes alongside each other as a base point from which to build on into the future. That is at the programme level.

At the overall project level, work is advancing within the Department that will capture some of the points the Senator made about measuring the climate impact of a project throughout the supply chain. Members will probably have heard about the public spending code, which is the process by which we appraise and evaluate projects, and then manage and implement projects throughout the life cycle. We are engaging with the OECD to embed climate action considerations within the public spending code. We will finish that work just after Christmas or early in 2023. The initiative will do two things; first, it will measure how we capture the embedded carbon emissions within a project. For instance, when concrete is used for a project like a cycle lane, that has associated emissions which we need to evaluate. The initiative captures that aspect.