Dr. Patrick Moran:

The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform has a programme of work around performance budgeting and trying to align the budgetary process with the type of outcomes we ultimately want to achieve in each of those areas, whether it be climate targets or well-being goals we set as a society. We can provide detail on the individual programmes of work but, in general, all those pieces of work take the same sort of trajectory. The idea is we want to align expenditure with the outputs we want to achieve and then try to track the changes in those outcomes over time so that we are confident we are using resources and getting the most value for money out of them in making progress.

Two streams of work are going on in respect of the well-being budget. One is looking at the overall national picture and the national well-being indicators that are published on the Central Statistics Office, CSO, website. We are gathering data on how the country is faring over time as regards those types of outcomes. We also track expenditure across all the Departments that is targeted at effecting those outcomes. At present, as the Deputy knows, the budget tells us what Departments got what in the allocation. We are engaging in a piece of work that will involve tagging all expenditures across all the different Departments to see how much is being spent on each of those wellness areas, including mental and physical health, safety and everything else. That is the well-being bit.

Similarly, with green budgeting, we want to be able to track Ireland's performance as regards how we are faring and to be able to tie that back into how much of the country's resources we are allocating into each of those areas and make that link more explicit. The benefit of doing that is threefold. It tends to produce better prioritisation and agenda-setting discussions within Departments. It also feeds into the whole embedding of evidence into policymaking and the formulation of policy but also how we evaluate it afterwards to make sure we have met policy goals. Finally, many of the climate change and well-being targets do not live in one Department alone but are across many different Departments. This sort of performance budgeting framework allows better strategic alignment across Departments that are all working towards the same goal.

As I said, if there is any specific information the Deputy wants on any of those programmes, we would be happy to tell her about it.