Dr. Aideen Hartney:

I will start and bring in my colleagues as appropriate. We have a number of monitoring functions established in legislation. Some of that is to monitor Part 5 of the disability Act, which is the employment of disabled people in the public sector. We monitor the implementation of the EU web accessibility directive, and we have also done some monitoring on Part 3 of the disability Act, relating to a code of practice on accessible public services and information. That work is done by seeking information from Departments, which declare their compliance as it relates to a number of indicators, or metrics of compliance. That information is then put into the public domain. That relates to one of the Senator's later questions about holding people to account. Departments do not like to feel they have performed poorly in any of those areas. A hard data point can often be quite motivating in driving change and improvement. On the other side, we have a guidance role and are interactive with Departments in that regard. For example, somebody might have had poor performance under Part 5 of the disability Act.

After measuring and declaring that, we would engage with the public body and offer guidance on how it might improve its performance, the areas it might like to consider, the improvements it could make to its recruitment processes, and how to create a workplace environment with equitable, diverse and inclusive attributes so people would feel comfortable sharing their disabled status. The guidance offers a practical approach allowing people to see how they might make improvements.

We very much try to employ both a carrot and stick, and we have found that to be very effective. There are stakeholders who feel we should be more stringent or have more enforcement powers assigned to us. That would be a matter for the Government, but we have found that the dual approach we take has been effective in bringing about incremental change over time.

We will have a quite significant supporting role in the development of the implementation strategy. Within our remit will be the provision of research, advice and an evidence base to inform the thinking of the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth and all the other Departments that will need to come to the table for the process. Some of that might be about good practice in other jurisdictions, and some might be about key statistics and data that we analyse. We will do a lot to develop a monitoring framework for the strategy because we believe very strongly that it should be developed in tandem with the strategy itself.

It is worth stressing a general point at this stage. Although the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth is leading out on this and is the co-ordinating body, it is really important that all Departments accept they have responsibilities under the UNCRPD. It is in this regard that our role of engaging with them through policy advice forums and providing guidance will be very much to the fore.