Ms Caroline O'Loughlin:

Equality budgeting has been iterative since it was started in 2018. We work with the Departments to try to identify areas. In the earlier years we wanted to take varied sectors and do equality budgeting rather than gender budgeting, which is the international norm. We looked at all aspects of equality. What dictated the earlier metrics was the availability of disaggregated data. This is why there was a focus on gender in the early years. We have done a lot of work to make sure much wider disaggregated data is now available across all dimensions of equality.

With regard to how equality indicators are selected, in the first place we requested Departments to buy in. Momentum sped up for equality budgeting integration and now all Departments are reporting on equality metrics. For last year's Revised Estimates Volumes we required all Departments to provide an equality metric for each programme. We are trying to consider equality budgeting as part of the performance budgeting metric. We do not want to keep them as two separate things. We want equality budgeting to be used as an example of how applying an additional lens to performance metrics can make sure we are looking not only at the impact on society but the impact on various cohorts of society. It is up to the Department is the short answer.