Mr. Niall Egan:

We have regular engagement with the CSO across the board within the Department. I meet my counterpart once every six months about work in hand because I also have responsibility for statistics within the Department and the sharing of data. We also have staff on secondment from the CSO in the Department helping to produce our statistics. In fairness to the CSO, it made changes to the poverty statistics it produced - the survey on income and living conditions - in the recent past. Last year's statistics are the first iteration of that. It has brought the indicators forward by about six months. It has narrowed the gap. It used to be worse than it currently is. There has been movement in that space. The CSO has to have a methodology that is robust and comparable with other jurisdictions. We will raise the issue of timing, which the Chair highlighted, regarding income versus poverty statistics, but there is a limit to what the CSO can do because it is survey-based, particularly the deprivation questions. That is the time lag associated.