Dr. Mary Murphy:

The Deputy mentioned a meeting with a delegation from Scotland and asked whether there are other countries where best practice might be looked at. In respect of the event hosted by us and the Department, we drew particularly on Austria, Iceland and Andalusia in Spain as the three examples where it was felt that best practice in proofing was emerging. It is because they embed their proofing exercises in the budget process in the way we spoke about earlier. They use slightly different models to do it. Austria looks at some of the key priorities in each government department and gets each department to nominate five different priorities it wants to proof. Andalusia takes a whole-of-budget approach. These are just different ways of doing the same thing.

It would be seen that one of the advantages of these models is that they are quite well institutionally embedded in the budget process. They are difficult to move once they are in place and they are often buttressed by legislative requirements so that they stay there. They are independent of whichever government is in power at the time. They are seen to quite useful from that perspective. All of them involve a marriage of the types of expertise that are available in the civil service to do budgets and the kind of expertise that is available from consultation with expert groups on the outside around gender, age and disability so that those type of issues - the very discrete issues mentioned by the Deputy - can be spotted early in a policy development stage and ironed out in terms of taking out anomalies that would have disadvantages for certain groups. Consultation in alignment with different types of expertise in the process is very important.

The human rights principles are quite useful there because they are clear that what is required is progressive realisation so it is not that one must attain all the standards in one go but one must be seen to be making reasonable progress towards them so that what is expected is realistic. The principle of retrogression also applies. This argues that if one reaches a certain stage of human rights standards, for example, in respect of pensions, one should not initiate policies that would retrogress those standards.

In the case Deputy Broughan gave, human rights standards suggest that having inadvertently discriminated against a particular group, in this case women, one should take steps to restore the standard of rights that group had previously. The human rights principles give a good, effective guidance for Government decisions in those areas, once the impact of the policies is known.