Dr. Aideen Hartney:

I will answer a number of Deputy Tully's question and then hand over to my colleague, Dr. Craddock, who will talk about built environment matters. The Deputy asked whether the NDA employs people with disabilities. Yes, we do. In 2020, approximately 20% of our staff felt comfortable declaring that they have a disability.

That is something we are always keen to focus on. As to whether we are resourced to do our job, what we have done very successfully, particularly Dr. Craddock's team, is built awareness of universal design over the last number of years and begun monitoring work on compliance with the various directives. The challenge is the capacity to support the variety of public bodies we interact with on implementation. We are not finding anyone who argues with universal design as a good idea but developing the guidance and toolkits they need to take it up is resource-intensive work. That is where a little bit of extra resourcing would be very welcome.

We work hard on consulting with people with disabilities and their representative organisations in our work. We take a varied approach to that. Sometimes for specific projects, we might have an advisory group with membership from DPOs on it and sometimes we go out wide with public consultation on specific projects. We take a varied approach but it is something we are working hard on improving over time. Our "Participation Matters" guidelines, which launched last week, will offer a blueprint for us and for all public actors to improve in that space.

I will make a final point about data. One of the challenges is getting accurate data from the census, not just about autism. This also came up in another committee hearing around not having accurate numbers for wheelchair users. The NDA would love to see a national disability survey carried out after the next census. Anyone declaring they have a disability on the next census could be followed up with and asked a range of more detailed questions so we could capture specific conditions, barriers and challenges. That was done back in 2006 but there has not been an opportunity to update that survey since then. It is something we have had preliminary discussions with the CSO on. We would welcome cross-Government support for a national disability survey after the next census.