David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein)
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47. To ask the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform the status of implementing equality and poverty proofing of budgets; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [12990/16]

Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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The Programme for Government commits to ensuring that institutional arrangements are in place to support equality and gender proofing.

Cabinet procedures require a whole range of impacts to be covered in every decision proposed to Government. This ensures that the impact of policy proposals on gender equality, rural communities, North-South/East-West Relations, employment, persons experiencing or at risk of poverty or social exclusion, people with disabilities and industry costs are taken into account.

In addition, the Department of Finance carries out distributional analyses of budget tax options using the ESRI SWITCH model. For Budget 2016, the Department produced analysis of the distributional impact of tax measures. These are contained in the Tax Strategy Group papers and inform the budgetary decision process. Further distributional analyses in relation to expenditure measures are carried out by my Department and the Department of Social Protection including distributional analysis of Budget measures and social welfare changes.

Overall, the analysis and transparency of the decision making process has been undergoing constant improvement over recent years and I envisage this continuing.

In order to facilitate a more comprehensive assessment of the impact of budget measures on household living standards, my Department is currently developing a new Social Impact Assessment ("SIA") Framework designed to focus on policy areas that cannot easily be incorporated into the existing SWITCH model, for example the impacts of spending on service provision expenditure on recipient households. The framework aims to complement existing processes with additional information on where Government resources are spent and who the key beneficiaries are. It is intended to reflect the Programme for Government commitment to develop a process of budget and policy proofing as a means of advancing equality, reducing poverty and strengthening economic and social rights within this framework.