Equality Data Audit 2020

Background

CSO is supporting the development of the National Data Infrastructure (NDI). The core concept of the NDI involves the collection, maintenance and storage on all public sector data holdings of the associated PPSN, Eircode and Unique Business Identifier (UBI, to be developed) whenever they are relevant to Public Sector Body transactions with customers and support the development of targeted policy interventions. To this end the CSO has established a public Sector “NDI champions” group of public sector data holders and has developed a dashboard to monitor the use of Eircode and PPSN across the public sector. This dashboard is produced for the Civil Service Management Board (CSMB) and the Public Service Leadership Board (PSLB).

One of the main benefits of the NDI is to enable administrative data to be used to provide insight for policy makers. The CSO has planned to build on the NDI dashboard and repeat the Statistical Potential of Administrative Records³ exercise first completed in the 2000’s.

Section 42 of The Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission Act 2014 established a Public Sector Equality and Human Rights Duty. This places a statutory obligation on public bodies to eliminate discrimination, promote equality of opportunity and protect the human rights of those to whom they provide services and staff when carrying out their daily work. The law requires public bodies to implement the Public Sector Equality and Human Rights Duty through a three-step process in the context of strategic planning and reporting. This provides an important framework to systematically consider and reflect the particular needs of staff and service users at risk of inequality, discrimination or disproportionate impact, and helps to mitigate and avoid unintended consequences.

Equality budgeting is a way of approaching and understanding the budget as a process that embodies long-standing societal choices about how resources are used, rather than simply a neutral process of resource allocation. In practice, this means that equality budgeting attempts to provide greater information on how proposed or ongoing budgetary decisions impact on particular groups in society, thereby integrating equality concerns into the budgetary process. Ireland’s Equality Budgeting pilot was initiated by DPER in 2017, with dedicated equality indicators included in the REV; the 2017 and 2018 Public Service Performance Reports included an Equality Budgeting Update. While the initial focus of equality budgeting has been on gender, the initiative is being incrementally extended to other equality dimensions. This process has been guided by the Equality Budgeting Expert Advisory Group, which first met in September 2018.

Moreover, the OECD has recently conducted a Policy Scan of Ireland’s approach to Equality Budgeting⁴ programme; their report was published on 8 October 2019 and delivered 12 recommendations. One key recommendation was the development of an equalities data strategy which would rely on improved availability of disaggregated data. The CSO made a statistician available to conduct an audit of existing data from an equality perspective, an exercise that complemented the CSO’s plans for a “SPAR 2” initiative.

The European Commission’s Subgroup on Equality Data published their ‘Guidelines on the Collection of Equality Data’³ in 2019. The guidelines provide a series of steps and actions to improve the collection and use of Equality data. One of these steps includes a data audit, along with a range of institutional, structural and operational activities.

Approach

The aim of the audit project is to examine all data sets in public bodies and determine the extent of data available on the one or more of nine dimensions of equality in the equal status act: gender, marital status, family status, age, disability, sexual orientation, race, religion and membership of the Traveller community.

Socio-Economic status was discussed by the audit team and the other stakeholders and identified as an important indicator of deprivation, poverty and inequality. It is not included in this version of the audit, as further discussion is needed to identify what variables in data sets could be used as indicators of socio-economic status.  

This audit is intended to be used identify data sets that can be analysed to inform policy.

This process was broken into several stages:

1. Meta data in the Administrative Data Centre (ADC) of the CSO was analysed to identify datasets relevant variables.
2. CSO survey teams were contacted to establish if their surveys had relevant variables.
3. Data providers to the NDI were contacted about relevant variables in NDI data sets.
4. The NDI Data Champions were asked to find any other relevant data sets within their own departments which are not included in the NDI data sets, (which are defined as data sets which contain PPSN or Eircode).
5. Contact was made with public sector groups, beyond the NDI Data Champions, for other available data sources.
6. This report on the process and results of the audit was prepared.

In the data gathering/auditing stage, for each of the data sets listed, respondents were asked to provide information on the following:

• the equality dimension(s) covered
• the organisation responsible for the data set
• the underlying dataset – the survey source or administrative dataset
• a unique identifier – such as PPSN or Eircode
• the theme – this was a free text field to capture the broad subject matter of the source.
• how often it is released
• the time period for which the data are available
• any other relevant notes – free text

Information was requested related to harmonisation in the second page of the audit. Details of the data collected on the equality dimension was included to show similarities and differences in the data sets collected. For example, age can be collected as date of birth, age in years or as an age grouping which would have to be adjusted when analysing multiple data sets.

Once the audits were all returned, further work was done to refine the results for cohesion and ease of use. Fields that were left blank by respondents have been completed where possible. For example, if the title of a data set included the type of data set (Survey, Administrative etc), this would then be filled in. In other cases, reaching out to respondents for clarity helped to fill in blanks and if there was no solution, the field was left blank.

Similarly, where possible, themes were allocated to each data set. These were chosen to align with the 11 domains of well-being from the well-being budgeting team.

As far as possible, the themes reflect was included in the free text field by respondents. Where the free text response did not align with any theme then the field was left unchanged. In contrast, where the response indicated more than one theme, duplicate records were created for that source, each of which captured a different theme. This helps users to easily analyse by theme. 

References

1 Guidelines on the Collection of Equality Data (PDF)

2 General Household Survey Module on Equality

3 Statistical Potential of Administrative Records (PDF)

4 OECD Policy Scan of Ireland's Approach to Equality Budgeting (PDF)

Other Useful Links

In 2003, the National Statistics Board (NSB) and the CSO released a report from a steering group. The report had two major aims: to identify data within existing administrative records that could be used to build social statistics; and to ask those directly involved in policy making in government departments and agencies to identify their precise data needs in the context of the growing importance of evidence-based policy making.

They performed a similar audit to the one discussed in this report and this can be seen in Appendix F at the following link: 

Report of Steering group on Social and Equality Statistics (PDF)

Go To: Contact Details