To ask the Minister of Finance, pursuant to AQW-2020/17-22, to detail what the information garnered from second religious question is used for by each Department.

All Departments use the ‘religion or religion brought up in’ statistic from the census to inform a wide variety of personnel issues (e.g. recruitment, equality of workforce composition etc…). The requirement for such statistics stems from the Fair Employment and Treatment (NI) Order 1998, which places a duty on all public and private sector employers to carry out regular reviews of their employment composition. Workforce equality monitoring is undertaken for all Departments by the Civil Service human resource function within the Department of Finance.

All Departments also carry out a wide range of equality screening and impact assessments when developing policies. These are required under section 75 of the NI Act 1998. Equality analysis informs the policy development process and a variety of census religion and ‘religion or religion brought up in’ statistics are used by Departments to support this.