Annual Equality Monitoring Report – Open Data
Welsh Government is undertaking work to make available public body equality data, as required by the Equality Act 2010 (Statutory Duties),(Wales) Regulations 2011.
Public bodies in Wales have a duty to annually publish employment information and present it for each of the different protected characteristics. Although public bodies publish this information individually, it is not always easily accessible.
In September 2018, the Equality, Local Government and Communities Committee report on parenting and employment in Wales included the recommendation “The Committee recommends that the Welsh Government publishes employment data required by the Welsh public sector equality duties to a single location on the Welsh Government’s website, in a format that allows the data to be analysed easily.”
The Welsh Government response accepted the recommendation but noted that, given public sector employers have the responsibility for complying with the duty, the preferred approach would be to work with the public sector to ensure PSED data were published more accessibly as open data. Welsh Government would then provide a single location to enable straightforward access to this information.
Why open data?
Open data, according to the Open Data Institute, is data that is available to everyone to access, use and share. Much PSED data published by public bodies is published within a larger PDF report, and can be difficult to access unless users know where to look. Welsh Government’s aim is that public body PSED data would be presented in an open data format that is machine-readable and published in tables within open data spreadsheets (which can be produced in Excel) under the Open Government Licence. This could be done alongside existing PDF reports. Making all public body data available in a single online location would support transparency and learning from others.
2017 - 2018