Public Appointments Annual Report 2016/17
Date published:
The Public Appointments Annual Report provides statistics relating to public appointments in Northern Ireland in 2016/17.
This publication was revised on 23 November to take into account the accidental omission of some equal opportunity monitoring data which related to 2016/17.
The correction results in less ‘unknown’ data in the ‘Applications’ and ‘Appointments made’ sections (parts 1 and 2 respectively) of the report and the corresponding data tables. The proportion of applications received for public appointments for which gender is unknown has dropped from 35% to 16%; the proportion of appointments made for which gender is unknown has dropped from 37% to 20%. There is also a decrease in the information which is unknown for the other Equal Opportunity groups.
The total numbers of applications and appointments made remain unchanged.
There is no effect on the ‘Appointments held’ data (part 3 of the report) or the corresponding tables; both have a different data source to the one resulting in the error above.
In the data collection process, departments were instructed to record some of the 2016/17 equal opportunity monitoring data in a section labelled 2017/18, which led to the error. Provision of Equal Opportunity information is not compulsory for Public Appointments; and the data has to be collected separately from names and other personally identifiable information and matched later using Unique Reference Numbers. Therefore the process is vulnerable to data input error which results in data gaps where Equal Opportunities information is unknown.