There's a lot to cover here in the short time we have.
If I could start off with the gender equality duty, the new law, I agree, is perhaps the most important. The idea of the new law is to make it compulsory for all public bodies—not just government departments but local government, public bodies, and anyone who is performing a public service—to promote gender equality in the provision of those services and in the design and development of their policies. This follows from a similar law on race equality, which was passed in the year 2000. So the same kind of principle of a public duty to promote race equality has been extended to disability and also now to gender.
I think it says something about the political will issue that you raise, that it has taken us so long to move from the race duty to the gender duty. It's taken us nearly 10 years to do that. So that's the first thing to say. What that means is that although it's been illegal in the U.K. to discriminate against women in policy and services since about 1970 to 1975, when different laws were passed, this law now goes a step further in requiring departments to look at the impact of their policies and consider whether they promote equality between the sexes. So that's a very considerable change, and a very exciting one, I think.
The second question you asked was about the government equalities office. Lots of information is available from the usual government sources on this. But let me tell you briefly that it has been set up as a separate department in its own right. This again is an innovation for us. Our equalities units traditionally have been embedded within departments, as you suggested, within cabinet office and others. This is now set up as its own department. However, necessarily, it is quite a small department. It doesn't have a large spending budget as the other departments do. Its permanent secretary, I believe, has been appointed at a slightly lower level than other permanent secretaries. So I suppose one of our questions in the Women's Budget Group would be how much authority it will have to influence other departments, and we look forward to seeing that happen.
You asked about the gender expenditure analysis project, and I did bring the report with me, but it is also on our website, which is wgb.org.uk. This project in essence was a project we undertook in partnership with Her Majesty's Treasury, and our project manager, who works full time for the Women's Budget Group, went on secondment to Treasury for two days a week to undertake this project. Professor McKay, from whom you heard earlier, and Professor Diane Elson, one of our members who unfortunately couldn't be here with me to give evidence today, were participants in this project. They provided the academic and technical expertise to train the treasury officials and the officials from the government departments that took part in the project. We analyzed two different government programs, two different expenditure programs, to see what the gender impact was. The findings were mainly that we didn't have sufficient gender desegregated data to undertake the analysis properly. I think that was the main learning point from it.