Skip to content

Equality Commission for Northern Ireland has published its latest Fair Employment Monitoring Report (July 2024)

16/07/2024

Equality Commission for Northern Ireland has published its latest Fair Employment Monitoring Report (July 2024)

On 10 July 2024, the Equality Commission published its 33rd Fair Employment Monitoring report.

By way of background, the Fair Employment and Treatment (Northern Ireland) Order 1998 is unique to Northern Ireland. All employers who employ 11 or more full time employees (that is, employees working 16 hours or more per week) must register with the Equality Commission.

Those required to monitor must submit an annual monitoring return to the Equality Commission covering employees, applicants, appointees and apprentices. Businesses with more than 250 employees must also monitor promotes and leavers.  Failure to submit a monitoring return is a criminal offence. Employers must keep a record of community background i.e. whether the person is from the Protestant Community or the Roman Catholic Community in Northern Ireland or neither.

Regulation 17 of the Fair Employment (Monitoring) Regulations (NI) 1999 (Monitoring Regulations) requires an employer to retain the following:

  • written information obtained for making a determination
  • record of the determination made in respect of any such person until the expiration of 3 years from the date on which the person to whom the information of determination relates ceases to be employed in the concern.

This means the monitoring form completed, as well as the determination made about the person, must be retained. A similar 3-year period applies in relation to monitoring information about applicants and this is for a period of 3 years from the date of the application.

The latest Monitoring Report shows the breakdown of the monitored workforce in Northern Ireland by community background using data provided by private and public sector employers based on their workforces in 2022.

The Equality Commission has commented that:

For the first time since monitoring began, the share of the total monitored workforce from:

members of the Roman Catholic community [50.1%] was greater than that of members of the Protestant community [49.9%], reflecting a trend whereby Roman Catholics represent a majority of those available for work.

This marks an end to the long-established trend of members of the Protestant community accounting for a greater share of the total monitored workforce and continues the trend of an increasing share from members of the Roman Catholic community. In the same period, the female share of the monitored workforce increased by 0.1 pp from the previous year (52.5%).

Full details of the 33rd Fair Employment Monitoring Report (2022) are available online