The Regional Policy Collaboration Pilot - Assessing similarities and differences

The assumption going into this work was that there was significant common ground on the issue of ageing between Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales as well as shared desire to explore a new approach to futures working and to do so in collaboration with other parties.

But the analysis conducted on the outputs – the prioritised 24 events - from the second workshop challenged that notion. Or at least said that the differences in the feedback need to be explored so that there was clarity about where the partnering opportunities and differences might be.

In this analysis, we saw limited agreement on the potential impact of the events but a reasonable degree of agreement on the likelihood.

This table looks at the degree of clear agreement, where agreement / dis-agreement is unclear, and clear disagreement in the ratings allocated for the impact of each of the 24 events on the societal and economic opportunities of an ageing population and likelihood of the events taking place.

The degree of agreement or otherwise could be the result of different interpretations of the underlying data - the definition of an event and its implication, for example - so further exploration would be required to assess the potential for ongoing collaboration in these areas.

While there is scope for further potential discussion, just one event – Negative Dependency Ratio – saw agreement across the three administrations on impact and likelihood.