The set of outcome indicators adopted formally by the European Council at Laeken in December 2001, and developed substantially since that date, is intended to play a central role in monitoring the performance of Member States in promoting social inclusion. The purpose of these indicators is to allow the Member States and the European Commission to monitor national and EU progress towards key EU objectives in the area of social inclusion (see Chapter 2), and to support mutual learning and identification of good (and bad) practices in terms of policies and institutional processes (see Chapter 6). This represents a major step forward in the development of EU cooperation in social policy, and has the potential to transform the framework within which Member States develop their national (and sub-national) policies to tackle poverty and social exclusion. The value of having regular and publicly available data on these indicators, allowing for an independent assessment of the performance of Member States, must be emphasised.

The development of indicators is a dynamic process, in which the Indicators Sub-Group of the EU Social Protection Committee has performed a very important role since it was set up in February 2001 (see Chapter 2). The work of the national delegations of experts, who make up the Sub-Group, and the secretariat provided by the European Commission Directorate-General on “Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities” (in close cooperation with Eurostat), has allowed the set of indicators (and breakdowns of these) to be considerably enriched. A prime example is provided by the progress made on capturing the relationship between poverty and work (see Lelièvre, Marlier and Pétour, 2004; Bardone and Guio, 2005); progress has also been made towards developing indicators relating to material deprivation, housing and access to health care.

Our objective here is not to provide a full history of the evolution of the commonly agreed social indicators, but to revisit certain aspects of the content and use of the set of indicators to see whether improvements can be suggested, whether they can be further enriched and made more policy-relevant. This is timely in the light of experience with the use of the common indicators, of changes in data availability, and in particular following on the accession to the EU of 10 new Member States with relatively low average living standards.