Seòmar agus comataidhean

I would be guessing at the details of the UK Government's position, but from our perspective, one of the difficulties is that, although people are displaced internally in Gaza they are not classed as refugees while they are still in that place. The struggle that many have had to cross any border has made it a lot harder for neighbouring countries to provide support of the kind that Poland was able to provide to Ukraine.

That is exactly what we are trying to do. Covid was not the only or the first example of a situation in which not having intersectional inequalities data led to poorer outcomes for various groups. However, it certainly brought together the anti-racism interim governance group, which eventually recommended the establishing of the anti-racism observatory. The impact of its work will therefore be far more wide ranging than simply addressing the inequalities that became clear through the pandemic.

As for connecting pieces of work, it is important to note that the observatory is not the answer to racial inequality; it is part of the solution. It will allow us to create stronger evidence-based policy. It is also not the only approach that we are taking to obtaining data as we recognise the requirement for intersectional information.

You will be aware that we are currently considering a review of the operation of the public sector equality duty. Recently, I wrote to stakeholders to outline the next steps on that, which we propose should include two key regulatory changes, including revising the current pay gap reporting duty to include information on ethnicity pay gaps. Pay gap reporting is an important means of driving action to spotlight and reduce pay inequalities that affect certain disadvantaged groups, and extending the requirement to report on pay gaps between men and women to include reporting on those relating to disability and ethnicity will encourage public bodies to take more effective action on equalities issues that affect their disabled and minoritised staff.

I thank the committee and the citizens panel again for an in-depth question.

I suppose that I would hesitate to take such a broad-brush approach. I know that there are very good examples of PSHE education led by very hard-working teachers throughout Scotland. As I have mentioned, all teachers are required to adhere to the General Teaching Council for Scotland professional values, so they should be demonstrating, welcoming and encouraging inclusive behaviours to ensure that everybody in schools is treated with respect. It is the responsibility of all staff—not just teachers—in Scottish schools to promote and facilitate a culture of equality and diversity and to address individual and institutional discrimination, including where that stems from cultural differences.

I can give a specific example of our delivering appropriate training for teachers. We are currently consulting on revised statutory teaching guidance for relationships, sexual health and parenthood education that is aimed at enabling children and young people to build positive relationships as they age.

I appreciate—the convener has alluded to this—that diversity education has come a long way in 20 years, but there is still much work to do. We recognise that, and I welcome the scrutiny of that aspect. Additionally, I welcome the approach that my colleague the Minister for Children, Young People and Keeping the Promise is taking with the statutory guidance to help to ensure that teachers are empowered to deliver PSHE education in a culturally sensitive way.

I will bring in Fi Robertson in a moment, but I can give you some initial reflections. For something that describes a piece of work as large and as complex as the annual budget, the equality and fairer Scotland budget statement is an incredibly accessible document. However, I appreciate that we do not want people to be involved only at the end of the budget process and in looking back over it; we want them to be involved throughout the process.

We are therefore committed to improving the budget’s accessibility. Through successive open government action plans, we have worked closely with civil society partners to improve the understanding and accessibility of public finances, and our current plan commits us to improving the accessibility of our fiscal data and information, to benchmarking our fiscal transparency against international standards and to improving public engagement and participation regarding public finances.

By using our own research and international best practice, we have developed a prototype fiscal portal to bring together and present our fiscal data and information in a more accessible, open and understandable way. We are working to produce a fully functional minimum viable product by the end of 2023.

Fi Robertson might have more to add on the subject.

We have committed to exploring opportunities to improve public engagement with the budget process and continuing to make the process more transparent, which includes exploring a citizens budget. There is a strong commitment and a will in the Government to hear more from people who have been empowered to comment on the budget in a way that allows us to take that into account. That means not just opening up opportunities for people to speak to us but making the process clearer, more transparent and easy to digest, so that the set of documents is not inaccessible.

Those two things go hand in hand. If people are empowered to understand what we are doing and why we are making our decisions, they will be able to comment and scrutinise in a far more informed way, which the Government absolutely welcomes. We are committed to exploring more opportunities for people to engage with the process.

That is another excellent question. First, I am glad that the panel members feel so positive about the process; I feel positive about it, too. It is a good experience to come to the committee and hear directly from committee members how they have been influenced by the work that the committee has undertaken in engaging with the public. I feel very positive about it.

In terms of my direct engagement with communities, my equalities migration and refugees portfolio is very people focused, and over recess—and, indeed, throughout the parliamentary session—there is a lot of direct engagement with people who make use of services. I go back to Maggie Chapman’s use of the term “easy to ignore”; it is a far better descriptor than the term “hard to reach”, which is used too often. We know where a lot of the people are. I engage with people directly through the Scottish Refugee Council and other bodies that we know assist people who require extra help to engage with those in power and to deal with councils, as well as other support networks that engage directly with people. Through them, I can meet clients and people who might not think to e-mail a minister or otherwise try to get in touch with me.

I am proud of the Scottish Government’s vision of public participation and the importance that has been placed on ensuring that people’s expenses and time are paid for when they engage and that engagements are designed with a wide range of needs and circumstances in mind. After all, we must bear in mind that people might be travelling from rural or island communities, or might require accessibility measures to be put in place before they are able to contribute fully.

The important thing for us now is to ensure that the participation offers result in change that we can meaningfully demonstrate. I would like to be able to come back to the committee and say, “Look, this is how participation has changed direction” or “This part of our policy making has been broadened as a result of listening to what people have taken the time to explain to us.”

I hope that that answers the question.

You will appreciate that I am working closely with the anti-racism interim governance group co-chairs on what the observatory will look like, its functions and its constitution. I am not in a position to share all that with the committee at the moment, but I will keep you updated as things move on. As I have said, we are moving at pace and, as is reflected in the programme for government, we expect to launch the observatory by the end of the year.

That is a fantastic question to kick things off. Thank you, convener. I am very aware that the citizens panel members are behind me, and I feel a bit rude to be facing away from them. I apologise to everyone who is behind me, but I need to address the convener.

I completely appreciate the work that has been put in here and the fact that the questions come from members of the public. That possibly means that they will be even more difficult to answer than usual. I emphasise that my portfolio is equalities, migration and refugees, and I will do my very best to answer the questions within the scope of that remit. Equalities is so broad that it might be quite difficult to tie things in, but I am more than happy to bring in my officials and we are happy to write to other ministers and directorates, as appropriate, to get the committee fuller answers if we go into depth on colleagues’ portfolios.

When it comes to working with Natalie Don around the Promise, convener, you will be aware of the programme for government commitment to set up a Cabinet sub-committee on the Promise. Its membership is still a work in progress, but it is a demonstration of our wider mainstreaming approach. Although the Promise is not my area of responsibility, I am committed to ensuring that equality and human rights are embedded in all that we do in government, including the delivery of the Promise.

We are delivering that change in a number of ways. You will be aware of the proposed human rights bill, our consultation on which has recently closed. Among other things, legislating on those human rights will ensure that the Scottish Government takes a human rights-based approach in how we legislate and how we treat our citizens. We are reforming the public sector equality duty, which will make sure that other public bodies are acting in the same way. We are focusing on building capacity and changing culture within Government, on strengthening leadership, including at senior levels, and on making better use of the equality data that we have.

I will continue to work with colleagues, including the Minister for Children, Young People and Keeping the Promise, to ensure that, across all our services—for example, in care, health, social services and education—we meet our ambition for Scotland to be an equal and fair place for any child to grow up in, no matter their background. That will require lots of portfolios to work together, which is reflected in the need for the Cabinet sub-committee.

I suppose that all policies come up, because we are keen to constantly scrutinise what we are doing, including any measure specifically aimed at supporting children and families out of poverty. After all, that is a core mission of the Government, and a substantial amount of our budget is currently focused on it. For example, we are spending more than £3 billion on policies aimed at tackling poverty and supporting people, which will have an impact on how people make it through the cost of living crisis and other events that they are facing.

As for working with other ministers, my portfolio lends itself to that. A lot of the work that we, including Robbie Priestley, are doing is about mainstreaming—that is, encouraging other ministers to think about things through an equalities and human rights lens and requiring them to do so through the changes that we are making to the budget process and the equality duties.

I hope that you will appreciate that that is not something that I can go into in great detail, because that is not an area of responsibility that sits with me. However, I know that the Minister for Children, Young People and Keeping the Promise is as keen as the rest of Government is to ensure that we do all that we can to promote diverse culture in schools. I am more than happy to pass on any comments to her from the committee and any others in the education portfolio to make her aware of the asks from the committee and the citizens panel.

In my area of responsibility, we are doing lots of work at pace to launch the anti-racism observatory. I think that the data, guidance and evidence base that we can get from that institution will allow us to respond to the systemic issues that we know exist, and that policy that is based on that new evidence—such evidence has perhaps previously not been collected as much as it should or could have been—will allow us to be truly anti-racism as well as simply not racist.