Seòmar agus comataidhean

Amendment 140 is a clarification amendment. Whereas the bill refers only to “fruit growing” and “seed growing”, the new wording in the amendment would clarify and reassure our industry that, in Scotland, we grow crops not just for food but for other purposes.

Specifically, the amendment highlights the fast-developing energy crop sector. We must be explicit in the bill that we recognise those future opportunities for our agricultural sector, and including

“crops ... for the production of energy”

in the schedule of eligible agricultural activities enables that aspect to be supported in the future, should ministers choose to do so. By including growing crops for other non-food purposes, we ensure that the bill provides future flexibility as our producers adapt to climate change and new market opportunities that might open, and so I ask the committee to support this amendment in the name of Kate Forbes.

I move amendment 140.

Until 5 May 2022, I was a councillor at Highland Council.

Thank you very much, convener. I congratulate you on your appointment as convener of the committee. I look forward to working with you and to your leading the scrutiny of work across my portfolio.

First of all, I want to emphasise the positive spend and the commitment to delivering equality and fairness in the budget. I point to the increased spend on the Scottish child payment, the reopening of the independent living fund, and the increase in the equality, inclusion and human rights budget.

We are committed to improving participation in the budget process, and we know that it is important to make sure that every consideration that should be taken is taken and that people can feel that the budget is relevant to them. It was very insightful to hear the committee’s previous budget scrutiny session. I was pleased to note the continued improvement that is reported every year in this area of work. There was shared recognition on the part of those who provided evidence of the significant changes that we made to the internal process for the budget last year. Those changes included our new case-study approach for the “Equality and Fairer Scotland Budget Statement 2024-25” and the first ministerial workshop, which looked specifically at that statement.

We acknowledge that there is still a lot of work to do, but I want to remain mindful of the considerable progress that is being made along the way. We are providing accessible and inclusive forms of communication and documentation to support public understanding of the budget. I appreciate fully that more work needs to be done to increase public engagement in the budget and to support better understanding, and I know that the committee is also keen to ensure that.

The financial year is extremely challenging—it is the most challenging environment for a budget since devolution. On top of United Kingdom Government underinvestment for more than a decade, our Barnett funding, which is driven by UK Government spending choices, has fallen by 1.2 per cent in real terms since the 2022-23 budget was presented.

Because the UK Government did not inflation proof its capital budget, that has resulted in a real-terms fall of nearly 10 per cent in our capital funding over the medium term. UK Government decisions such as that to prioritise national insurance cuts rather than public service investment have made it difficult for us to deliver a budget that reflects our priorities, but that is what we have done. We have taken every opportunity that we have had to mitigate the worst impacts of those cuts.

We have invested in public services, we have put money where it will have the greatest impact on the delivery of our priorities of equality, opportunity and community, and we have put money directly into the pockets of those who are experiencing poverty. We have put money into the realisation of, and the upholding and protecting of, human rights, which is in stark contrast to the £240 million that the UK Government has spent down south on its policy of deportation to Rwanda and the further £50 million that it has already committed to doing the opposite and allowing human rights breaches.

We have funded human rights and tackling poverty regardless of who is responsible for the difficult situations that many people find themselves in. For example, we are looking at how we will spend money that is allocated to refugee integration in the light of the Illegal Migration Act 2023 and its potential impacts. We know that many people who are benefiting from our social security programme have had to turn to that programme only because of the cost of living crisis, which has been pushed on Scotland and the rest of the UK by economic mismanagement elsewhere.

Our approach to considering equalities in the budget has involved extensive engagement with experts and our stakeholders. We published our response to the equality and human rights budget advisory group, and I will join the group to discuss that further on Thursday. I was the first minister to attend a meeting of the group, and I plan to continue that engagement throughout the year. The Deputy First Minister will also join me at a meeting of the group later in the year.

I hope that the fact that improvements were made during the budget process has been evident to the committee through the equality and fairer Scotland budget statement. Alongside changes to the document itself, we held a ministerial workshop with a case-study approach, which involved challenging ministers across Government to show their working on decisions that they had used equalities and human rights budgeting to achieve.

We want to ensure that the wider mainstreaming agenda is reflected in everything that we do, and that the impact of the mainstreaming strategy, the public sector equality duty improvement activity and our forthcoming human rights bill can be seen throughout Government processes. I work closely with colleagues across Government to advance equality and the progressive realisation of rights for people in Scotland, thereby ensuring that that is a priority that can be seen in every portfolio.

I look forward to taking questions on the budget.

The increase in the human rights budget is a reflection of the activity that we are doing to invest in the progressive realisation of human rights. The 2 per cent change in the equalities budget is due to project delivery review—that is, things coming to an end and the timings of the delivery of particular projects being slightly different from what we had anticipated.

That is a fair question, and there is probably quite a lot that we could look into on that topic.

We feel the impact of cuts by the UK Government on protected groups in Scotland every day, and every day there is a need for us to put more of our budget into social security—the Scottish child payment and into other such schemes that are, as I mentioned, being accessed by people who require to do so only because of the direct impact of UK cuts. I would, therefore, be very interested to see such impact assessments.

The Scottish Government needs to check its own work first: that has to be our priority. However, I will always highlight why we are in this situation and why people are so reliant on our budget spend.

In order to fully answer the previous question, I point to the fact that the objective of mainstreaming is that people should apply equalities and human rights budgeting to their own portfolios. It is not for me to make decisions for other ministers, although I am more than happy to have conversations about mainstreaming, about the “Equality and Fairer Scotland Budget Statement 2024-25” and about how best to prepare for that throughout the year to ensure that equalities and human rights are visible throughout the process.

I will hand over to Rob Priestley to talk about “Your Scotland, Your Finances”.

We are doing the work on the EFSBS exactly for that reason. I am hopeful about the changes that we have been making. Since the statement was introduced, the content has not been the same every year because we are taking on board feedback and reacting to the input of the budget advisory group and people who have, over the years, given evidence to this committee and the Social Justice and Social Security Committee on what they would find more helpful.

It is a constantly evolving piece of work, but its objective is exactly as was just described: it is to help people to understand the impact on them of budget decisions, and to bring politics and the decisions that we make in the Parliament closer to the lived reality of people everywhere in Scotland.

I will follow on from a previous answer. What we are doing is the right thing to do. Reviewing the budget and asking ministers to report why they made decisions and how they used equality and human rights budgeting is the right thing to do. The question is how effective it has been and whether we are going far enough or doing it effectively enough each year.

The fact that we are being so reactive and changing the process, the documents that we put out and the format and type of information—in addition to, as I said to Paul O’Kane, considering a ministerial workshop and other points that we have for showing our work and scrutinising each other as well as our own decisions—will strengthen the process year on year. We were never going to get it right and be perfect in the first year because we are tackling ingrained, systemic inequalities and changing attitudes in a very large institution and a representative body. That is a hard thing to do, but we are making improvements every year.

I would focus on that. Yes, we need to improve, but we are doing the right thing.

Equality impact assessments and the work that went into producing the “Equality and Fairer Scotland Budget Statement 2024-25” have allowed us to track Scottish spend. However, as Kevin Stewart pointed out, much of the growing inequality is impacted, or even driven, by decisions that are not made in the Scottish Parliament. It is difficult to track how our spend balances against cuts that are made by a different Government, because the two institutions have separate reporting mechanisms and different reasons for making decisions.

I will look at whether we can do more in relation to tracking. We have information from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and other organisations that look at the impact of UK decisions on Scotland. We are trying to be more alive to that. I point to the debate that I took part in last year with Christina McKelvie, the then Minister for Culture, Europe and International Development, in which we looked specifically at the impact on Scotland of UK decisions on asylum and immigration and at how such decisions affect where we need to spend our budget. There is tie-in, but it is far more difficult to track spending by the two Governments when the decisions that have been made are so opposed.

I do not pretend that the systems and policies that are in place are the problem. Even if we started entirely from scratch, we would still be dealing with what needs to change: people’s attitudes and habits. With mainstreaming, we are trying to make it a habit to think about equality and about impacts on groups and on human rights-progressive realisation. That takes time and it takes work.

We could start from scratch, but we would still have to do all that work to change attitudes and the wider system. However, what we are learning right now through feedback from the advisory group and through scrutiny by this committee and the Social Justice and Social Security Committee in particular on equality and human rights budgeting will be very helpful. The lessons that we can take from the likes of the Covid inquiry will also be important, because we must ensure that our processes are resilient enough to enable us to spend on priorities when reacting to emergencies and, in the case of this budget, when reacting to significant cuts by the UK Government and a very challenging financial situation overall.