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We might need to do some digging on that.

How can we use that analysis and understanding to improve or add to the procurement landscape? The issue links back to what you said about the failure to connect procurement and the public sector equality duty. What do you see as important in that regard? Is it about a specific conditionality or different weighting? We have talked about the price versus the social or environmental impact. Thinking specifically about procurement, what is important?

I appreciate that we are at the beginning of the process and that, although we have done a lot of mainstreaming, there is still a lot of work to do. However, one of the challenges is that, when we look at what is happening in communities and neighbourhoods around Scotland, we see rising inequality and more people being threatened with exploitation at work and modern slavery-type situations. Are we on the way to following the pound—to better understanding that a particular investment will mean that someone does not fall into modern slavery? Do we have mechanisms for tracking such specific impacts?

I appreciate that. It is worth saying that, if it was easy to track the impact of spending, we would have been doing it by now. I appreciate that the process is not easy.

However, I sometimes wonder whether we look at equality and human rights accountability from the wrong end of the telescope. Last week, there was an interesting discussion in the Scottish Parliament on different strategies for tackling poverty. Somebody posed this question: what if our starting point in every budget was to look at everything through the lens of eliminating or reducing child poverty? If the starting point for everyone, whether it is the Cabinet Secretary for Transport or the Cabinet Secretary for Wellbeing Economy, Net Zero and Energy, is that every decision that is made needs to address child poverty and other such issues, we will start to get very different types of decisions.

Over the coming year—in some ways, next year’s budget process starts now, as we conclude this year’s budget process—will there be space for those conversations, not only with your Government colleagues but with external stakeholders who have routes into understanding the impacts and who have experience of assessing every decision that they make through a rights-based lens, because this is about rights realisation? What are your thoughts on that?

I understand that. I appreciate your openness towards considering how we can get better at this, because everybody would probably agree that nobody does this right. We are trying to do something quite important in Scotland in focusing on rights realisation through our budget.

My final question is linked to what you have said in reference to the Scottish child payment and tackling child poverty. How confident are you that gendered inequalities and inequalities related to other protected characteristics are being considered by the Government and the strategic leadership team in ways that look at more than just economic poverty and inequality? Are we asking each other the right questions? Have we got the right information? Are we collecting the right kind of data to understand poverty that is more than economic?

Thank you, minister, for being with us this morning. I welcome you and your officials.

I have some questions on accountability for equalities and human rights. In some ways, they follow on from Kevin Stewart’s questions and points that he picked up. They are about how we understand the impact of decisions on people who use services, whether or not they are vulnerable and marginalised.

One of the questions for us is how we track analysis of impact from previous decisions into future decisions. Will you say a little bit about what we need to do to better understand impacts from past decisions before we even begin to think about future decisions?

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the fifth meeting in 2024 of the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee. We have received no apologies for our meeting.

As members will be aware, Kaukab Stewart has resigned as convener of the committee, following her appointment as Minister for Culture, Europe and International Development. For that reason, I am chairing this part of the meeting in my capacity as deputy convener. I take this opportunity to put on the record our thanks to Kaukab for her work, and I wish her well in her new role.

Under our first agenda item, the committee is invited to choose a new convener. The Parliament has agreed that only members of the Scottish National Party are eligible for nomination as convener of the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee.

Do we have any nominations for convener?

Congratulations, Karen. I hand over the chair to you.

Good morning. I thank the witnesses for what they have said so far.

I want to follow up on the tension between price sustainability and the different weightings. With the sustainable procurement duty, is there a mechanism by which longer-term value or longer-term outcomes can be incorporated, or, as things stand, is it just a case of the system saying, “This is the value now and this is the weighting now”? We do not or cannot collect data, and we cannot project forward. Colin Smith talked about alternatives. If we took a longer-term look—over five years, for example—would we get those outcomes? Would that help to provide some balance?

Joanne Davidson mentioned fair work earlier. Do we understand what subcontractors and secondary contractors do in a way that allows us to understand the genuine benefits of what we are trying to do?