Seòmar agus comataidhean

We have had our own piece of work going on involving the expert reference group on Covid-19 and ethnicity and now the interim governance group to develop national anti-racist infrastructure, and work is taking place on the observatory. We were already on that pathway.

On the UPR, in particular, you will know that the United Nations issued its recommendations in November. We are currently in the process of working through the recommendations that impact us and we are working with the UK Government on how we inform the report. Of course, there is a word limit on what we can contribute to that, so we always try to make it as concise as possible. We are preparing that right now.

What we also tend to do, which we will do in this case, is publish our own Scotland-specific statement, which gives much more detail about the areas of the UPR recommendations that we are working on. We were a bit further ahead than England and Wales on some of the recommendations, so we want to highlight some of that. However, we are working closely with our colleagues at Westminster, to mutually support one another’s work and to ensure that Scotland’s voice is heard when the report goes back to the Human Rights Council in the spring.

As always, Maggie; thank you.

The equality and fairer Scotland budget statement is our primary tool. There are national outcomes, the national performance framework and many other regulatory things that fit into that process and there are implications for public authorities if they do not uphold that.

We have included more detail than ever in the equality and fairer Scotland budget statement, but Angela O’Hagan said at committee last week that that 200-page document is underused, which made me think about why it is underused. I am thinking about how we encourage more use of it.

Ben Walsh and Rob Priestley made points about how we use the detailed analysis of what we have committed to, whether we have delivered outcomes, how we make decisions and how we work across other parts of Government and public authorities to realise those outcomes.

The human rights bill will address that gap by bringing about a much clearer understanding of what Government, Parliament and other public authorities’ responsibilities are in ensuring that equality and human rights outcomes are the best that they possibly can be. On areas where we spend money, I know that Maggie Chapman will be pleased to hear about the funding that is going to Clinterty in Aberdeenshire from the Gypsy Traveller accommodation fund. Something as basic as accommodation has an impact on all the equality and human rights outcomes of the Gypsy Traveller community in Scotland.

To go and see the finished product of that funding is important to me. It is important that those people realise their rights and understand that they have rights, because people in that community felt as though they did not have any rights. We are working in a very tough position, so seeing that money go from this place to that place is incredibly important.

When we do all the analysis, create all the documents and have all the links that we want, it still concerns me that people say that the document is underused and is not usable. I want somebody to read that document and realise the outcome for Clinterty or a disabled people’s organisation or whatever. I want them to be able to see that, but we still have work to do on that. I say that there is work to do, rather than that there are gaps. We are cognisant and mindful of what we need to do to get there.

Angela O’Hagan has done amazing work over the years in speaking to local authorities and others on human rights budgeting and gendered budgeting. She has been working away doing that, as have a number of organisations such as Making Rights Real.

We had a human rights bill advisory board meeting last week—we meet frequently right now, and I chair those meetings. Last week, we met Councillor Maureen Chalmers, who is the new chair of the wellbeing board, because we realised pretty quickly that local authorities are a huge and key partner for us in this work, as is the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities through the work that it does. The human rights bill will cut across many committees at COSLA level, and Maureen is taking the lead on the work that we are doing around the bill. COSLA and local authority leaders are involved in it at the early development stages both to realise what will be their duty under the bill and to understand why the duty is important and the reason why we need it to be there, which is that we need better outcomes for people who are affected by the deepest systemic structural inequalities that we know about.

As I said, Maureen Chalmers was along at our meeting last week. I asked her how she thought that it went and she said, “Oh, my goodness, there is so much work here, but it will be incredibly important for all the COSLA committees”. I am working on how we facilitate that with those committees so that we bring people in at the design stage. I hope that it will mean that local authorities understand what they need to be doing as they move forward. I am sure that they will.

I heard some of that evidence last week. That has been a perennial problem. The point was made that that applies not just to the Government but to the Parliament and other public authorities. We need to improve that whole process to ensure that resources go to the right places.

A lot of the work that I do on equalities and human rights, in relation to the funding that we provide to stakeholders in order that they can do their work, is outcome driven. What difference is being made for people in their everyday lives? A lot of that, especially in relation to delivering money as part of the equally safe strategy, involves working in partnership.

A great example of that is the Saoirse project that I visited in Blantyre, which supports women in relation to domestic violence, mental health and addictions. They go through one door, tell their story once, and all of those services click into place. Seeing resources being utilised in a holistic way that has a successful outcome is really powerful. I am not saying that we are perfect—the delivering equally safe fund is only about eight months old and are we are still learning from it. We published a six-month report on it, which I commend to you.

You also asked about the equality and human rights budget advisory group—there are so many acronyms now that I cannot remember them all, but you know what I am talking about. One of the first things that I did when I came into Government was to make the chair of that group independent, so that they became a critical friend of Government and are not afraid to tell us what they think—they have never been afraid to tell us anyway, but now they can be more independent with their thoughts on all of this.

We have a number of recommendations from the work that the group has done over the past wee while. It has done a pretty detailed analysis on some international comparators. I am meeting Angela O’Hagan in February in order to pick up on those recommendations, which we are working through.

I tend to look at recommendations and decide what we can achieve quickly, which ones are bit more medium term, what are some of the long-term goals and how we work in partnership to meet them. I will be meeting Angela in February to discuss all of that, and I am happy to give the committee a much more detailed update then. We are not quite finished the work of analysing the recommendations yet, so things might change by the time we get to February.

To be honest, I could not speak for local authorities and would not want to do so. It would not be fair. Certainly, in my continuing work with the new COSLA chairs, particularly the chair of the community wellbeing board, I see superb work being done at local authority level, notwithstanding the challenges that everybody faces on budgets, the inflationary squeeze and the cost of living. Those impact on everybody and every penny that they have to spend. We mostly do the best.

There are two things there, Maggie. The homogenisation of protected characteristics was raised with us at the national advisory council on women and girls. You may sit in a protected characteristic, but we all know that a person usually does not have only one protected characteristic but a combination of them. Rob Priestley made the point about how we do that portfolio-by-portfolio analysis, and if you read it that way, that looks like siloing; however, when we draw on all the analysis, it becomes much more joined up and deals with that issue.

We tend not to do this, but if it looks as though there is homogenisation of protected characteristics and we are missing out on aspects of characteristics, we do a lot of work across Government to mitigate that, especially in departments such as the exchequer that would not ordinarily be involved in the issue.

However, with regard to how we develop capacity and competence—whether that relates to gender, disability or equalities and human rights—we now have experts across the board in this work, and that can only grow and become much better. That addresses the point about ensuring that we take an intersectional approach to everything that we do. Although the national advisory council on women and girls deals with women and girls, it also deals with disability, race, LGBTI issues and so on.

Therefore, when we take an intersectional view, we are taking a human rights and equalities approach. It is just about ensuring that we have the infrastructure, the capacity and the competence in our team to address that, pick out the issues, identify the gaps and then come up with the plans to fix them. That is what the continuous improvement vein is all about.

I think that we are quite world leading in some of that work and with regard to the proposals for our human rights bill and a lot of the work that we have been doing with stakeholders. We have funded a number of stakeholder organisations to look at the bill, the accessibility of the consultation, what it means, how to put it in plain language and how to make rights real for people. We are looking at all of that with regard to core obligations. A lot of the feedback is about what people expect to be the minimum, such as housing, food, a job, or the right to education—whatever it is—and those organisations are coming back to us with some of that detail.

I hope that the consultation will open soon, and I will be hoping that the many people who will be looking at that particular aspect, if not all of it, will come back with some of the ideas and resolutions that we need. We have some of that in train—I think that we know where we are going with it all—but I want to hear quite conclusively from stakeholders what they expect and whether we can meet that expectation. Sometimes, that is the tough part—the aspiration is there and the expectation is there, but whether we can make those align is sometimes the toughest part of it all.

Be assured that it is stakeholders who are the drivers for change in this and who are working with us to ensure that those core obligations that we can put into our act will deliver what it says on the tin. We should be proud of the committee’s work on making rights real in the previous parliamentary session, and we should be proud as a Parliament of how we work together to realise those rights.

That is what we are working on—that continuous improvement that we want to see and the route map that allows people to read the numerous layers of budget documentation in a way that gets them the information that they want.

There is work to do. I know that the exchequer has been working on some aspects of that. Folk there are looking at what the top lines are and how much we have to spend and I am the person who is pushing to see where we should spend it. Ben Walsh may be able to give you an update on the work that the exchequer is doing on that.

Rob Priestly will answer your question about analysis.

That is a great question. Human rights budgeting is a tool that the Government will use to realise some of that, and the wellbeing indicators in the national performance framework are another example of such a tool.

I recognise completely your characterisation of equalities and human rights as being a bolt-on at the end of a project or as a box that gets ticked at the end—“Aye, we’ve done that so let’s move on”. That is not how we see it now. We are undertaking work around the public sector equality duty, which we consulted on last year. We had very strong evidence from our stakeholders, and I will meet them again soon to discuss some of the stronger proposals that they made in relation to what we proposed in the consultation. Again, meeting expectations about realisation is important.

The public sector equality duty, our mainstreaming strategy, the national performance framework and the equality budget statement all have a key role to play in realising that—perhaps the public sector equality duty more so, and part of the criticism about the duty is how vague some of that is, so we need more clarity. Those things will obviously need to work with the human rights bill work that we are doing. We are thinking of them in tandem with the bill and not as two separate pieces; they are all part of the jigsaw, which is the characterisation that I used earlier.

It is important for us to be able to use the jigsaw to put in stronger duties for public authorities so that they live up to our expectations, and it is important to make the duties clearer. Given that it is taking some years to do that through the public sector equality duty and the bill, we need to work with public authorities and say, “This is what we want to achieve and how we will achieve it, and this is the way that you can achieve it”. However, the criticism from them is that it is vague and that they do not understand it. We are working now to provide much more clarity on what a public sector equality duty is and what a Scotland-specific duty is and how public authorities can use those tools to create better outcomes for the work that they do in their organisations.