Thanks for giving us the opportunity to share some of our highlights from 2018-19 and to talk about our priority aims for the year ahead. We have sent you some background documents that cover all the key points that we want to make, including a bit of background about the fact that our organisation covers Great Britain, so I will not go into that just now.
The past year has been one in which we have reviewed our organisation, defined the way in which we operate and refocused on the work that we do. That is set out in our soon-to-be-published strategic plan, which we have sent you on a single page. We went through a periodic tailored review, which is something that is undertaken by all arm’s-length bodies. That highlighted a number of our successes and recognised a number of the improvements that we have made over the past three years. It also, understandably, identified a few key areas for improvement—in particular, how we prioritise, how we show the impact of our work and how we influence and engage with our stakeholders. The review also recommended that we be much clearer about the use of our unique powers and the levers that we have at our disposal. That is a key theme that has also been picked up by the Westminster Women and Equalities Committee, which is undertaking an inquiry into the enforceability of the Equality Act 2010 and the role of the EHRC as the enforcement body.
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Before I say a little bit about how all of that impacts on our work, I will share some of our highlights from the past year. We launched “Is Scotland Fairer? The state of equality and human rights 2018”, which is a three-year review of progress on equality and human rights. It contains a significant body of evidence and is part of our “Is Britain Fairer?” reporting. We concluded work on the Scottish city deals, influencing and embedding equalities in the inclusive growth policy agenda in Scotland. Over the past year, we have engaged with and influenced all city region deals and the Ayrshire growth deal.
We have carried out research on the impact of Brexit on the benefits of European Union funding for equality in Scotland and on the need for future arrangements to continue to support equality. We undertook a major review into the effectiveness of the public sector equality duty, which found that compliance with the specific duties is not having the desired effect of driving change for people with protected characteristics. We will use that evidence to inform the forthcoming consultation on the specific duties.
We completed our inquiry into the accessibility of homes for disabled people, and we have called on the Scottish Government to set a 10 per cent target for accessible housing. We have also undertaken a growing number of successful compliance, enforcement and legal interventions.
Looking forward, the breadth of our remit and the size of, and the reduction in, our budget mean that we will have to make some difficult choices about what we work on. We have based our priorities for the next three years of our new strategic plan on evidence around the most challenging equality and human rights issues that society faces, which are set out in the 2018 editions of “Is Britain Fairer?” and “Is Scotland Fairer?”. We consulted widely on those priorities and received a great response from our Scottish stakeholders.
Our priorities reflect our dual remit as a national equality body and an A-status NHRI. Of course, they also respect the mandate of the SHRC in Scotland in terms of devolved areas of human rights. We have a close working relationship internationally and domestically with the SHRC, which allows us to complement its human rights work where appropriate—for example, in our criminal justice inquiry.
As you will see from our strategic plan, we are now working to achieve change through five priority aims, which cover work, transport, education, access to justice and institutions. We also have a core overarching aim to maintain strong equality and human rights laws that protect people and to have the data available to show what is happening to people in practice. Our main areas of focus in that regard will be on safeguarding laws after Brexit, seeking a strengthened and a more impactful public sector duty, supporting work to incorporate United Nations treaty rights into Scots law and influencing the collection of data across our aims on protected characteristics so that we can measure progress. We are happy to share more information about the specific work that we are planning in any of those areas.
I will finish on how we will work. You will see in our plans that there is an increased focus on compliance and enforcement. A key plank of our new strategic plan is legal support projects, taking multiple cases on particular areas of life that are aligned to our aims. That will create a critical mass that will make it clear that areas of life are regulated space.
We are also creating new compliance and enforcement teams, which has led to increased staffing in Scotland—Lynn Welsh will be able to tell you a bit more about that. Further, we have increased our investigations and inquiry work. We are currently running two inquiries, with more in the pipeline. Previously, we would have had one only every few years. Of course, I would defend the full range of our powers and levers.
We are part of the architecture for equality that goes beyond legal enforcement and litigation. Many of the root causes of inequality require other types of activity, such as encouraging good practice or providing evidence of the sort that we set out in “Is Scotland Fairer?” We are clear that we need to focus on prevention as well as on cure.