Equalities and Human Rights Committee

Meeting date: Thursday, October 4, 2018

Official Report 646KB pdf

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Draft Budget Scrutiny 2019-20

Our second item of business is an evidence session as part of our scrutiny of the 2019-20 draft budget. We have a panel of local authority expert witnesses, and we will look at how equality and human rights approaches can be taken in local government budgeting. I welcome Councillor Jennifer Layden, who is city convener for equalities and human rights at Glasgow City Council, Louise MacKenzie, who is group manager for strategic policy and planning at Glasgow City Council; Rosemary Mackinnon, who is principal officer for equality at Highland Council; Audrey Cameron, who is development officer for equalities at North Lanarkshire Council; and Liz Fergus, who is youth work manager at North Lanarkshire Council. You are all very welcome.

I will start by asking what methods you use in your local authorities to undertake equality impact assessments. Can we hear a bit about what evidence is considered and who is consulted, please? I will go to whoever makes eye contact with me first. Who is ready? Does Audrey Cameron want to come in?

10:30  

Okay. The approach that North Lanarkshire Council took in setting the 2018-19 budget in particular was to consider equalities groups in the proposals for the budget, which were made in August 2017. When the corporate management team and heads of service were considering what the budget proposals would be, a pro forma was developed that asked specific questions about whom the budget would impact on. That included consideration of whether the budget would impact on service users, employees and other services. If that was the case, a follow-up question was asked, to drill down on which specific protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010 were impacted.

That was a kind of screening process at a very early stage of the budget-setting process, which obviously involved only proposals at that point. That work was used as a basis for later discussions with elected members. I can speak about my own service, which covers education, youth and communities. We took an overview of all the proposals that were being made for our service and looked at the cumulative effect on particular groups. We identified, in relation to the 2018-19 budget in particular, that there was an impact on young people—it is the education, youth and community service, so that was an obvious group. We decided that we needed to keep an eye on young people who had additional support needs, communication support needs or mental health issues. Those were the kinds of issue that came up in relation to the original proposals.

The proposals then went out to public consultation, which took several forms. There were internet and email consultations and focus groups, and there were 25 articles in the local press. Hard copies were put in local libraries, and we held specific consultation focus groups with our British Sign Language community and with young people. Liz Fergus might be able to speak about the young people—

I will bring in some of the other local authorities, and then we can get into that.

Okay.

Who else would like to come in?

I am happy to come in. In our budget process, a number of different strands took place simultaneously. I was part of our budget sub-group, along with the treasurer and another colleague, which met directors of services to discuss the budget proposals. That allowed me to ask specifically about equalities aspects.

Some of our budget proposals also went out to public consultation. We held a number of community events and used an online dialogue tool, and we spoke to equalities groups in the city, such as the Glasgow Disability Alliance, to get their feedback on the types of issue with and gaps in our budget and on where we could perhaps make savings.

As part of our meetings, we undertook equality impact assessments for our draft budgets. On budget day for the full council, draft budgets from all the parties were presented and each had an equality impact assessment. We were strong on making sure that consideration was given to equalities through the entire process.

I will follow on from some of the points that Councillor Layden made. Strong political leadership is what is really important in our approach.

As Councillor Layden mentioned, we held a number of community consultation events. We are lucky in Glasgow in that we have a strong and thriving equalities third sector, and a lot of those groups were present at the consultation events, which were held in three different sectors of the city. In addition, we have a Glasgow household survey, which is a panel of 1,000 residents that is weighted to reflect the make-up of the city, so, to reach beyond the consultation events, we conducted focus groups of people who were drawn from the panel to discuss the budget options and ideas that were coming through.

As Councillor Layden mentioned, equality impact assessment work was done, following a mainstreaming model, by the services that were looking at the budget options. In addition, for the new administration of the council, as well as councillors receiving mandatory equality training to cover the public sector equality duty under the 2010 act, there was a programme of equality impact assessment training, which was carried out by the corporate team. It is a fairly practical session—Councillor Layden will vouch for that. The training has really helped members to understand what they are required to do.

Thank you—we will move on to training and such things later. We are interested to hear the perspective from Highland Council.

There are similarities between our approach and the approaches of Glasgow and North Lanarkshire. We use a pro forma template that asks at an early stage about protected characteristics and the likely impact of proposals, so that issues are identified and highlighted before proposals go forward. If it is identified that a full impact assessment is needed, one is carried out and presented to members.

We have used a range of different forms of engagement over the years. Some of that has been online, and we have worked with local communities in community councils and ward forums. We have carried out consultation with groups that have an interest in equality and access. In particular, we have tried to work with groups of people who find it difficult to use traditional methods of engagement, such as people with learning disabilities, people who are affected by mental health issues and people with visual or hearing impairments. We have carried out focus groups with such groups as well as the wider range of groups with whom we engage.

When we carry out surveys, whether online, on paper or through citizens panels, we disaggregate information by disability, gender and age, in particular, to give us further information. Although, generally, the feedback that we get from different groups tends to be aligned with the feedback that we get from the general population, it sometimes gives us rich insights into the different views of particular groups.

Thank you. That is helpful. My colleague Gail Ross wants to ask about equality and training.

Good morning, panel. I thank you all for coming along.

Before I go on to training, I have a question about the consultation with focus groups, citizen panels, disability groups and whomever else you consult when you are doing impact assessments. If it becomes clear that there would be quite a severe equalities or human rights impact, is the suggestion for that part of the budget immediately dropped, or is it put to elected members to decide whether it goes through? How does it work if you find out that a piece of work would have a severe impact on a certain group?

I will give the example of one of last year’s budget priorities in North Lanarkshire that was up for consultation, which was the proposed closure of our outdoor centre in Kilbowie in Oban. There was a strong reaction from local young people, who were supported to make their views heard about the impact that going to Kilbowie had had on them as they were growing up. Young people of all ages talked about their week at Kilbowie with school and felt strongly that the proposal would impact on learning experiences. All that information was put to the committee, and the proposal was then taken off the table and the centre was not shut. That is a practical example of our taking a “You said, we did” approach with our young people.

That is good. Is there any other feedback on that?

We follow a similar process. We do not want to implement policies that will have a severe impact on a protected characteristic group. The reason for having the equality impact assessment and for training elected members in that is that we understand the types of impacts that can occur. The approach can allow us to work through a policy and see whether it needs to be changed radically or dropped.

I cannot think of examples from the past few years, which is perhaps because there is early engagement and because senior officers and members look at options at an early stage, which means that such issues are picked up before they get into a wider budget package. We remove a lot of such proposals when the impacts are understood at an early stage.

Highland Council has a similar process, in that not all proposals go forward to the council. Some proposals are dropped or changed along the way as a result of the engagement that is carried out.

Is the training for elected members similar to that for officers, or does it differ? Is the training mandatory and on-going?

I can answer that from an elected member point of view. We undergo mandatory training on the Equality Act 2010, which involves going through the legislation. However, when I came into post, I felt that it was important that we should undergo impact assessment training to understand why we go through that process. Our strategic planning staff kindly provided us with that training, which involved working through examples of developing policy. That has helped to give elected members a deeper understanding when we scrutinise policy and impact assessments.

Highland Council has on-going training for staff and members. The training is similar for both, although we tend to have slightly shorter sessions for members. With members, we focus on the equality impact assessment process and highlight their responsibilities to give due regard to equality issues in decision making.

The situation is similar in North Lanarkshire. All our elected members have recently undergone equality and diversity training, with a focus on their roles and responsibilities and power dynamics. That was not specifically on equality impact assessments, but elected members raised that issue at the training as an area on which they would like to focus further in future training.

This question might be challenging for council officers to answer—if it is, the officials can just leave Jennifer Layden to answer it. We have heard about all the training and awareness raising, but can you give the committee an example in which elected members spotted a budget proposition and thought that the impact on a protected group would be too great, so the policy needed to be dropped or changed?

We have had a number of examples of that over the years. One that springs to mind involves a potential impact on our employability services. An impact assessment certainly changed a decision at the end of the day on proposals to reduce costs.

In our budget proposals, we focus heavily on socioeconomic deprivation. Therefore, a lot of our budget proposals look at where levels of deprivation are higher in Glasgow than they are in other areas, and a lot of them have been medium or low impact.

10:45  

I have a small follow-up question. I used to be a council elected member, and I know that getting members along to undertake training can sometimes be quite challenging. Have all elected members had the training, or is it patchy?

I believe that we have all had the legislation training and that the vast majority of the 85 members have had the equality impact assessment training.

At the moment, not all the Highland Council councillors have had training, but we will carry on and encourage members to attend on-going training.

In North Lanarkshire, a motion was passed at council that all elected members had to undertake the mandatory equality and diversity training. That has happened in the past two months.

That is interesting.

If I cut across someone else’s question, just tell me to stop, convener.

I want to ask about training for the public, as well. We have talked about officers and councillors, but I know from my own local authority that there is a big focus on participatory budgeting, and some of the witnesses have mentioned focus groups. One of my concerns is that sometimes the groups that are most disadvantaged or at risk are the ones that are least able to articulate their voice and that, particularly when budgets are tight, members of the public do not necessarily have information from impact assessments to make such choices. Have you looked at that?

A colleague who works closely with me has taken forward participatory budgeting in North Lanarkshire. In conversation with him, I suggested that members of the disability access panel in North Lanarkshire should be part of the steering group that informs the participatory budget so that members of the panel could influence access and inclusion issues in the participatory budgeting setting. That is one approach that we are looking at.

I can answer on behalf of Glasgow City Council. A number of participatory budgeting pilots have come from our budget this year. The majority of those five pilots are based on protected characteristic groups. We have, in participatory budgeting, socioeconomic deprivation that is linked to child poverty, to black and minority ethnic groups, and to communities of interests as opposed to geographical wards. However, the main aspect of that is capacity building and training people in how to get involved in citizens panels, which includes equalities training.

There is a risk with participatory budgeting that we will get the already very enabled and capable community activists, so we have to take an extremely proactive approach to ensure that groups that are at risk or are marginalised get involved in processes. It takes resources and time to enable people to do that. We have invested a lot of time in looking at how our care-experienced young people get involved in our youth engagement structure. That requires a lot of support and training and additional resource to look at where they are, where they are going, the barriers to participation that they experience and how we can overcome those barriers. There is still a job to be done to ensure that the voices of those who are most vulnerable are heard.

I am gratified to hear about the training that is going on for elected members and officials. However, my experience and the experience of members of the committee is that sometimes when something is everybody’s responsibility, it becomes nobody’s responsibility and that, if everyone thinks something is happening, it does not always happen.

I always remember that, when the Parliament passed the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014, it was the first piece of legislation to refer to duties in respect of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. I was the convener of the Scottish Alliance for Children’s Rights at that time, and I was horrified that half of Scotland’s councils divested themselves of children’s rights officers in the following year because of cuts as a result of financial pressures. Do your councils have elected individuals or officials who are specifically responsible for defending and promoting equalities and rights not just in budgeting but in policy and service delivery?

As the city convener, my role is to defend equalities and human rights in Glasgow City Council. I have a strong leadership role in ensuring that such rights are secured in policy. Many teams across our council offices and our arm’s-length external organisations have an equalities remit.

We talked initially about having an equalities committee in our new policy committee structures, but we decided that that might mean that all the equalities work would go to one committee. The terms of reference for all our policy committees say that equalities must be considered. Our policy report templates contain a section that must be completed to detail what equality impact assessments have been undertaken and how equalities might be affected, so we scrutinise that. A number of our policy committees have also co-opted members from the third sector and equality groups, who scrutinise our policies and our papers.

I will add further observations. I recognise exactly the dilemma that has been posed of balancing mainstreaming with having someone who has responsibility. In the time that I have worked on equalities, we have strengthened the position. We have a small team of people at the centre who work on a range of corporate issues, and I have a number of staff who focus on equalities, but we now have a much stronger group of staff who are closer to operational service delivery who understand the issues better.

We have a corporate equality officers group but, given Glasgow’s size, services such as education have their own working groups that draw in people from the operational side to make links. A number of specialists also support work in areas such as addressing domestic violence and the hate crime policy.

We have a mix. Equalities cannot be only driven from the centre and seen as the equality team’s job, which is where we were 15 or so years ago. However, we need a core to keep driving equalities through the organisation.

Similarly, Highland Council has a corporate operation—it is tiny and is represented by me—but we have much stronger roles across services. We have a cross-service equalities working group, and equalities are much more embedded across all our services than they were in the past.

Our care and learning service has made a huge shift forward. It has its own equalities working group, and equalities work is being taken forward much more strongly there, particularly in education. Equalities have been seen as other people’s responsibility, and the role has traditionally been with human resources, but the responsibility is shared.

We have a lot of partnership working on equalities in Highland with other public bodies, which are in a similar situation of having one lead member of staff. We work closely together to provide support and to network. Where we can work together, that helps us.

To build on the 2014 act, our children’s services partnership co-produced with young people in North Lanarkshire a partnership agreement on a rights-based approach, which the chair of the partnership and the chair of our council-wide youth fora jointly signed. It says that all the business of the children’s services partnership will be done in conjunction with young people’s views being sought at every opportunity.

We have moved from officers considering how to include a rights-based approach in plans to having practical examples, such as the partnership agreement. Our young people are empowered to ensure that the children’s services partnership delivers. When we raise our expectations of young people, they respond and react.

Our situation is similar to that of other councils. We have an elected member equality champion and a youth, communities and equalities sub-committee, which young people go along to and contribute to. We have a corporate equalities working group that has service representatives from across the council, and my role supports corporate work. There are also specialist staff across the organisation who work on issues such as gender-based violence and housing. We mainstream equalities as much as possible.

It is good to hear all the steps that your authorities are taking. It is fair to say that massive organisations such as local authorities can do all the things that they have in their armoury to address equalities and human rights, but unless they have a good process by which people whose rights are impacted or who have been discriminated against accidentally at local-service delivery level can raise the issue, it is all for nothing. The most marginalised people in society are often the quietest and find it hardest to have their voices heard. Can you give me an example of how that process works? If somebody has difficulty physically accessing a public space or experiences unconscious bias at the hands of a council employee, are you confident that they would know that they can challenge that and raise it with the authority, and how would they go about doing that?

On the first part, I am not sure that people always know that they have the ability to do that or that a behaviour or deficiency in a service is discriminating against them. However, we have processes in place to allow people to challenge that. Corporately, we try to support that. We engage with third sector groups, which are often the first place that people would go. People also go to their elected members. In Glasgow, over a long period, many of our elected members, and not just the ones who are equality champions, have had a strong interest in a range of equality issues, and particularly those of disability, race and religion. Our members are quite often a port of call if there is a particular issue.

We have a similar approach. I do not think that any of us would say that we are wholly confident that all people can access our services or find an effective way of taking forward a complaint. As has been said, the third sector is extremely important in this regard. We try to focus our training, particularly with front-line staff who come into contact with members of the public, on the equality and diversity issues, which is extremely helpful in raising awareness about people who need different ways to engage and who use different ways of communication. That helps us.

A partnership approach with other public sector bodies, such as the police, is crucial. Recently, we have done quite a bit of work with the police in relation to people with learning disabilities and disability hate crime. That involves having a partnership approach with the police and our social work colleagues in young people and adult services. We would not be able to reach everyone if it were not for our close working with third sector disability organisations, particularly deaf people’s representative organisations, with which we work closely.

Could the panel give the committee information about how you balance difficult decisions and take account of different and competing priorities when you look at equality issues?

11:00  

As councils, we sometimes have to make decisions with a heavy heart. For example, we spoke earlier about making difficult budget decisions. Sometimes we have to make difficult decisions, but we need to look at balancing them with mitigating factors. Rosemary Mackinnon spoke earlier about employability services. One of our recent proposals for employability services was to close a building, which we knew was going to impact on people who used those services specifically. We can save money by closing the building, but we need to ensure that we provide the service. We can do that in other ways, such as using libraries and community centres to ensure that people continue to access the service but in a slightly different way.

We need to be creative in our thoughts about how we balance things and make difficult decisions, and we need to ensure that the impact is not so great that the decision cannot be justified. That is certainly the approach that we take.

That goes back to the role of the equality impact assessment, which means that we are able to take account of some of the issues at a very early stage. In particular, officers are able to flag up any issues or considerations, and evidence such as feedback from local groups or national evidence. Decisions are taken daily at different levels in different ways—some are political decisions, and some are taken by officers. It really depends on what those decisions are, but we need to make sure that they are evidence based.

We always have difficult decisions to make, and we face some challenges. We have our council plan priorities, many of which are based on equality, fairness, dignity and respect. As others have indicated, we look at the evidence base and the outcomes, and the impact that we can make on people’s lives, as a way to help to direct resources. I will give examples of some of the budget decisions that we made this year. We put in approximately £2 million to mitigate the impact that universal credit will have in the next couple of months, in particular on disabled people and people who have learning difficulties. We know that there is a cumulative impact on protected characteristics. We have also put in additional moneys to deal with child hunger, or “holiday hunger” as it is called. That will help us to challenge some of the socioeconomic deprivation in the city.

One of my bugbears with equality impact assessments and equality training—I know that some committee members share this view—is that they are done once a year so that a box can be ticked. Equality is then put back on the shelf to be revisited the following year, when we remove the dust from the book and say, “Yeah, yeah, we need to do this again.” How confident are you that the equality training that all of you, and colleagues in your workplaces, have received is actually almost a living entity in your working and day-to-day lives and is meaningful?

I can come in on that—I think that Louise MacKenzie would probably back me up. At almost every committee, there is mention of equalities and how we are consulting hard-to-reach groups. It is a continuous process that we look at through all our policy development and service design.

We are about to start our budget process for next year, and we are already looking at some of the equality impacts of this year’s budget and reflecting on the decisions that have been made. We plan to discuss that with some of our third sector colleagues who represent equalities groups in the city to see whether we can do anything further and to find out whether they have any reflections on the budget decisions that we have made.

I agree with that. Even 10 years back, equality would come up very rarely in committees. Now it comes up at most, if not all, committees in one way or another. The process is on-going throughout our committees; it is not simply about our budget proposals and decisions.

In North Lanarkshire, we have established a sub-committee of our education committee that focuses specifically on equalities, young people and communities. That has helped to ensure that equality is part of the overall budget plan, and that the process is—as Mary Fee said—not just something that sits on a shelf that we dust down once a year.

I am thinking about what has been said. In Glasgow, given the make-up of our city, the equalities issue is very real for our front-line staff who deal daily with issues that citizens face. There are some challenging issues for some of our newer communities and for more excluded communities. At the centre, we are very much focused on giving them what they need. What Councillor Layden said reminded me of an example. When we were developing our equality outcomes, in addition to engaging with equality organisations in the city, our equality policy officers held workshops with front-line staff to enable them to help to shape policy because they deal with the issues on a daily basis. We are very much trying to keep the issues live.

We also have an employee equality forum, and we hold regular events for employees. The events are consultation forums for the council in relation to all sorts of policies, including budget decisions. Along with all the previous mechanisms that I mentioned to do with equality, keeping that focus ensures that equality is not forgotten and that it always has a high profile. Our elected member equality champion has also provided an excellent focus to keep equalities high on the agenda. Recently, the fairer Scotland duty has helped us to focus further on equality in all our decisions. In all our templates for reporting to committee, we now have to provide evidence on how we have considered equality and socioeconomic disadvantage.

You have all spoken about the marginalised and disadvantaged groups with which you are committed to engaging. Across the authorities that are represented here today, can you give me an example of the specific dialogue and communication that you have had with the Gypsy Traveller community, who are an ethnic minority and a disadvantaged group?

If you cannot give an example at the moment, perhaps you could bring one back.

I would quite like the panel to say whether or not they have had dialogue with Gypsy Travellers.

Absolutely.

We have a Gypsy Traveller liaison officer in North Lanarkshire Council. We do not have a permanent Gypsy Traveller site in North Lanarkshire, but we have a transient Gypsy Traveller community coming through the area. Our liaison officer always takes views from and consults with Gypsy Travellers on their needs, and that is part of our housing needs assessment.

We do not have a specific Gypsy Traveller liaison officer in Highland, but our tenant engagement officers engage with Gypsy Travellers. We have four sites across the region, and we have regular engagement with them through our housing service in particular.

Glasgow, like the areas that colleagues have talked about, has traditionally had a low number of Gypsy Travellers. Occupational travelling is the more prevalent trend in Glasgow, but we have worked regionally with colleagues in the west of Scotland to look at the accommodation and site needs of Gypsy Travellers. That has been done through our housing strategy. We also have a Gypsy Traveller liaison person who is located in our social work services.

I have a brief supplementary. While we are talking about marginalised groups, it is fair to say that one of the groups of people who, in all of Scottish society, experience the worst life outcomes and the worst denigration of their equalities and human rights are those to whom the local authority is arguably most responsible: our looked-after children. On any given day in Scotland, there are 15,000 children in the care of the state at home or in kinship care, foster care or residential care. How do your authorities seek to meaningfully engage with that community and those with care experience who have left their supervision orders?

We do a lot of work with our integration joint boards, which are looking to redesign and transform our children’s services, on our looked-after and accommodated children. We also do a lot of work with our social work services, and there has been a lot of involvement in trying to reshape the way that children’s services are delivered. It is a matter of moving from the model in which children are in long-term institutional care, which we have had for a very long time. For example, we now have a family genealogy service running in Glasgow that uses genealogy searches to support children to find kinship carers. That is an innovative way to look at how we can support children in the looked-after and accommodated sector in Glasgow.

There is a lot of work with looked-after children in Highland Council’s care and learning service, particularly on moving away from children having out-of-area placements. It is trying to keep children in the area or to bring children back into it.

We have also had a lot of engagement with looked-after children and have involved them in the shaping and redesign of services. That has been really important, and there have been powerful messages. For example, children have attended the committee and spoken at it about their experiences. That has been invaluable.

We have much to do to improve outcomes for our looked-after children, but a lot of good work is being done. Our authority has been partnered with the Life Changes Trust to set up a champions board. The work that is happening is really important. It is about ensuring that our care-experienced young people—past and present—get the opportunity to participate in the decisions that affect them. I know that our young care-experienced group is set up to challenge what is happening with services. They are interested in particular in education, housing and employment services, and we have helped to support them to take part in that process. Although we have six locality forums for our young people, their last request was that they have their own forum—a seventh forum—specifically for care-experienced young people. It is important that we act when our young people make such requests. We have much to learn from our young people who have been through the system.

We also need to ensure that we can focus on a deficit approach and that we look at the assets and learn from our care-experienced young people. We still have a way to go, but the picture on outcomes for our care-experienced young people is improving.

I want to ask about cumulative equality impact assessments. Obviously, individual policies do not sit in isolation. We have had a bit of discussion about partnership working, and integration boards have been mentioned. If you do cumulative equality impact assessments, how do you do them? I know that not all local authorities take that approach. Will you also speak a little about the involvement of community planning partnerships and joint boards in delivering the services that come out at the end and the mitigation or adjustment that you make when you identify that something will impact on a group?

I am sorry; there was quite a lot in that. I will let you breathe. Does North Lanarkshire Council do cumulative impact assessments?

11:15  

Yes—we did them for the 2017-18 budget and for the budget before that. With the last budget that we carried out a cumulative equality impact assessment for, it proved to be difficult, because in the end a lot of the proposals did not go through. When the Scottish Government brought out its draft budget, we realised that there was a lot of room for manoeuvre, and there was a significant difference between what was in the draft budget and the budget that was actually set. A lot of things did not go through.

That said, we try as best as we can to take a cumulative look at those matters. It is easier to do that for a budget, because so many equality impact assessments are being done at one time, but when you have an individual service doing an impact assessment on only two areas a year, it is difficult to get that focus.

How do you carry out that kind of assessment? Do you look at the impact of services and decisions on a person with a protected characteristic, or do you look at the suite of decisions that you have to make and then map it all out? The process feels quite complex. What is your starting point? If you want to get back to us on that, that would be fine—we are interested in hearing what you have to say.

Highland Council has faced challenges with cumulative equality impact assessments; in fact, we have found the area itself challenging, and we are very interested in hearing about any models of good practice in that respect.

With regard to community planning partnerships, I have already said that we do quite a lot of partnership work on equality issues across equality leads, but I also point out that, in our community planning partnership’s outcome improvement plan, equality is one of the horizontal themes cutting across all our outcomes. All the outcomes have a focus on inequality anyway, and many of our themes touch on equality.

Highland does not have an integration joint board; instead, there is a lead model approach, which is slightly different from the model in other bodies and authorities. However, under that, each organisation takes its own approach to equalities. We are the lead for children’s services in Highland, and equality is built into that work.

So even where there is joint working between two bodies, they might well have two different and separate approaches.

That is a challenge, too, but one of the benefits is that when we work together we ensure that equality is included in that work. For example, any integrated plans that we have must include equality in those considerations. As I have said, a lot of the work that we focus on jointly is, in a broadest sense, about inequality, equality issues and protected groups.

I agree that this is a challenging area. I would say that we need more evidence to support cumulative impacts, and it is important that we look at how we gather that data and focus on outcomes. It is also important that we carry out consultations and continue to speak to inequality groups to understand some of the cumulative impacts that our services might have.

Just to be clear, though, Glasgow City Council does not formally carry out cumulative impact assessments.

No—we do not do so formally. In the past couple of budget rounds, we have attempted in a very high-level way to flag up to elected members the broad cumulative impacts prior to decision making. However, like colleagues, we would be interested in getting more advice and support on how we might do that practically.

In the interests of time—and if Audrey Cameron and Liz Fergus do not mind—I will focus my questions on my own patch of North Lanarkshire. I am glad that Kilbowie was mentioned when the convener asked for examples of political groups taking things forward, and I know that the Scottish National Party group responded to concerns and took them to the council. Indeed, to be party political for a wee second, it was the SNP group who brought to committee the proposal for all members to have equality training—

Mr MacGregor, I do not think that we should talk about specific political decisions.

I was just commenting on remarks that were made, convener. I also wanted to mention the really good equality work that is going on at Buchanan high school.

How can we make equality impact assessments better? I am thinking, for example, of the situation with the bins in North Lanarkshire, what happened with the winter services and the issues at Drumpellier nursery. How can we make impact assessments better in that respect and ensure that, as other members have suggested, links are made with minority and disadvantaged groups?

I wonder whether the panel already covered some of that when they talked about how they carry out equality impact assessments. You are asking about quite specific and local decisions.

The issues were widespread—

That is political.

It is not. Okay, then—I also wanted to ask about arm’s-length organisations, particularly in North Lanarkshire, and organisations such as Glasgow Life. How do you ensure that equality is brought into those organisations?

I am quite conscious of the time, so it would be wonderful if someone could just jump in.

Glasgow Life, which is the cosy term for our council family, participates in our corporate equality structures and is part of our framework for equality in terms of our equality outcomes agreement, although I should say that that is not a specific requirement under the public sector equality duty. It is also included in our plan. It has a different structure—for example, it has a board—but one of the directors of Glasgow Life is also its equalities champion.

From my daily work with people in that organisation, I know that they are very up front about this, and it is very visible in the service that they offer. I do not have the time to do it this morning, but I can provide a lot of practical examples of how those things are visible in the approaches that Glasgow Life has taken. I certainly feel comfortable with it as an organisation; it is part of our wider family, and it can demonstrate good practice in a lot of areas of its work.

That is helpful.

I have a final question. We have talked a lot about equalities this morning, but I note that there is a new human rights outcome in the national performance framework. I know that this will be a challenge, but can you, as succinctly as possible, let the committee know how that will inform the forthcoming budget process?

We in Glasgow are starting to look at that, and officers have met Scottish Government colleagues to discuss how we can fit that into our budget process and our equality impact assessment training.

In Highland, we still have a way to go to incorporate human rights issues fully into some of our decision making, but it is certainly getting stronger in children’s services, as children’s rights are regularly considered.

The philosophy behind participatory budgeting is that a human rights-based approach be taken to budgeting. It is about communities determining for themselves how they want their money to be spent.

Human rights are also integrated into our equality impact assessment process, but that is still work in progress, because it is still the case that, for a lot of people, their understanding of what human rights actually are happens at a not very conscious level. A lot of work still needs to be done on that. Like Rosemary Mackinnon, I would say that a lot of work on human rights happens in our children and adult services, but it needs to be broadened out to include other parts of the council.

Thank you very much for your helpful evidence. We are quite squeezed for time on Thursdays, so we might write to you for more details.

I now close the public part of the meeting, and I ask for the gallery to be cleared.

11:24 Meeting continued in private until 11:40.