Social Justice Committee, 10 Jan 2001

Meeting date: Wednesday, January 10, 2001

Official Report 189KB pdf

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Social Justice Annual Report

We move to item 5 on the agenda, which is the social justice annual report. Members will recall that it was agreed last year to put this matter on the agenda. The report was debated in Parliament and people had the opportunity to voice their views and concerns. I do not think that it is the committee's role to rehash the debate and set out party positions, but we may want to discuss briefly the committee's role on the report this year and in future. Lee Bridges has provided a report. Do members have any views on how we should proceed?

I agree that there is no point in regurgitating the arguments or the somewhat hard words that I had to say about the report when it was discussed in Parliament. It is too early to determine the effectiveness of the Executive's policies. We should bear in mind the fact that we did not even have a year before we were asked to express a view. We need much longer than that. This morning we can discuss whether we agree that the targets are appropriate and whether the existing system for satisfying the Parliament that the targets are being met is adequate.

I agree with Bill Aitken. The report was the first ever report in Scotland on the social justice targets. We have to give the targets time to bed down. We should wait before we discuss them and we must tread carefully. By next year, a full year will have passed and we will have a clearer picture of whether the Executive's various measures are working. It will perhaps be more telling to consider the figures in next year's report.

It is important that the committee has a role in this matter, but that role is different from that of the whole Parliament. We do not want to hold the debate again, but the minister should be accountable for the report to the committee. We should perhaps arrange for the minister to come to the committee once a year so that we can question her on the targets, on the progress that has been made to achieve them in the previous year and on any difficulties that the Executive has encountered or that committee members have perceived.

The difficulty is pinning down the results of policy measures. Some of the objectives in the report are significantly more important than others. Some do not relate to the particular work of our committee. It may be useful to draw from the report the particular matters that the committee should keep an eye on. For example, on the rough sleepers initiative, we want some visible sign that people are not sleeping rough to the same extent. We should establish how that is measured and examine the figures. There is a lot of work that we could do in that area. Some figures are more solid than others; some things cannot be monitored effectively, but others can. Perhaps we should have a quarterly paper that draws together the key points that the committee would like to keep its eye on and on which it could monitor progress.

I do not disagree with that suggestion. We are at an early stage and the report represents an attempt to draw a baseline against which comparisons can be made. We should be careful that, when the baseline is adjusted, as it undoubtedly will be, it is done logically—there should be no recurrence of what happened in relation to unemployment when targets were moved if no improvement could be achieved.

The things that are difficult to measure are probably as important as those to which it is easy to put a number. An area in which I am interested, because I used to be involved in the health service, is the disparate figures that arise from health inequalities, which affect communities in which attempts are being made to tackle social exclusion. I am familiar with some of the figures from my area. Someone is much more likely to be admitted to hospital as a result of an overdose if they come from a deprived—whatever that may mean—background than they are if they come from a community that is not deprived. We should examine such trends to identify problems across the range of policy areas, not just in relation to housing. The report is on social justice and cuts across a range of factors. I know that the Executive and everybody else are interested in health inequalities. We should think about broadening the range of criteria that we consider.

We are now called the Social Justice Committee, so it is important that we have an overview of everything in the report. I would like a meeting to be arranged to go through the report perhaps every six months, so that we can examine the targets that have been set and what has been happening. We cannot tell every committee what to do, but it would be a good idea for the Social Justice Committee to hold meetings that are devoted to the subject.

I think that members agree that it is our role to keep an eye on the report and to inform the social justice agenda through our meetings with different groups and so on. We should ask the clerks to produce a paper along the lines that Robert Brown suggested, which outlines the key targets and fields for us. There may be a case for alerting other committees to some of the targets that are identified—there are obvious examples in education—so that they can examine what is happening. I understand the argument that the targets are a baseline against which things can be checked and therefore that they should not be changed. Equally, if targets and milestones are set that conflict with each other or do not make sense as part of a cross-cutting approach, we may want to highlight that to the Executive so that it can address it. We can also agree to invite the minister to the committee annually or six-monthly to discuss progress on the report and any issues that we want to raise. Perhaps the clerks will summarise how we will act. Is that acceptable?

Members indicated agreement.

I know that there will be an annual report on this, but will we be given a more frequent—quarterly or half-yearly—monitoring report?

We can find that out. There is always a tension between looking at the statistics and having an impact on the statistics. It is a matter of balance for the Executive; it has to decide whether expending a lot of energy on reporting back on what has been done detracts from work in this important field. We can ask the Executive how it envisages the process developing in the next year.

A slight problem is the fact that the statistics in which we are particularly interested do not arrive simultaneously, but are produced at different times of the year. We should flag up that problem.