Equal Opportunities Committee
Meeting date: Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Official Report
324KB pdf
Budget 2011-12
Welcome to the sixth meeting in 2011 of the Equal Opportunities Committee and our final meeting in this session of the Parliament.
I remind all those present that mobile phones and BlackBerrys should be switched off completely, as they interfere with the sound system. We have received apologies from three members: Christina McKelvie, Stuart McMillan and Elaine Smith.
The first item on the agenda is consideration of the Scottish Government’s response to the committee’s report on the draft budget for 2011-12. Do members have any comments on the response?
I realise that we cannot say much about it at this point because we are coming to the end of the session, but I thought that it was worth making some comment.
The response is positive about the committee’s relationship with the Government, how everything works and how we have moved forward. I appreciate that and it is right. We have come on in leaps and bounds and I hope that that continues over the next sessions. However, I will mention a few smaller details.
Page 2 of the response mentions the equality and budget advisory group—EBAG—2010 report. However, it was unhelpful that that report was not published earlier. EBAG had completed it and submitted it to the Scottish Government, which was considering it, but we did not get to see it until afterwards. That needs to be said. The process is good, but it needs to be transparent and timely so that we can follow it.
The response also talks about:
“Analysis of the potential impact on equality groups of the final choices set out by Ministers in the Draft Budget proposals”.
We need to make the point again about when the decisions are made. It is all well and good to conduct an analysis at the end, but equality impact analysis should be an early and integral part of the decision-making process. It seems that we cannot say that often enough. It is essential.
On page 4, the education maintenance allowance is mentioned as an example of a case in which considering equal opportunities made a difference to policy and an example of an analysis having shown that a policy would have an impact on a particular group. The EMA is obviously targeted at young people and, although I absolutely welcome its retention, surely better examples could be given.
Throughout, the response talks about tackling occupational segregation but it does not give details of how that is being done. Simply to assert that something is going on to tackle occupational segregation is not detailed enough. I would have appreciated a little bit more on that.
Your comments will be part of the Official Report and therefore, as far as that goes, a response.
The Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Sustainable Growth’s response is positive. The committee has made considerable progress and the cabinet secretary has certainly listened to many of the fundamental points that we wanted to raise. On that basis, the committee welcomes his response. Do members agree?
Members indicated agreement.