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I welcome Morag Alexander and Anne Meikle from Fair Play, Jon Harris from the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, and Muriel Robison from the Equal Opportunities Commission to give evidence to the committee. Members have many questions, so rather than ask the witnesses to make statements we will move on to questions. The witnesses will be able to make statements as they answer the questions.
I will start with a general question, to which I ask all the witnesses to respond. From your experiences, what can be learned from addressing gender inequality through a mainstreaming approach? Can you give any examples of good practice in terms of addressing gender equality generally, rather than only within the best-value framework in local government?
The convener said that she did not want us to make general statements, but I would like to thank the committee for inviting Fair Play. We are launching our five-year report today. We have been in existence for five years and we have a lot of experience of attempting to mainstream gender equality, particularly in areas of economic development. We can identify some good examples for the committee. Anne Meikle will pick up on some of the examples.
As Morag Alexander said, Fair Play works specifically in equal opportunities and economic development. Economic development is a key function of local authorities. A good example of our work is the training that we have been doing with local authorities to help them to implement their equality strategies. That training has been done with a range of managers and staff. It has also focused on the business adviser network. Equality has a valuable contribution to make to the implementation of documents such as "The Way Forward: Framework for Economic Development in Scotland" and "A Smart, Successful Scotland: Ambitions for the Enterprise Networks". Our work with business advisers and other staff in councils is important.
Before we move on, I will pick up on a couple of points. Have you found that your training is generally well received? Has there been any resentment of the training? Have any authorities not felt the need to work with you on training?
We have not met a lot of resistance to the training from local authorities, although some departments in authorities ask, "Are other departments doing this?" Interestingly, many of the departments that we work with are in competition with the private sector for work, such as community services divisions or, as I mentioned earlier, the business adviser side or environmental services. Some departments do not have the focus on equality that others—for example social work departments or education departments—that have a long history of equality training and equality strategies have, but they are now working with us. I would not say that there is resistance to or resentment of our work.
That is good. You mentioned the private sector and tendering. I wish to ask about awarding contracts. This is not just a question for your organisation; it may also be a question for the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities. I asked this question in a debate in Aberdeen: should the Scottish Executive and local authorities examine whether the organisations to which they award contracts have equalities policies? Are they putting them into practice?
If any of the witnesses want to answer any of the questions, they should indicate that to me.
The committee's inquiry is timely, given the publication of the Local Government in Scotland Bill and the opportunity that that provides to mainstream equalities, such as gender equality, in everything that local authorities do. The bill also covers the integration of mainstreaming within the duty of community planning, which applies to local authorities and to other public bodies, and within the application of the power to advance well-being. Given the First Minister's commitment to extend best value throughout the public sector, there is an opportunity to deal with mainstreaming more broadly than simply in local authorities. That is one advantage of the bill when compared to the English legislation.
That is interesting and raises a number of issues. Before Muriel Robison answers, I have two specific questions for her.
I ask you to make them brief, because other members have questions.
Do you know any examples of bad practice in addressing gender inequality in local government and elsewhere from which we can learn in this inquiry? Can you provide us with specific examples of good practice—of local authorities working through best value to address the issue of gender inequality?
I can do so in answering the committee's general questions, especially about mainstreaming.
Can that material be submitted to us as part of the inquiry?
Yes. Both Jon Harris and Muriel Robison mentioned the Local Government in Scotland Bill. Do you think that the equal opportunity requirements that are contained in the bill will be sufficient to address gender equality issues or to improve gender equality significantly?
There is guidance that councils are required to have regard to. I was a member of the original best value task force, which has been resurrected and had its first meeting a couple of weeks ago. We discussed what guidance is necessary under the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000. I have suggested that we should update the guidance that we issued previously—which you have seen—to bring it up to date in relation to the statute. In some respects, Audit Scotland and the inspectorates have increasingly taken account of equalities issues and the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 codes of practice. Councils would welcome updated guidance. If we did it properly, health boards, local enterprise companies and other agencies would learn from that.
I endorse what Jon Harris has said, but more needs to be done in the form of guidance, standards or indicators. The COSLA guidance that was circulated previously requires updating. It is a good starting point and there are other good examples such as the English and Welsh equalities standard. The Equal Opportunities Commission has worked with the Commission for Racial Equality, the Disability Rights Commission and the Audit Commission to produce that equality standard. That is something that the EOC would commend, as a lot of work has gone into it.
When the report was written, only the CRE standard existed and it is referred to as a benchmark. Having the general equality standard takes the benchmark a step further. The new duty of best value requires equalities to be mainstreamed within performance management structures. Crucially, because it is set in legislation, it is enforceable by inspection and scrutiny. That is missing in England, where there is a standard but no mechanism for enforcing it. If we could put it all together, we would not necessarily have the best of both worlds, but we would certainly move forward a bit faster.
That was a general question. Does Fair Play want to comment?
Only to say that, in general, the requirement must be much more explicit and have greater force.
What are the key barriers to the successful integration of gender equality issues through the best-value mechanism, apart from people saying that it does not work or paying lip service to it?
In some ways, it was seen as a minority issue and an optional issue. One of the advantages of the way in which the area of equal opportunities is defined in the Scotland Act 1998 is the fact that it is everyone's business. That has raised the profile of gender equality and people now understand that it is not something that can be added as a bolt-on. That made a big difference. My experience in the 1980s and the 1990s was that that was a major barrier.
I would be interested to hear other people's views on the barriers.
The Local Government in Scotland Bill talks about balance. We now have four Es and we want equality to have the same weight as the other three. I endorse Jon Harris's concern that it may not. Through the guidance and standards that we have spoken about, an explicit commitment is required to ensure that equality is not the poor relation of the other Es.
I endorse that—the commitment has to be explicit. Some of the processes involved in best value and community planning reinforce what we are trying to do in equality. You are consulting and you are considering the people who use services and are employed in them, and you are acknowledging that their needs may be different and that you may have to think differently. That all comes under mainstreaming. That process can reinforce the qualities of best value and can help us to provide a more equal delivery of services and give better treatment to all employees.
We have discussed the barriers and are aware of them. I agree with Jon Harris: for a long time people signed up to the idea of equal opportunities but kept the policies in their drawers, thinking that they were for someone else to deal with. How do we get over the barriers? We have spoken about training, community planning and a commitment to mainstreaming, but how do we deal with hearts and minds to ensure that policies are delivered, and how do we ensure that the equal opportunities policies do not end up stuck in a filing cabinet?
You have to make each local authority clearly responsible for delivering equality throughout the authority. In a performance assessment of managers and people at all levels, serious questions would be asked if budgeting was not on target.
So appropriate indicators are required.
Yes.
I want to mention another driver for change that may have brought equality issues nearer centre stage. Much of the modernising agenda that is built into best value and community planning puts the community first. A focus on the customer and citizen is one of the essential elements of best value. Community planning has to promote the ideas of community regeneration and empowerment. Once communities are put first, we no longer think of a community as a homogenous group; we think of it in the context of the definition of equalities in the Scotland Act 1998. That is a huge driver for change, leading to a focus on the needs of the community rather than on the needs of institutions.
We need to look at how we remove the barriers. Jon Harris spoke about community planning and about the involvement of communities. How can we ensure that communities become actively involved in the process? How do we ensure that, when we involve the community, we are not simply paying lip service to the most vocal person in the community or the organisation who has made the most noise or has an interest in a particular issue?
We are in the early stages of community planning. If I were asked to name the most successful pathfinder in that respect, I would pick Stirling, as it works through the Stirling assembly and has built its community plan on the basis of links with its communities. Other pathfinders produced a community plan because they were asked to do so. The community planning process is now moving to a position in which its focus is less on the community plan and more on the process of engaging communities.
Do you agree that communities need the same training and support tools that the people who work in local authorities have or need?
Yes.
Yes. Communities need to have the same tools. One of the benefits of community planning should be that people have equal status around the table. However, if people perceive that they have a different status to others who are sitting around the table—that perception may be real or otherwise—equal status may become a source of tension.
You have already talked generally about best value in response to Elaine Smith's questions. Best-value regimes must contain a commitment to continuous improvement and the involvement of stakeholders. Are you aware of any examples of good practice in those specific areas?
The report of Audit Scotland's most recent external audit of councils identified several examples of good practice both in engaging communities and arrangements for continuous improvement. As far as best value is concerned, the key element is the best-value review process, in which people have carried out equalities impact assessments. I know that good examples exist; for example, I have seen Edinburgh's assessments and some of Fife's. We should also develop the Equal Opportunities Commission's work on impact assessments and build it into the best-value process.
In response to a question from Cathy Peattie, Morag Alexander mentioned the appropriateness of indicators. Without being critical of or making any judgment on COSLA, I should point out that its guidance on best value and equalities recommends that any performance indicators that are developed should be focused on areas where legislation supports equality perspectives rather than on broad indicators. What is your view on that matter?
We need to be careful when using indicators. We have worked with the various audit bodies on them. I also worked with the Equal Opportunities Commission at the very beginning to find out whether we could establish various indicators. Although I appreciate that the process is difficult, we can get there. I should point out that if indicators are so bland that everyone can just sign up to and achieve them, they will simply have no impact. They have to mean something, and that requires thought and effort. A lot of work is being carried out on this subject, and there are many examples that we can draw on. I encourage the committee to look for that.
I think that COSLA should have a chance to reply.
I am looking for the sentence that you mentioned in your question. On equalities indicators, our main message is that, as a whole set of performance measures is used for individual services and corporately for the council itself, we should perhaps put more thought into disaggregating that information instead of looking for new indicators. I see the equalities standard more as a benchmark than an indicator. As Anne Meikle pointed out, if it is used simply as an indicator, it will lose its value. I cannot find the sentence to which you referred, but I will keep looking.
I apologise for the earlier interruption. I thought that my mobile phone was turned off but, as everyone heard, it was not. Furthermore, if I ask a question that has already been asked, I hope that you will tell me so and skelp me down immediately.
We worked with Audit Scotland to build equalities into the performance management and planning audit templates. We felt that more evidence was needed. The Audit Scotland report was the first time that we had a reasonably accurate statement of where we are. Best value had been introduced on a voluntary basis for only two and a half years.
Part of the answer is training and investment, the lack of which Jon Harris mentioned. We need to make equal opportunities policies relevant to the day-to-day work of front-line staff by putting the policies into practice and turning them into outcomes. The only way to do that is by investing in training to raise people's awareness of how they can promote equality in their work.
Like you, I am concerned about how we can make equal opportunities policies work. I come from a social work background and was a social work practice teacher. Equality training was built into social work courses. Trainee social workers needed to work with ethnic groups and be able to prove in their final assessment that they had worked on equalities issues. Whether you can find an ethnic group depends on where you are in the country. People could take a tick-box approach. You would look for something just so that you could tick the box to say that the social work student had shown evidence of being able to understand equality issues or work within an equality framework.
There is always a concern that people will adopt a tick-box mentality towards equal opportunities. As has been mentioned, the enforcement of best value presents an opportunity to ensure that equalities are very much part of the enforcement agenda. That will mean that, in the balancing act around best value, the way in which equality of opportunities is implemented in practice will be on the same level as the other Es. As Jon Harris mentioned, equality standards, in effect, are not policed down south. We have an opportunity to ensure that they are policed here in Scotland.
We need to be a lot smarter about how we provide training support. As one police officer said to me, there has always been a tendency to take a sheep-dip approach to the provision of equal opportunities training. People are given the training once for half an hour and then they are moved on. Equality of opportunity needs to be mainstreamed into the provision of all training so that, instead of being a one-off issue, it forms a part of everything from induction right through to exit interviews. I am not an expert, but I know that, unless equalities issues are built into the process, they will always be seen as just another box to be ticked. However, as I pointed out, I am not sure whether trainers have the capacity to deliver the level of provision that we are discussing.
So it is a matter of who trains the trainers?
Yes.
The importance of effective monitoring comes through loud and clear from you and from research findings on equalities work. How can we ensure that there is effective monitoring of implementation of the requirements of the Local Government in Scotland Bill?
Monitoring should be built into performance audit and inspection regimes. Performance audit has three elements. First, there is the external audit, which uses the template and the auditor goes in once a year. Secondly, there are value-for-money studies, which will become best-value studies. They can deal with thematic issues such as equalities—the inspection of police authorities, for example. Thirdly, there are the statutory performance indicators. If those are disaggregated by equalities and put together, one has a useful picture of a local authority's performance in respect of equalities. Doing that annually means that one can judge whether there are trends and continuous improvement. In some ways, that approach must be the answer. I see no point in setting up a separate monitoring exercise, as there is a huge resource of auditors and inspectors. It is a matter of making that approach work so that equalities are monitored.
I agree with Jon Harris, but what really matters is what one does with what one sees. One should find out what monitoring says and communicate that to people. If a person ticks a box, we hope that they recognise that that will be recorded. If they receive feedback that demonstrates that what they have done has been effective, that can help to reinforce the message about equality and its value. It is important that monitoring statistics are used and that results are communicated to people and built on. Information for continuous improvements from year to year will then be available. It is important that we do not reinvent processes and overburden people, and that we use what we have effectively in a variety of ways to meet needs.
I could not agree with you more. Feedback—particularly feedback to those at the front line—is important, otherwise the whole exercise is futile.
I apologise to the committee and our guests. I have not been watching the football on television—I was at the Procedures Committee, which is why I have just arrived.
Will you define structural?
I meant gender inequality within institutions, but inequality for disabled people as a result of the fabric of buildings is also important. You might want to touch on both issues.
We have mentioned the importance of changing people's understanding and perception of equalities so that there is a move from a culture that is focused on institutional needs to one that focuses on community needs. If there is such a culture shift, it will change how an organisation thinks. I think that there is a shift in local government.
Gil Paterson asked whether we think that best value is the best way, or even an appropriate way, to break down such barriers. The EOC thinks that best value is a significant improvement on previous systems, as equality is a factor that should be taken into account. Earlier, I talked about bad examples of situations in which equalities were not taken into account in service delivery or employment settings. In those examples, serious inequalities resulted from a failure to recognise the consequences of using only cost as the determining factor. I mentioned that best value gives an impetus to mainstreaming equalities—it gives local authorities an endorsement, an encouragement and an opportunity to mainstream equalities. We want equalities to be mainstreamed, and there is no contradiction between best value and mainstreaming equalities.
As the gender reporter to the committee, I produced a paper some time ago in which I hoped to persuade the committee to undertake a gender inquiry. My paper was perhaps a little too wide, as it talked about the wider aspects of violence against women in society—not just domestic violence but prostitution and pornography. Those issues must be addressed when we consider gender discrimination and inequality. The committee decided to focus on best value in local government, which was fair enough, because it gives us an opportunity to consider the outcomes and to focus. I accept that the suggestion in my paper was perhaps too wide—we might have ended up biting off more than we could chew.
I will make a general comment. I am not speaking for Fair Play, but I base my response on years of working in the equality business and on the fact that I once wrote an article on pornography. I feel strongly that pornography has a negative impact on the image of women, but that is a personal view, and others may not agree with me. I reacted positively to the news that lap dancing was to be discouraged in Glasgow and I encourage other cities to follow Glasgow's lead. Glasgow's decision demonstrates that the city and the politicians within the city's structures recognise that the image of women needs to be protected if women are to have equal status in society and equal access to services.
I want to go back to a comment that Morag Alexander made, when she talked about the standards that can be set and whether those standards should be easily attainable or whether the system should have rigour. Are the references to equal opportunity requirements in the Local Government in Scotland Bill sufficient to address gender equality issues? In other words, is the bar set high enough?
I think that much more explicit wording is required.
Members may wish to ask the Executive that question when they scrutinise the bill. The provision was drafted by lawyers, so it is based on what they thought was possible. In our opinion, the language should be strengthened.
Is the standard that has been set the lowest common denominator? Should a higher standard be set?
The bill says that local authorities
It could mean anything.
That is why we believe that guidance is required to support the provision. It is crucial to include the provision in the bill—by achieving that, we will have moved a long way—but the requirement is not sufficient. We conducted analysis with the EOC and the CRE on the legal position in respect of reserved and devolved powers. My view is that the provision could be strengthened, but perhaps the committee could ask the Executive about that.
One thing about good answers is that you never get tired of hearing them, even if they are given at the same committee meeting.
Meeting continued in private until 11:42.
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