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Item 3 on the agenda concerns mainstreaming equality. Committee members have in front of them a report from the convener of the Equal Opportunities Committee, Cathy Peattie, which follows on from the recent debate in the chamber on the Equal Opportunities Committee's report on mainstreaming equalities in the Parliament. The paper contains a number of recommendations on how subject committees can consider equalities issues as part of their daily business, their scrutiny work and the overall approach to their work. I invite comments from the committee.
I would like to discuss disaggregation of statistics, which is discussed in paragraph 21 of the equality guidelines. It seems to me that we should try a small pilot exercise, if possible, and apply that guideline to some piece of work that we are doing to find out how well it fits with the job that we do. The principles are excellent, but the question is whether discrimination takes place in our subject area. It would help to sharpen up our ideas about the kind of work that we are doing if we could perhaps find some way of highlighting that issue specifically through the disaggregation of statistics. I wonder whether you could help us with that to give us a better idea of how it might affect our work.
That is an interesting point. I have written to the minister about the Nature Conservation (Scotland) Bill with the six points from the checklist, so it will be interesting to see his response. When it comes to the statistics, there is also the question of which statistics to disaggregate, because we might want to consider how a bill or act would impact on different members of society in relation to different issues.
I agree with Rob Gibson. In the spirit of the advice, we should apply the principle to everything, not just to a small part of our work. The point of mainstreaming is that we should do it every time for every piece of legislation and every piece of work. That way, if there is an equality issue, we will flush it out, and if there is not, at least we will have gone through the checklist and the routine to ensure that we have considered equalities. To get into the habit of thinking about those things, you have to do it every time.
There is something in what Nora Radcliffe says. I, being a good old-fashioned Conservative, am one of those people who are inclined to say that it is all bunkum anyway, but I am becoming enlightened and am beginning to understand the priorities that are before us. It is important to ensure that we deal with the matter in such a way as to minimise the impact on our work and maximise its effect. Nora Radcliffe's suggestion that it should be part of the procedure that we go through has its dangers, because we can always become complacent, but it also means that we will be able to employ the procedure across the board without its having an undue impact on the time that it takes to deal with the committee's work.
If we are to ask the minister regularly to look at the checklist in relation to bills or other issues that come before us, we must, when we get answers, consider them and ask whether there is anything else that we would add to the list. We can use the list as an aide-memoire, in a sense. Alex Johnstone is right to say that it does not need to be time-consuming; it is more about the quality of thought that goes into it. If we feel that there is something that we really need to tease out on a specific issue, the list should act as a memory jogger for all of us.
The last thing that we want is to be doing things by rote, as it were, without thinking about what we are doing. There are obviously considerable inequalities built into the rural dimension, which must be teased out and underlined. Those inequalities will not necessarily be the ones that are highlighted by the committee, to be honest, and perhaps we should make that clear. I know that rurality has been highlighted in some pieces of legislation, but I do not know that that is always the case.
From memory, I think that all legislation has to pass an islands test as well.
I asked the question because of two things. First, members of the committee need to go through the exercise step by step each time, but we must do so very carefully the first time, so that we can see the process in action. Secondly, disaggregation of statistics has to play up the rurality aspects, about which members from all parties expressed concerns in the integrated rural development debate. It would be of great help to us, convener, if you could facilitate such an exercise.
We have a bill in front of us at the moment—the Nature Conservation (Scotland) Bill—and I expect a response from the minister on the six questions that have been sent to him about that. It could prove to be quite a nice test, because it is not a bill that one would automatically think of in the context of equalities, but equalities will have implications for the bill.
Members indicated agreement.
Are members content for me to reply to Cathy Peattie to pick up on the points that members made about how we implement this policy in our day-to-day scrutiny work?
Members indicated agreement.