Equal Opportunities Committee, 26 Sep 2000

Meeting date: Tuesday, September 26, 2000

Official Report 112KB pdf

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Legislation (Scrutiny)

For the next item, members have a report from the clerk with guidelines on equality proofing legislation and policy documents. Are there any comments or questions?

The only comment I have concerns the section:

"Where to go for help".

I agree with the inclusion of the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Commission for Racial Equality, but we should include other groups that represent people who are discriminated against, rather than proceed only through those two organisations. We should consult sexual orientation discrimination groups and disability discrimination groups as well. We should go directly to organisations that represent groups that tend to be discriminated against.

This paper represents the first stage. We would hope to build up a checklist for the committee.

Yes, but we should go directly to all groups, and not do it via groups that have a more focused approach.

The first stage is to address race and gender issues. I am trying to get the committee's ideas about building up a checklist that covers all equalities issues. This paper demonstrates how that may be done in two areas. I am not excluding any area; I am just hoping to get the committee's approval for this as a concept.

That is fine.

We need the committee to agree how we will scrutinise legislation. I do not know how easy it will be to come to a conclusion in committee.

This is a good paper from the CRE and the EOC. I am worried that equal opportunities principles are not being applied at the moment. We have a serious responsibility to apply them. I am also worried about how we will do that in conjunction with our inquiry. As far as I can see, we will not have the whole of each meeting to spend on our inquiry, because we have a lot of legislation to deal with, as was announced two weeks ago. We should take some credit, because the second example in the paper, the Standards in Scotland's Schools etc Bill, is one on which we did a lot of work and the CRE wrote to us and congratulated us on our success. We should not grow complacent, but we showed how we can begin to equality proof legislation—but we should remember how much time that took, because we took evidence from five or six people.

I am worried about how we will manage to continue to do that. The principles on pages 2 and 3 of this paper are a good starting point and we can discuss them in relation to the housing bill in a minute, but they are profound questions and I see no evidence that any serious equality proofing is being done in the Parliament. That is the point Positive Action in Housing made in June when some of its members came to talk to us about housing. We have a heavy responsibility, and it is not easy.

I do not know whether we are talking about legislation in general under this item and housing specifically under the next one. The bill that is on top of us at the moment is the Transport (Scotland) Bill. Throughout last year, people kept making points about that bill—particularly in relation to disability, but also in relation to gender. We are just about into stage 2 of that bill. We have to do something about it immediately and not wait any longer, because this is our opportunity. Johann Lamont mentioned a lot of the bills that we will have an interest in, in relation to gender, after the Transport (Scotland) Bill—and there will be the housing bill.

We have to take this one step at a time, but the immediate priority is the Transport (Scotland) Bill. The research that was done for the Executive by Reid Howie about women and transport has been mentioned. We asked Jackie Baillie about it in June and she said that a report would come out soon. Where is the report? Has it been published? What does it say? How is it feeding in to the Transport (Scotland) Bill? We have to get a grip of those issues now. The immediate legislative priority is the Transport (Scotland) Bill, with regard to disability and gender. We cannot wait, because the bill will be in stage 2 after the October recess—it may be now for all I know. We will then have to take each bill at a time, make time for it somehow and not lose sight of the legislation while we are doing the inquiry.

This item is for the committee to agree how we will scrutinise legislation. I do not envisage the inquiry taking up all the committee's time. We can decide to do the inquiry over a long period of time, so I do not envisage its being discussed at every meeting. The inquiry might involve some visits and so on, but not every committee member has to attend and the visits do not have to take place on the same days as committee meetings. We have to discuss that when we discuss the remit of the inquiry, once we appoint an adviser.

We will discuss the housing bill under the next item. In view of what we agreed last week, we wanted the committee to have a process to equality proof legislation. I take on board everything Malcolm Chisholm said about the time scale and the amount of work the committee has to do. The Transport (Scotland) Bill is already at stage 2, which creates difficulties for us, although we wrote to the Transport and the Environment Committee asking it to take equal opportunities issues on board. That highlights the fact that all committees—not just the Equal Opportunities Committee—should be looking at equal opportunities.

That is the point I was going to make. It is important that we do not get tied up too much in thinking that we have to do all equality proofing for all legislation. I would like to see every committee putting equality proofing on the agenda and working out what they are doing about mainstreaming equality in legislation as they are looking at it.

We should remember that the equality unit, the equality strategy, the equality officer and lots of other structures are in place and can help the Parliament consider those issues. While we have a role to play, this committee is not the only structure that can help to mainstream equality issues into legislation. I hope that we can encourage other committees to consider the issue as we have done.

At our previous meeting, we agreed that once we had agreed the checklist we would send it to all the committees for discussion. That will start to take care of the concerns that Irene McGugan and others have expressed about other committees' responsibilities as regards equal opportunities.

We have to agree that the checklist is agreed by the committee first. Are we agreed?

Members indicated agreement.

We will bring that back to the next meeting.