Chamber and committees

I imagine that provision might look different in different parts of the country, so it might be helpful for us to reflect on what good looks like.

Thank you very much, convener, and good morning to the panel.

I am particularly interested in information and advice that are provided to people who are looking to get back into education and training, particularly parents with a low income. I will start with the universities. The Open University has a dedicated helpline, and people can speak to advisers. Is that effective for people who are looking for information and advice? What more can be done in that space?

The committee is always glad to provide opportunities for synergy

My next question is about partnership working. Jackie Galbraith mentioned the DWP, which I suppose includes Jobcentre Plus. Are advisers in that setting doing enough, and are they trained well to share opportunities and be supportive by taking people through the process and getting them the right information and advice?

I thank Monica Lennon for that observation, and, in true Labour Party style, we could begin to have an internal discussion between us about the mechanisms that are used in the selection processes.

I think that Monica Lennon’s broad point is correct. The challenge for the Labour Party is that, now that the parliamentary Labour Party in the UK Parliament is 50 per cent women, all-women shortlists cannot be used, so it is looking at different mechanisms that work. We need to make sure that we do not think that that is the only system that can work. We need to look around the world and learn from other political parties that use different systems and try to find the systems that give us broad scope and allow us to think about what will we do.

Bob Doris makes a very good point. It is about encouraging more diversity and activism at the grass-roots level.

I will just finish this point and then give way.

We can all be guilty in politics of getting caught up in running from one campaign to the next. We think about what needs to be done and not about how sensitive we are to the barriers that exist for a lot of people, even in going to chap at a door or to deliver a leaflet, for example. We need to think about that, and about how toxic our political campaigns and election time can be. We have heard a lot about the toxicity that often exists in the chamber. That is absolutely true, too, outside the chamber and on social media.

I certainly think that we need to acknowledge that. As I said at the outset, we all have a role to play in encouraging more women and working with our organisations and our party structures in order to make that a reality. Perhaps we should not be afraid to talk to one another about those things and about what happens in other parties.

I am conscious that I have been given a generous allowance of time, but I do not want to stray into going over the score slightly.

In the past few days, I have hosted a number of politicians from Northern Ireland who were involved in the Good Friday agreement and the peace process. Professor Monica McWilliams was one of those people. On Tuesday night, she spoke very passionately in the Parliament about the role of women in that peace process and the barriers that existed to her even being at the table—or to women even being at the table—and the tropes that we heard 25 years ago about going back and being a housewife and that the housewives of Ulster should go back to the kitchen.

We heard such things in the creation of the Scottish Parliament. We are about to mark the 25th anniversary of this institution. We have to reflect on how we will continue to challenge some of the attitudes that persist. We can learn a lot from other people internationally about what to do. We could learn a lot from Monica McWilliams about how to take out toxicity and find common ground and purpose, and to do that in a gender-sensitive way that respects the fact that we need to have everyone at the table.

We had a good conversation in the debate about our sitting times and the time of decision time—I do not want to fall foul by running over into decision time, which we might have at 5 o’clock today. New Zealand and other countries around the world have structures that we could look at. The Presiding Officer and I have spoken about that in the past. There is a lot of potential in that work.

To conclude, colleagues often hear me say this, but this is not a full stop in the discussion; it is a comma. It is about us taking a pause in the debate to begin to think about some of those ideas and initiatives. We must continue those discussions and move them forward in our various roles, and ensure that we have a gender-sensitive Parliament that is ready for the next 25 years and beyond and that encourages more women—particularly more young women—to come in and feel safe in this space and contribute to our important democratic life.

The member makes a valid point. I, like him and other members, served as a local authority councillor. Councils can have real challenges, from timings of meetings and accessibility to, again, appropriate times for childcare. Does the member agree that it is shocking that, until recently, we still had councils that had no female councillors at all?

I am very grateful, Presiding Officer, as I am sure every member is, for the opportunity to take some time this afternoon to reflect on and listen to colleagues’ contributions, and to have a little bit of extra space in which to do so.

This has been a very consensual and helpful debate. There have been very considered contributions from across the chamber about the importance of the work of the gender-sensitive audit, and the importance of this conversation not just happening at a set point in time but becoming something that we move forward with together. We heard a lot of consensus on that.

The concept of a gender-sensitive Parliament is an international democratic standard. It is very welcome that our Presiding Officer commissioned the audit and took a lead in putting her own stamp on the assessment of the gender sensitivity of the Scottish Parliament in all our processes and work. Most fundamentally, as we have heard reflected in the debate and as I have just alluded to, the audit has to be more than a tick-box exercise or a moment in time; it has to provide tangible outcomes and an on-going conversation that we can all engage in, recognising that we all have a role to play in bringing some of these ideas into reality and improving our Parliament more generally.

The response to the audit’s publication cannot be focused just on the words; it also has to be about measurable actions. Already this afternoon we have had quite a good conversation about what could work and where we probably need to do a bit more to explore how it would work.

Broadly, on behalf of Labour members, I reiterate our support for the work of the gender-sensitive audit and congratulate and thank those who were involved, from across the parties, in the working group. We want to see continued engagement in that space.

As we have all heard this afternoon, it is critical that, in their composition, our democratic institutions look and sound like the people of Scotland. We have to reflect ourselves. From the beginning of our discussion, many colleagues touched on the idea that political parties can do some of this work in the first place by making sure that they increase the number of women who stand for election and who are elected to this place, in order to ensure that we have a Parliament that reflects our population and our communities. Then, because we will have more women MSPs, as Rhoda Grant rightly said, we will not have to make a few women work harder. We need to increase how many women we have in Parliament.

I am very proud that the Scottish Labour Party and the UK Labour Party led the way, even when this was not popular, on mechanisms such as all-women shortlists, twinning arrangements and zipping. We were very proud of that, but I absolutely hear my female colleagues who were in politics at that time when they talk about the challenges to those moves from men who said that it was grossly unfair that we should do those things.

Although we should all welcome the new modelling that predicts that 90,000 fewer children are expected to live in poverty, it is deeply concerning to see that there is an upward trend in levels of persistent poverty across Scotland. That needs serious and focused action in order for the Government to meet the targets that we agreed across the Parliament, and any issues and current interventions must be dealt with speedily.

I have previously raised the issue with the First Minister of the disparity between eligibility for and uptake of the Scottish child payment, with up to 60,000 children in Scotland facing the possibility of missing out on receiving the payment. What action has the cabinet secretary taken to address those concerns, and will she continue consider the idea of automating that payment?

It is revealing that the cabinet secretary was only five paragraphs into the statement on child poverty before she shifted the focus back on to the constitution. The reality is that people across Scotland are being failed by two Governments who are too focused on their own internal issues rather than on relentlessly tackling poverty. Will the cabinet secretary focus on the detail of eradicating child poverty and outline to the chamber how the new modelling will affect the Scottish Government’s ability to hit its own targets on absolute poverty, relative poverty and persistent poverty?