Chamber and committees

You talked about supporting conditionality as long as grant funders recognise that they need to provide the resources for that. What is your assessment of the extent to which grant givers and other funders understand full cost recovery? Do they understand the extent of what that means for charities and the different types of organisation that SCVO represents?

There is a gap there for us to close.

What is your assessment of why procurement is being used when grant funding or other mechanisms, such as service level agreements, could be used?

What is the reason for the lack of use of reserved contracts? Is that simply because they have not been talked about? Procurement has a lot of stuff built into it and around it, so there is some work—

Thank you, minister, for being with us this morning. I welcome you and your officials.

I have some questions on accountability for equalities and human rights. In some ways, they follow on from Kevin Stewart’s questions and points that he picked up. They are about how we understand the impact of decisions on people who use services, whether or not they are vulnerable and marginalised.

One of the questions for us is how we track analysis of impact from previous decisions into future decisions. Will you say a little bit about what we need to do to better understand impacts from past decisions before we even begin to think about future decisions?

I appreciate that we are at the beginning of the process and that, although we have done a lot of mainstreaming, there is still a lot of work to do. However, one of the challenges is that, when we look at what is happening in communities and neighbourhoods around Scotland, we see rising inequality and more people being threatened with exploitation at work and modern slavery-type situations. Are we on the way to following the pound—to better understanding that a particular investment will mean that someone does not fall into modern slavery? Do we have mechanisms for tracking such specific impacts?

I appreciate that. It is worth saying that, if it was easy to track the impact of spending, we would have been doing it by now. I appreciate that the process is not easy.

However, I sometimes wonder whether we look at equality and human rights accountability from the wrong end of the telescope. Last week, there was an interesting discussion in the Scottish Parliament on different strategies for tackling poverty. Somebody posed this question: what if our starting point in every budget was to look at everything through the lens of eliminating or reducing child poverty? If the starting point for everyone, whether it is the Cabinet Secretary for Transport or the Cabinet Secretary for Wellbeing Economy, Net Zero and Energy, is that every decision that is made needs to address child poverty and other such issues, we will start to get very different types of decisions.

Over the coming year—in some ways, next year’s budget process starts now, as we conclude this year’s budget process—will there be space for those conversations, not only with your Government colleagues but with external stakeholders who have routes into understanding the impacts and who have experience of assessing every decision that they make through a rights-based lens, because this is about rights realisation? What are your thoughts on that?

I understand that. I appreciate your openness towards considering how we can get better at this, because everybody would probably agree that nobody does this right. We are trying to do something quite important in Scotland in focusing on rights realisation through our budget.

My final question is linked to what you have said in reference to the Scottish child payment and tackling child poverty. How confident are you that gendered inequalities and inequalities related to other protected characteristics are being considered by the Government and the strategic leadership team in ways that look at more than just economic poverty and inequality? Are we asking each other the right questions? Have we got the right information? Are we collecting the right kind of data to understand poverty that is more than economic?

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the fifth meeting in 2024 of the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee. We have received no apologies for our meeting.

As members will be aware, Kaukab Stewart has resigned as convener of the committee, following her appointment as Minister for Culture, Europe and International Development. For that reason, I am chairing this part of the meeting in my capacity as deputy convener. I take this opportunity to put on the record our thanks to Kaukab for her work, and I wish her well in her new role.

Under our first agenda item, the committee is invited to choose a new convener. The Parliament has agreed that only members of the Scottish National Party are eligible for nomination as convener of the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee.

Do we have any nominations for convener?

Congratulations, Karen. I hand over the chair to you.