Chamber and committees

To be honest, I could not speak for local authorities and would not want to do so. It would not be fair. Certainly, in my continuing work with the new COSLA chairs, particularly the chair of the community wellbeing board, I see superb work being done at local authority level, notwithstanding the challenges that everybody faces on budgets, the inflationary squeeze and the cost of living. Those impact on everybody and every penny that they have to spend. We mostly do the best.

There are two things there, Maggie. The homogenisation of protected characteristics was raised with us at the national advisory council on women and girls. You may sit in a protected characteristic, but we all know that a person usually does not have only one protected characteristic but a combination of them. Rob Priestley made the point about how we do that portfolio-by-portfolio analysis, and if you read it that way, that looks like siloing; however, when we draw on all the analysis, it becomes much more joined up and deals with that issue.

We tend not to do this, but if it looks as though there is homogenisation of protected characteristics and we are missing out on aspects of characteristics, we do a lot of work across Government to mitigate that, especially in departments such as the exchequer that would not ordinarily be involved in the issue.

However, with regard to how we develop capacity and competence—whether that relates to gender, disability or equalities and human rights—we now have experts across the board in this work, and that can only grow and become much better. That addresses the point about ensuring that we take an intersectional approach to everything that we do. Although the national advisory council on women and girls deals with women and girls, it also deals with disability, race, LGBTI issues and so on.

Therefore, when we take an intersectional view, we are taking a human rights and equalities approach. It is just about ensuring that we have the infrastructure, the capacity and the competence in our team to address that, pick out the issues, identify the gaps and then come up with the plans to fix them. That is what the continuous improvement vein is all about.

I think that we are quite world leading in some of that work and with regard to the proposals for our human rights bill and a lot of the work that we have been doing with stakeholders. We have funded a number of stakeholder organisations to look at the bill, the accessibility of the consultation, what it means, how to put it in plain language and how to make rights real for people. We are looking at all of that with regard to core obligations. A lot of the feedback is about what people expect to be the minimum, such as housing, food, a job, or the right to education—whatever it is—and those organisations are coming back to us with some of that detail.

I hope that the consultation will open soon, and I will be hoping that the many people who will be looking at that particular aspect, if not all of it, will come back with some of the ideas and resolutions that we need. We have some of that in train—I think that we know where we are going with it all—but I want to hear quite conclusively from stakeholders what they expect and whether we can meet that expectation. Sometimes, that is the tough part—the aspiration is there and the expectation is there, but whether we can make those align is sometimes the toughest part of it all.

Be assured that it is stakeholders who are the drivers for change in this and who are working with us to ensure that those core obligations that we can put into our act will deliver what it says on the tin. We should be proud of the committee’s work on making rights real in the previous parliamentary session, and we should be proud as a Parliament of how we work together to realise those rights.

I heard some of that evidence last week. That has been a perennial problem. The point was made that that applies not just to the Government but to the Parliament and other public authorities. We need to improve that whole process to ensure that resources go to the right places.

A lot of the work that I do on equalities and human rights, in relation to the funding that we provide to stakeholders in order that they can do their work, is outcome driven. What difference is being made for people in their everyday lives? A lot of that, especially in relation to delivering money as part of the equally safe strategy, involves working in partnership.

A great example of that is the Saoirse project that I visited in Blantyre, which supports women in relation to domestic violence, mental health and addictions. They go through one door, tell their story once, and all of those services click into place. Seeing resources being utilised in a holistic way that has a successful outcome is really powerful. I am not saying that we are perfect—the delivering equally safe fund is only about eight months old and are we are still learning from it. We published a six-month report on it, which I commend to you.

You also asked about the equality and human rights budget advisory group—there are so many acronyms now that I cannot remember them all, but you know what I am talking about. One of the first things that I did when I came into Government was to make the chair of that group independent, so that they became a critical friend of Government and are not afraid to tell us what they think—they have never been afraid to tell us anyway, but now they can be more independent with their thoughts on all of this.

We have a number of recommendations from the work that the group has done over the past wee while. It has done a pretty detailed analysis on some international comparators. I am meeting Angela O’Hagan in February in order to pick up on those recommendations, which we are working through.

I tend to look at recommendations and decide what we can achieve quickly, which ones are bit more medium term, what are some of the long-term goals and how we work in partnership to meet them. I will be meeting Angela in February to discuss all of that, and I am happy to give the committee a much more detailed update then. We are not quite finished the work of analysing the recommendations yet, so things might change by the time we get to February.

That is what we are working on—that continuous improvement that we want to see and the route map that allows people to read the numerous layers of budget documentation in a way that gets them the information that they want.

There is work to do. I know that the exchequer has been working on some aspects of that. Folk there are looking at what the top lines are and how much we have to spend and I am the person who is pushing to see where we should spend it. Ben Walsh may be able to give you an update on the work that the exchequer is doing on that.

Rob Priestly will answer your question about analysis.

That is a great question. Human rights budgeting is a tool that the Government will use to realise some of that, and the wellbeing indicators in the national performance framework are another example of such a tool.

I recognise completely your characterisation of equalities and human rights as being a bolt-on at the end of a project or as a box that gets ticked at the end—“Aye, we’ve done that so let’s move on”. That is not how we see it now. We are undertaking work around the public sector equality duty, which we consulted on last year. We had very strong evidence from our stakeholders, and I will meet them again soon to discuss some of the stronger proposals that they made in relation to what we proposed in the consultation. Again, meeting expectations about realisation is important.

The public sector equality duty, our mainstreaming strategy, the national performance framework and the equality budget statement all have a key role to play in realising that—perhaps the public sector equality duty more so, and part of the criticism about the duty is how vague some of that is, so we need more clarity. Those things will obviously need to work with the human rights bill work that we are doing. We are thinking of them in tandem with the bill and not as two separate pieces; they are all part of the jigsaw, which is the characterisation that I used earlier.

It is important for us to be able to use the jigsaw to put in stronger duties for public authorities so that they live up to our expectations, and it is important to make the duties clearer. Given that it is taking some years to do that through the public sector equality duty and the bill, we need to work with public authorities and say, “This is what we want to achieve and how we will achieve it, and this is the way that you can achieve it”. However, the criticism from them is that it is vague and that they do not understand it. We are working now to provide much more clarity on what a public sector equality duty is and what a Scotland-specific duty is and how public authorities can use those tools to create better outcomes for the work that they do in their organisations.

You will know that the consultation closed around the autumn—I am trying to remember all the timelines—and we had a really helpful, if not challenging, letter from a number of organisations that said that they did not think that the proposal went far enough. We are consulting with them on that to inform the next steps.

The timetable for that is on schedule as well. I will see whether I can share the schedule with you. We are analysing the consultation results and the challenge from civil society organisations, which want us to be stronger and go further.

As you know, the whole budget process is about continuous improvement. We are learning all the time. Last week, we learned key aspects of how we can do things better from members of the national advisory council. The important part is how we work together to do things better.

From the stuff that comes into my inbox, I see that other ministers consult very closely with stakeholders. For example, the DFM met the Women’s Budget Group and Engender Scotland to talk about the gendered aspects of the budget. Such collaboration takes place across the board. As I said, I do not make any decisions without stakeholders who are at the table.

There are a couple of issues in that question. The cabinet secretary was absolutely right that it is up to local authorities how they spend their money. If we started to tell them how to spend their money, we would get criticism, and if we did not tell them how to do it, we would get the same criticism.