Chamber and committees

We have had our own piece of work going on involving the expert reference group on Covid-19 and ethnicity and now the interim governance group to develop national anti-racist infrastructure, and work is taking place on the observatory. We were already on that pathway.

On the UPR, in particular, you will know that the United Nations issued its recommendations in November. We are currently in the process of working through the recommendations that impact us and we are working with the UK Government on how we inform the report. Of course, there is a word limit on what we can contribute to that, so we always try to make it as concise as possible. We are preparing that right now.

What we also tend to do, which we will do in this case, is publish our own Scotland-specific statement, which gives much more detail about the areas of the UPR recommendations that we are working on. We were a bit further ahead than England and Wales on some of the recommendations, so we want to highlight some of that. However, we are working closely with our colleagues at Westminster, to mutually support one another’s work and to ensure that Scotland’s voice is heard when the report goes back to the Human Rights Council in the spring.

As always, Maggie; thank you.

The equality and fairer Scotland budget statement is our primary tool. There are national outcomes, the national performance framework and many other regulatory things that fit into that process and there are implications for public authorities if they do not uphold that.

We have included more detail than ever in the equality and fairer Scotland budget statement, but Angela O’Hagan said at committee last week that that 200-page document is underused, which made me think about why it is underused. I am thinking about how we encourage more use of it.

Ben Walsh and Rob Priestley made points about how we use the detailed analysis of what we have committed to, whether we have delivered outcomes, how we make decisions and how we work across other parts of Government and public authorities to realise those outcomes.

The human rights bill will address that gap by bringing about a much clearer understanding of what Government, Parliament and other public authorities’ responsibilities are in ensuring that equality and human rights outcomes are the best that they possibly can be. On areas where we spend money, I know that Maggie Chapman will be pleased to hear about the funding that is going to Clinterty in Aberdeenshire from the Gypsy Traveller accommodation fund. Something as basic as accommodation has an impact on all the equality and human rights outcomes of the Gypsy Traveller community in Scotland.

To go and see the finished product of that funding is important to me. It is important that those people realise their rights and understand that they have rights, because people in that community felt as though they did not have any rights. We are working in a very tough position, so seeing that money go from this place to that place is incredibly important.

When we do all the analysis, create all the documents and have all the links that we want, it still concerns me that people say that the document is underused and is not usable. I want somebody to read that document and realise the outcome for Clinterty or a disabled people’s organisation or whatever. I want them to be able to see that, but we still have work to do on that. I say that there is work to do, rather than that there are gaps. We are cognisant and mindful of what we need to do to get there.

Angela O’Hagan has done amazing work over the years in speaking to local authorities and others on human rights budgeting and gendered budgeting. She has been working away doing that, as have a number of organisations such as Making Rights Real.

We had a human rights bill advisory board meeting last week—we meet frequently right now, and I chair those meetings. Last week, we met Councillor Maureen Chalmers, who is the new chair of the wellbeing board, because we realised pretty quickly that local authorities are a huge and key partner for us in this work, as is the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities through the work that it does. The human rights bill will cut across many committees at COSLA level, and Maureen is taking the lead on the work that we are doing around the bill. COSLA and local authority leaders are involved in it at the early development stages both to realise what will be their duty under the bill and to understand why the duty is important and the reason why we need it to be there, which is that we need better outcomes for people who are affected by the deepest systemic structural inequalities that we know about.

As I said, Maureen Chalmers was along at our meeting last week. I asked her how she thought that it went and she said, “Oh, my goodness, there is so much work here, but it will be incredibly important for all the COSLA committees”. I am working on how we facilitate that with those committees so that we bring people in at the design stage. I hope that it will mean that local authorities understand what they need to be doing as they move forward. I am sure that they will.

That is a great question, and it is one of the aspects that we have been working on closely. I remember doing budget scrutiny when I first came into the Parliament. We would do an analysis of how many times women or disabled people were mentioned in a budget. Now, we have much more deep and detailed data to draw on from the improvements that we have made so far.

You might remember that “Your Scotland, Your Finances” has been published alongside the final part of the budget, whereas, this time, we published it at the first point. The budget was published on 22 December and we published “Your Scotland, Your Finances” the very next day. We are always looking at ways to improve our approach. The document will be published alongside the draft budget, in future.

We have taken accessibility into account, including EasyRead and a number of other aspects. We created a lot of infographics but, from consultation with stakeholders, we found that people felt that the approach was not as accessible as it could be, so we now do a plain English EasyRead version of the statement.

We bring in “Your Scotland, Your Finances” at the beginning and not at the end of the process, and we publish an updated edition at the end; I hope that those two measures will enable people to see the distance that we have moved from the beginning of the budget process to its end.

That is a great question, because we always think that accessibility is about EasyRead, British Sign Language and all those things, but other languages are also a key part of that.

We speak to stakeholders all the time. I am not sure whether we picked up any huge issue about language accessibility during that process, but certainly, we should be communicating in other languages and we will do so. I will go and have a look at what we produce and how we produce it. We tend to use a great organisation, iTranslate, which a lot of grass-roots organisations access, to get good translations of different documents. Because of their technical nature, the budget documents are pretty difficult to translate but, given that we now have the fairer Scotland statement and the “Your Scotland, Your Finances” document, we will have a look at how we can make them much more accessible, as you suggested.

Absolutely. We fund a lot of minority ethnic organisations that do some work of their own on translating budgets, consultations and everything else that comes from Government and is of interest to them. The process will be there, and I will make sure that it is as sharp as it can be.

Yes—I heard some of those comments from witnesses last week. I also heard about the positive progress that has been made.

We view all the documents and the processes that we go through as a continuous improvement exercise. It will never be finished, because we want to continually improve. Every time we have a budget round, we learn new things, such as the need to bring out “Your Scotland, Your Finances” at the beginning of the budget process, and then analyse it and publish something at the end of the process that tells people where we are.

We hear a lot about language and jargon. Some budget documents are technical documents and it is really hard to translate them into something that is much more readable and accessible. We have an on-going piece of work on how we link all our pieces of work together to make them easier to navigate.

We publish all level-4 figures in relation to the previous budget and the forthcoming budget, as well as the differences in that regard. I know that some people say that they cannot track the pound through the process, to see where it gets spent, but we are taking lots of measures to enable people to do that.

As I said, it is a continuous improvement project, and we work on that every time we go through a budget round. We learned such a lot last year, because we had a resource spending review, an emergency budget and then a budget process. We learned so much from the equality work that we did. We have a bit more work to do on joining some of that up—you make a fair comment, which I will take on board. However, we have come on in leaps and bounds. There are ways to access budget documents that were never available to people before. The detail is there. Although the summary is 30 pages long, which seems hefty, in the grand scheme of things and given all the budget documents, people have found it really helpful. We are looking at ways in which we can use that document and raise awareness of it much more effectively, to address the issues that you raised.

From the evidence and last week’s debate, you will know that all committees raised issues relating to equality and human rights. That is a huge step forward from when I convened a predecessor committee of this one and other committees would say, “That’s not for us to look at.” All committees now look at those issues, which gives us an excellent, although complex, picture of what is happening across all Government areas. Rob Priestley is here because he is the head of our mainstreaming team, which works closely with colleagues across the Government.

The equality and fairer Scotland budget statement is a joint piece of work by me and the finance secretary—well, it is the Deputy First Minister at the moment. I am involved in that work at every step, so I pick up a lot of the issues and concerns. Over the past couple of years, in relation to multiple budget evaluations, I have been really gratified to see other officials pick up on the importance of ensuring that budget decisions that have an impact on equality and human rights are made at the earliest stage. They understand the need for that.

We have worked with the Scottish Women’s Budget Group to increase the capacity of officials across the whole Government. That is why Ben Walsh, from the Scottish exchequer, is with us today. Last week, we had a cracking round-table event with the national advisory council on women and girls, at which we talked about gender competence and the intersectional competence that we all need in order to read across in relation to what needs to be done. Colleagues in the Scottish exchequer have undertaken all that work.

Previously, what would come in would usually just be plain figures and other budget stuff, but I now see, attached to that, information on the progress that has been made in analysing and understanding the impact of a pound that is spent in one area on another area, and whether that is the impact that we want. There is much better analysis of that. That is why ensuring that we link up all our documents so that people see a pathway through the budget—how a pound that is spent in one area affects another area—really matters. I am supported in doing that by officials from across the Government.

We are doing some of that. I will get you more info on how we are doing that engagement on the UPR.

That is a great point. The committee has done a lot of work to advance that. Making the Parliament a human rights guarantor is a key aspect of that, because it is a people’s Parliament, and it is important that the Parliament speaks with one voice about guaranteeing people’s human rights. The Government takes that view as well.

You might have picked up my comments about recognising that all the committees—12, I think—raised issues to do with human rights and the equalities budget in their work, which is a huge shift from where we were before. The committees were very silent on that before. That shows that the Parliament and its committees are doing that work.

You made a really key point. One thing that always sticks in my head is the Eleanor Roosevelt quote that human rights are for people

“In small places, close to home”.

When something has an impact on an individual, that is perhaps when they realise where the decision is made or the process that they went through to get there, and they almost reverse engineer from their perspective back to asking who takes the key decisions on that, how much money was spent on it and why they were not recognised in that process.

We are doing work to create an environment in which we make the budget process—and, indeed, any parliamentary process—as plain and accessible as possible. Lots of folk do not understand the steps that are taken to get to a decision, although many do. Given the amount of engagement work that I do, I am always blown away by the competence, confidence and understanding of the general population around what they see as a good outcome. That is about where their council tax money, their tax money or other money is spent and how we articulate that.

We all have a job to do to articulate the positive side of that, but also to recognise the challenges and take those on board. That is why the point about the participation of stakeholders is incredibly important. That gives us a two-way street in order to share information out and to get information back. We hope that that will address the issue of what is important to an individual in their community—in a small place, close to home.