Chamber and committees

I am really open minded about that. I was really interested in the comment that was made last week. I am happy to take those conversations further and see how that goes.

We have the public sector equality duty, so those responsibilities are in place. We also have the review, which will be open until—I think—11 April. If stakeholders or the committee want to make contributions to that, they should do so, because the more specific, detailed contributions we get, the better the outcome will be when we set the new duty.

The community conversations that we have very regularly and the re-establishment of the joint ministerial group are key in that regard. The group will drive change from the top down at both Government level and political level, but we are also working with the community to make sure that it can drive change upwards, according to its needs, and that things are done with it, rather than to it.

I hope that all that reassures you that we take the matter extremely seriously. The public sector equality duty already exists. We are reviewing it and there is space to add details and comments. However, I am keen to investigate a bit further the comment that you referred to that was made at last week’s meeting.

Absolutely—there is a real drive and determination to limit all those inequalities. They are there, and we have a responsibility to do that.

The work that we have done on the Gypsy Traveller joint ministerial group is very important in that regard, because that model has worked incredibly well in ensuring that other ministers as well are driving those changes within their portfolios. The work of the previous committee has informed that process, as has work that we commissioned the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights—CRER—to do, on which it published a report last year.

Rather than me pulling things out of the back of my head on what other ministers are considering doing, let me get that update for you. If you want to bring us back to discuss it at a future date, I am sure that Mr Lochhead or I would be happy to do that.

Thank you, convener. I am delighted to be here. My focus is on ensuring that the Government continues to do all that it can to address inequalities and ensure that equality and human rights become part of the fabric of how we deliver for all people in Scotland.

I am aware that the committee met Gypsy Traveller community activists last week, so I will start my comments on that topic, if you do not mind. We are continuing to implement our Gypsy Traveller action plan in partnership with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities and others, and we have made much progress. Funding has been allocated to new sites; we are expanding the provision of community health workers; we are supporting young Gypsy Travellers to improve their mental health; and we are taking steps to tackle the pernicious discrimination that is still experienced by the community.

I will continue to regularly meet the community. We have community conversations, and the ministerial working group on Gipsy Travellers meets often. We listen to what matters to the community and we work with partners to translate that into practical, real and on-going change.

I am also aware that concerns were raised last week around the so-called “tinker experiment” and its impact on families. I recognise and fully acknowledge the unacceptable historical practices that have been faced by the community. I therefore announce to the committee that I will be commissioning independent research into the “tinker experiment” to ensure that we fully capture and understand its implications, identify who was involved and affected, and ensure that the community has an opportunity to share its story. I will be happy to share that work with the committee when we undertake it.

I turn briefly to a few other areas in my portfolio, and will crack on through those. We are tackling all forms of violence against women and girls through our equally safe strategy and the £39 million delivering equally safe fund, which supports 121 projects. Funding is at record levels, and we are committed to ensuring that funding arrangements are fit for purpose, so I have established an independent strategic review of funding.

One of the issues that the sector has faced for many years is the precariousness of its funding—some members of the committee will have had experience of that. An independent chair, Lesley Irving, is in place, and an advisory group has been appointed to carry out the review. The group will meet for the first time in May. I wanted there to be an independent review of the process, so that we would have a good critical friend to tell us what needs to be done.

Working closely with people with lived experience, we are updating our disability strategy. We have committed more than £5 million in funding to disabled people’s organisations, including the access to elected office fund, which is particularly pertinent given the local government elections in just a few weeks.

We are also listening to our older people. Last week, I had valuable discussions—they are always valuable—with our older people’s strategic action forum. We are investing more than £2.2 million of funding in supporting older people’s organisations and age equality projects.

We are delivering our immediate priorities plan to tackle racism and to address the unequal impacts of Covid-19 that were identified by the expert reference group on Covid-19 and ethnicity. That plan takes forward actions across Government, including in health, employment and education.

The Government is clear about the need to act to end conversion practices, as we discussed during the recent debate in the chamber. I congratulate the committee on that debate and on the work that you did for your report. It has been incredibly insightful and will help us to move forward.

I am pleased to tell the committee that our expert advisory group on that issue will meet on Thursday for the first time, and will complete its work by the summer. I will meet the group that day, to support and develop that work. I can give you an update on that as soon as we can.

A human rights bill will be introduced during the current parliamentary session; we will consult on that this year. Later this year, we will also consult on our first equality and human rights mainstreaming strategy. Again, those are works in progress, and I will be happy to update the committee as we go forward with them.

Our equality and human rights fund, which totals £21 million over the three years 2021 to 2024, supports 48 organisations to tackle inequality and to advance rights.

Finally, we continue to support our human rights defenders. This afternoon, I will meet two participants in the Scottish human rights defender fellowship programme, which is delivered by the University of Dundee in partnership with the Scottish Government, Amnesty International and Front Line Defenders. Those women demonstrate remarkable bravery and leadership in the face of daily threats to their safety. It will be a privilege to spend time with them.

I hope that that quick run-through of just a few things that cut across my work has been helpful to you, and I am happy to take any questions.

That question touches on two areas: the work that we do generally to advance human rights budgeting and then the work on the Scottish Government’s budget, the work of the Parliament’s Finance and Public Administration Committee and the equality budget statement.

We have a detailed equality budget statement on the recent processes and are currently investigating that to see where progress is being made and how we can maintain it.

You will know that one of the first decisions that I took when I became a minister was to appoint an independent chair to our equality budget advisory group, because we felt that it was important for that group to have the independence to be a critical friend when we needed it.

That work is on-going. It ties in with our review of the public sector equality duty, in which we are considering where we should place duties and responsibilities and how we should strengthen them.

A bit of work is being done to support all that. The Scottish Women’s Budget Group is developing awareness, running training and creating understanding about the contribution of gender budgeting in the process. We have just committed £220,000 to it to do that for us. That group is another independent source that will be a good critical friend and help us to determine where there are gaps. That is another piece of work that is going on and on which I am happy to update the committee later when some of its recommendations come through.

Yes, I am more than happy to do that.

You would have heard me saying in the debate that I did not think that the UK Government’s plans went far enough, although I was happy to work with it. We are continuing to build that relationship as we speak. Once we have met the expert advisory group on Thursday, we will know which areas it wants to advance and we will be able to focus on those.

At that point, I think that I will make another approach to the UK Government to ask for an update. We have moved on since the UK Government published the work that it was doing and the consultation that it undertook. We need to get things as fresh as possible.

As soon as the group has met on Thursday, I will go back to the UK Government to ask for an update on where we are and to try and release some of the tensions around reserved and devolved matters. We want the legislation to work for everyone, and we want it to work in as many jurisdictions as possible. That means that we must work very closely with our colleagues at Westminster, and I am happy to do that.

One of the things that we established very quickly at the beginning of the pandemic was the disproportionate impact of Covid on our diverse communities in Scotland. That has been a global issue, but we recognised it very quickly and set up the expert reference group on Covid-19 and ethnicity, which did a huge amount of work in many areas where inequality was always present, but where Covid had exposed it in all its raw detail. That showed us areas that we needed to focus in on.

The expert reference group produced two sets of recommendations, some of which related to policy areas and some of which related to practical areas. We have accepted all those recommendations and are implementing them.

First, we considered the practical things that we needed to do quite quickly. We put some of that into place, including having culturally appropriate media and advertising on the vaccine. We also ensured that all the information about Covid and where to get support was culturally appropriate. We funded the ethnic minority resilience network—that group grows every day; if you have not had a chance to meet it yet, please look at doing that. We provided funding for culturally appropriate food, interactions and support. There was other stuff that was historical, such as our relationship with slavery and how we challenge and change that. Work is being done with our culture colleagues on some of that. We have also been looking hard at the endemic, ingrained discrimination that people face.

All of that came from the expert reference group on Covid-19 and ethnicity, which gave us a lot to think about and exposed some of the areas where we needed to focus. That is where the immediate priorities plan came from.

We published the immediate priorities plan quite recently—in September 2021—and I hope that members have had a chance to look at it. The plan addresses a range of things, including the impact of Covid and the race equality framework 2016 to 2030, and covers many Government portfolios including health, employment, education, housing and poverty. It is a comprehensive and strategic review that will inform our planned programme of systematic change.

The immediate priorities plan group is being established. It will be chaired independently from Government by two people who come from a lived-experience background and have a high profile in many relevant areas. Again, that fits with the idea of “nothing about us without us”. We need our stakeholders and people with lived experience of the issues to inform the process so that we get it right and make change.

The group will be an interim governance group and will develop an antiracist accountability and oversight function. It will deliver on all our commitments and will be independent. It will explore models for permanent, external oversight. Although we have the Equality and Human Rights Commission and the Scottish Human Rights Commission as regulators in relation to discrimination, we felt that it was important—this was one of the recommendations of the expert reference group on Covid-19 and ethnicity—to have an external oversight governance body that takes account of progress that has been made and holds the Government and public authorities to account. The interim group will look to develop that model and come up with recommendations on how to move that forward.

That is a direct response to the challenges made by people who say “It’s a bit slow” and “We’ve no seen much progress here”. There is lots of progress across many areas, but if our stakeholders are telling us that they cannot see it we need to take responsibility for that. We felt that the immediate priorities plan was a way to do that, together with having an independent chair and an oversight body.

I know that Richard Lochhead is working on those issues and that he has picked up particular areas. That comes under his portfolio and I will go back to him and ask him to give you an update on where all of that is sitting right now. The ethnicity pay gap is part of that, too. I will get you an update on that.

Again, that sits within another minister’s portfolio. My role includes a duty to ensure that, in mainstreaming this work across the whole of Government, ministers drive it forward in their individual portfolios. I am in awe of the work that Fiona Drouet does, and I know that ministers met her quite recently. Again, we can get you an update from the relevant minister on that area.

That sector is important, but it is not just about ensuring that each sector has a focus on that work. It is about continuation, and ensuring that when boys and girls grow up and go through the system, respect, dignity and safety are built into all that. We also need to think about cultural change and how we can drive that. Colleges and universities are not just places where students go to learn and gain experience; they are also where tens of thousands of people work, including in academia and research. We are looking at how we bring all that into the work that we do.

An important aspect is research and development. When we look at what we need to do and how we fill the gaps and ensure that we make things better, we sometimes need to take a step back and look at what the rest of the world is saying about the work that we do here in Scotland. We should take some pride in that, while also realising that we are a bit of a beacon and asking how we can use that role to drive change.

Rather than things being fragmented, we need to look at how they can join up. We need to think about the journey of a person through their life and how that life is respected, so that people can be who they are. That will help us to create the society that we all want to see.

I am absolutely delighted to give you a really exciting update on that. I met the social isolation and loneliness working group just a few weeks ago, and we developed some of the key actions that we are going to take forward. Again, during the pandemic, we very quickly went out to those organisations to say that we already had a strategy for socially isolated and lonely people. We said that we knew what actions to take and the areas that we needed to work on, and we asked how, given that a whole host of new people would be facing those challenges over the pandemic, we could tackle that.

There was a multipronged approach to tackling those issues. It was partly a question of connecting people with local organisations, and supporting some of the new local organisations that sprang up all over the place. In my constituency, I have the Hamilton Covid-19 warriors, Helping Hands Hamilton, the Larkhall Covid-19 rainbows and the Stonehouse Covid action group, and they are all still continuing to work. Those groups very quickly took on board the impact of social isolation and loneliness.

We know that social isolation and loneliness is a public health issue that has the same physiological effect on people as smoking 15 cigarettes a day—that is what the scientists tell us—and we know how insidious and difficult it can be.

One of the things that we have done is to fund organisations to develop work in that area. That involved rapid reorganisation, from which we learned lots of lessons, including how to hang on to the emerging groups and organisations and make them sustainable. We are looking at that—for example, there is a lovely, welcome £10 million investment in that area. We have tendered for a fund manager for that; we are almost at the end of that process and I will be able to update the committee on that very soon.

When I met the group last week, we discussed how, now that we have spent £1 million of the £10 million over the winter to sustain all those groups, we can use the other £9 million to build resilience into everything that they do. That local connection was one of the things that broke some of the taboos that people had had about how to access services and so on. Folk were just chapping on their neighbour’s door to ask them if they needed a prescription, some shopping or somebody to talk to. There are many organisations that do that—for instance, we fund the Age Scotland helpline and a number of other support mechanisms.

We have a great opportunity ahead of us, with substantial investment in this area. The committee may have ideas on what to do with that investment, but I have to tell you that the social isolation and loneliness stakeholder group has great ideas on how to spend not just the £9 million, but much more. However, for now, we will start with the £9 million.

That is a great question. If my memory serves me right, Lesley Irving has already met the chief statistician.