Chamber and committees

I will follow on from a previous answer. What we are doing is the right thing to do. Reviewing the budget and asking ministers to report why they made decisions and how they used equality and human rights budgeting is the right thing to do. The question is how effective it has been and whether we are going far enough or doing it effectively enough each year.

The fact that we are being so reactive and changing the process, the documents that we put out and the format and type of information—in addition to, as I said to Paul O’Kane, considering a ministerial workshop and other points that we have for showing our work and scrutinising each other as well as our own decisions—will strengthen the process year on year. We were never going to get it right and be perfect in the first year because we are tackling ingrained, systemic inequalities and changing attitudes in a very large institution and a representative body. That is a hard thing to do, but we are making improvements every year.

I would focus on that. Yes, we need to improve, but we are doing the right thing.

Equality impact assessments and the work that went into producing the “Equality and Fairer Scotland Budget Statement 2024-25” have allowed us to track Scottish spend. However, as Kevin Stewart pointed out, much of the growing inequality is impacted, or even driven, by decisions that are not made in the Scottish Parliament. It is difficult to track how our spend balances against cuts that are made by a different Government, because the two institutions have separate reporting mechanisms and different reasons for making decisions.

I will look at whether we can do more in relation to tracking. We have information from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and other organisations that look at the impact of UK decisions on Scotland. We are trying to be more alive to that. I point to the debate that I took part in last year with Christina McKelvie, the then Minister for Culture, Europe and International Development, in which we looked specifically at the impact on Scotland of UK decisions on asylum and immigration and at how such decisions affect where we need to spend our budget. There is tie-in, but it is far more difficult to track spending by the two Governments when the decisions that have been made are so opposed.

I do not pretend that the systems and policies that are in place are the problem. Even if we started entirely from scratch, we would still be dealing with what needs to change: people’s attitudes and habits. With mainstreaming, we are trying to make it a habit to think about equality and about impacts on groups and on human rights-progressive realisation. That takes time and it takes work.

We could start from scratch, but we would still have to do all that work to change attitudes and the wider system. However, what we are learning right now through feedback from the advisory group and through scrutiny by this committee and the Social Justice and Social Security Committee in particular on equality and human rights budgeting will be very helpful. The lessons that we can take from the likes of the Covid inquiry will also be important, because we must ensure that our processes are resilient enough to enable us to spend on priorities when reacting to emergencies and, in the case of this budget, when reacting to significant cuts by the UK Government and a very challenging financial situation overall.

Connecting communities is not a budget line that I have information on.

I have lots of engagement with ministerial colleagues, as I outlined in my opening statement, but individual decisions for ministers are still decisions for them to make.

The objective of mainstreaming, and of the work that I am doing on equalities and mainstreaming to ensure that equalities and human rights budgeting is taken into consideration across Government, is that other ministers will be able to apply the same thinking and process to their decision making. In the same way that the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee would not scrutinise every piece of policy and legislation in the Scottish Parliament, it is about everyone being able to take the equalities and human rights lens and apply it to their own work.

I think there has to be some leeway, and I accept that decisions are made in different portfolios for lots of different reasons. This year, I will look at examples that have worked from last year’s ministerial workshop. I will use the best examples of ministers applying equalities and human rights budgeting, which I will share with other ministers in order to set the expectation for this year. For example, it is my plan to continue with the workshop idea, but to have it much earlier in the process, while being clear with ministers about what was received well in the previous process and what was perhaps not as helpful.

That is the point of them. I hope that ministers who maybe do not have as much of an idea of when to apply assessments will, as we develop a better in-the-round process for the budget, take the opportunity to ensure that they are familiar with that need and that they know when to look further at what the impacts would be on particular groups of decisions that are being recommended by others or, in the case of housing, what we are having to do due to extreme financial difficulties.

I refer back to my opening statement. We are in a very difficult position. A 10 per cent cut to medium-term capital spend is a huge thing that we cannot simply absorb without anybody being impacted.

I would not say that equalities and human rights budgeting is about never making cuts. It is about making sure that cuts are proportionate, that there is a reason for them and that all the spend is directed towards the progressive realisation of rights, and I think that that is what we have done.

It is hard to prove the impact of spend-to-save processes, but inequalities drive public spending—whether that is spending on social security, on health, on education or on criminal justice. People who are subjected to the worst barriers to accessing human rights and the worst inequality are more likely to have to use those public services. Therefore, putting money into making sure that services are designed with them in mind, and that public services are flexible enough to react to people, regardless of their background or protected characteristics, will undoubtedly save money, and it will save a lot of hassle and, potentially, trauma for people who are trying to access those services. I have no doubt about that.

On equalities being an add-on, that is the attitude that all the work on mainstreaming is seeking to challenge. That attitude absolutely still exists in many minds in public life, but as I said in my previous answer, we need culture change. We need not only a mainstreaming strategy; we also need people to think about equalities and about the impacts on individual groups of people who are subjected to inequality when they make decisions about where to prioritise spending.

I would encourage engagement with lived experience throughout the year, at all stages of any process within Government, because it is absolutely correct to say that lived experience is valuable and should be considered when we are making decisions that impact on people’s lives.

You said earlier that my job involves speaking to other ministers and supporting and pushing them to consider equalities and human rights. Part of that has involved ensuring that the lived experience of groups that fall within my portfolio—such as disabled people, older people or people who experience racism—have direct access to other ministers. It should not be the case that those people always see the equalities minister—they also have issues with health, transport and education. I have been facilitating that contact. One example is that I have been ensuring that the voices that feed into the immediate priorities plan for disabled people are able to engage directly with other ministers.

Absolutely. I am already feeding into next year’s budget process. I already have written notes on things that I felt went well and things that did not. As I said, I will meet the equality and human rights budget advisory group again this week. We will probably talk about how the budget process has gone, but we always look forward and think about what we could do better next time and what needs to change, because that is why we are all here.

The First Minister has challenged all his ministers to think about how every decision will reduce child poverty. When we make spending decisions, we have to think about the impact on tackling poverty, reducing inequality, creating a wellbeing economy and providing growth that does not contribute to further inequalities. There is a challenge. Last year, for example, we looked at the impact of Scottish Government spending specifically to reduce child poverty, such as the Scottish child payment and other schemes. The information that we got is that child poverty is increasing at a slower rate in Scotland than in the UK.

That brings us back to mitigation. It is difficult to be positive and optimistic about a budget that is so focused on mitigation, instead of thinking about how much more of an impact those measures would have on our goal of tackling child poverty if we had control over the whole lot and were not reacting to cuts in other places.