Chamber and committees

I will bring in Rob Priestley on that question.

I understand that the subject of equalities in particular involves a great deal of crossover. That is reflected in the cross-Government work that we constantly undertake. My only fear would be in trying to go into detail on processes that I am not party to, on behalf of colleagues who could themselves come to the committee and be far more helpful in that regard.

The point about a diverse workforce is very important. However, as you will know, convener, teachers have to comply with professional values such as integrity, trust, respect and social justice. All teachers should be positive role models and ensure that everyone that they encounter is treated with respect.

Specifically, when it comes to an anti-racist approach to employment overall, you will be aware that, last December, we published our new anti-racist employment strategy, which seeks to respond to the scale of institutional racism and provides practical guidance and support to help employers take an anti-racist and intersectional approach to addressing racial inequality in the workplace.

I ask Rob Priestley whether he has anything to add.

Again, I appreciate the spirit of the question. It goes back to what Meghan Gallacher and I were discussing about institutional racism and the need for systemic change, which has only grown as we have become more aware of its effects on people, including those who are seeking to work in Scotland. To put it simply, we want Scotland to be a place where everyone has an equal opportunity to enter, sustain and progress in work in an inclusive labour market.

In December 2022, we published our new anti-racist employment strategy, which is underpinned by a series of actions that we are undertaking in partnership with key stakeholders, including evaluation of the minority ethnic recruitment toolkit to ensure that it continues to support employers in their recruitment of people from racialised minority backgrounds. We are developing the next stage of our anti-racism workplace training framework, which will support public and private employers to assess their own training needs and provide learning pathways that will build the capability of employers to address racial inequality in their workplace. We are also developing guidance to show how employers have used positive action to address underrepresentation, retention and progression of staff in their workforce.

We will continue to encourage and support public sector leadership to build that understanding of institutional racism and its impact, and to address the recommendations of this committee’s inquiry into race equality, employment and skills. All of that is being taken forward in the context of our new fair work action plan, which will help us to meet our ambition of becoming a leading fair work nation by 2025.

Again, that is a very important question on a key policy area for the Scottish Government.

I highlight that we have the most generous free school meal offer anywhere in the United Kingdom. It saves parents £400 per eligible child per year, so it is an incredible investment. We remain absolutely committed to the expansion of universal free school meals, and our programme for government set out that we will work with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities to prepare schools and infrastructure for the expansion of school meals to primary 6 and 7 pupils who are eligible through the Scottish child payment. The next step is working with local authorities to undertake the planning work that is necessary to deliver that, recognising that there is a big infrastructure and resource requirement on schools to deliver those school meals every day, which needs to be worked through on a local basis.

More broadly, I point out that such commitments clearly require significant funding, and we are in a very difficult budgetary situation this year and next. However, that is an example of how our on-going work on equalities and human rights budgeting is making a difference, and of the fact that we are still prioritising a social justice response to poverty, climate change and our interconnected goals.

We are committed to further embedding equalities and human rights budgeting, which is the role that I have not just with regard to the Minister for Children, Young People and Keeping the Promise’s portfolio but across all of Government. I recently met the equalities and human rights budget advisory group, along with the Deputy First Minister, to discuss what more we can do.

We have produced an equality statement alongside the budget for more than 10 years now, which represents an unbroken and consistent commitment to examining, through an equalities lens, the impact of the Scottish budget on Scotland’s population.

In September, we published our response to the equalities and human rights budget advisory group’s recommendations. In that response, we shared an overview of current and planned activity that progresses action on the recommendations. At the heart of that response is continuing to improve how equality analysis improves decision making, such as with the example of free school meals. We have a ministerial workshop on equality and the budget planned for early November, and I will take to that workshop the request about cross-portfolio working.

I hear that criticism. We are trying to improve exactly those issues of accessibility and transparency within the process. It is not that we are not committed to showing our work on equalities budgeting, but we must consider how best to build that into the process and how to explain that in an understandable format.

I will bring in Rob Priestley soon to talk about the detail. The programme for government and the material in our policy prospectus about equality, opportunity and community have given ministers and cabinet secretaries a clear focus. The mandate letters that went to cabinet secretaries regarding their portfolios communicated very clearly what this Government’s expectations are and how we should prioritise our core missions.

I hope that that has gone some way to helping people to see how the policy prospectus, programme for government and budget interconnect and how ministers are putting in the work to ensure that all that we do builds towards the missions that the First Minister has clearly set out. However, I appreciate that there is always more that we can do to increase participation and understanding more widely.

Rob Priestley would answer that more ably. However, there has certainly been a focus on the process when I have met the chair of the equality and human rights budget advisory group. The focus has been on culture, processes, the turnaround of the budget and how we can show our working throughout the process, not just at the end. A lot of it has been about culture change and putting in place checks and balances to ensure that any minister, regardless of their portfolio, has equality and human rights budgeting in their mind, so that it becomes habit rather than something that we have to drive through constantly.

Our equality and fairer Scotland budget statement links spending that has been undertaken with national outcomes. Through an equalities lens, that document links what we have spent money on with how that has changed things for people. More generally, in response to equality and human rights budget advisory group recommendations, we have made the commitment that officials will be resourced—to go back to Rob Priestley’s points—to mainstream issues, take a retrospective look and analyse what spending has resulted in.

Absolutely, convener. Such conversations have been happening in the long term, and they are on-going. We have been particularly keen on applying the right to work to asylum seekers, alongside removing NRPF, because such measures would allow integration, as is set out in our vision whereby people would be allowed to integrate from day 1 and, as you say, be economically active during their time here.

The powers that we would need sit within the wider asylum and immigration power that the UK Government holds. We have requested more power over the rights and entitlements of asylum seekers and other migrants, and we will continue to pursue that.

On bus travel, I point out that our existing approach has not been exclusive of asylum seekers. As it stands, our concessionary travel scheme allows for asylum seekers who meet the current criteria, including being aged under 22 or over 60 or being disabled, to acquire free bus travel. We estimate that around a third of asylum seekers in Scotland are currently eligible for it.

I will bring in Aileen Harding to say a bit more about the current pilot on bus travel. Once we have further information about how it is being used by asylum seekers and the types of journeys that are being carried out, we will be more than happy to explore how much it would cost the Scottish Government to extend the scheme and what justification there could be for extending it to one cohort other than simply on the basis of age and disability.

First, we are in the process of widening the dispersal of asylum seekers to other local authorities but we have been clear that, although a lot of work has been done and experience and knowledge has been built up among those who work in partnership in Glasgow to support asylum seekers, a lot of work also needs to be done to ensure that the support and the services are there once the dispersal is widened. Local authorities will have many different reasons, depending on which council it is, for hesitating to accept asylum seekers. We will learn a lot from the pilot. Transport in a city is very different to transport in a suburban or rural area, but the pilot will inform us of the cost that is likely to be inflicted.

I will bring Alison Byrne in to say some more about asylum dispersal.

I have been very interested in the evidence that the committee has gathered on hotels—keeping in mind that placement of asylum seekers in hotels—or, rather, temporary accommodation—is a decision that is wholly reserved to the UK.

It is important to go back to my answer to the convener’s previous question. Asylum seekers not having the right to work and not having recourse to public funds makes their placement in hotels very different to how it would be for other cohorts. We are clear that there is a time to use hotels and that there are appropriate circumstances for that. However, we do not see asylum seekers waiting for a decision on their immigration status as appropriate circumstances.

I completely agree about use of the word “temporary”: if we are providing people with temporary accommodation, it needs to be clear that it is temporary. Given the length of waiting times for decisions around immigration status and the uncertainty that asylum seekers face, I think that it is not fair to use the word when we place asylum seekers in hotels in Scotland.