Chamber and committees

I, too, pay tribute to Margaret Caldwell and her family. A wait of 19 years for justice is not just. Having women and vulnerable people ignored—not listened to or treated with compassion or dignity when they make complaints or report crimes—is just not good enough. Further to her previous answers about support for complainers, what assurances can the cabinet secretary give to victims, survivors and witnesses who feel that they have been let down by the justice system when they have made complaints?

Good morning. Thank you for joining us this and for your contributions so far.

I want to extend the conversation to look at how we can better use procurement to deliver the social and other policy outcomes that we might wish to deliver. Fair work and gender pay have already been mentioned. Melanie Mackenzie, in response to the convener’s first question, talked about the considerations that you would give to environmental and fair work issues, for example. Will you say a bit more about that and how you balance the regulatory and legislative requirements of procurement with those policy objectives?

Do you pull demographic and socioeconomic data into that decision-making process at the local level?

Thank you. That is helpful.

Lynette Robertson mentioned gender inequality issues. Is procurement a vehicle for tackling social inequalities? What are the barriers to doing that? What do we need to do better?

The monitoring system that you have talked about comes with a not-insignificant overhead. Are there economies of scale that we might consider, if not across the whole of Scotland then at least regionally, in understanding what kinds of monitoring, data collection and evaluation are required, or does monitoring have to carried out on an authority-by-authority basis, given local variation and specificities?

I want to explore an issue that Evelyn Tweed raised. We know that a lot of effort is put into thinking about procurement as delivering positive social, economic and environmental outcomes, as well as providing the goods and services that you all need to fulfil your functions. I am curious as to how you see those outcomes being set and determined, and about your role as procuring agents in those discussions.

Do you have clear lines of conversation with other agencies or internally in your organisations on how you can use your procurement power to tackle gender inequality, for instance? How do you see the setting or aspiration of the procurement outcomes that are not about service delivery or getting the stuff that you need?

That is helpful, thank you.

You have all talked about the need for internal consistency with regard to training and awareness raising to ensure that people understand the idea of trying to procure for good. This might be a difficult question to answer briefly, but how often do you find that the positive outcomes that we have been talking about—the promotion of ethical goods, fair work and gender equality, the reduction of inequality and so on—are sacrificed because of cost? Also, how much of that sacrifice could be allayed by the improved consistency and coherence of training and awareness raising with regard to the longer-term social and environmental benefits of procurement?

Great—thanks.

How would you decide how to weight those different considerations? Are you saying, “Right, in this works contract, we really need these social or environmental outcomes”? You said that you might write such considerations into the contract, but how else might you determine exactly the sort of fluffy outcomes that you are looking for?

The issue of availability and collection of data will be a thread throughout this inquiry, I think. Would it be helpful if there was a standardised approach to data collection so that you did not have to have that conversation individually every time you have initial discussions with potential contractors and suppliers? If there was something that set out the data that you have and how you want it to be recorded for the contract, would that make things easier, or would that just be too cumbersome a machine?