Chamber and committees

What mechanism do you think could be used to close that gap?

We might need to do some digging on that.

How can we use that analysis and understanding to improve or add to the procurement landscape? The issue links back to what you said about the failure to connect procurement and the public sector equality duty. What do you see as important in that regard? Is it about a specific conditionality or different weighting? We have talked about the price versus the social or environmental impact. Thinking specifically about procurement, what is important?

The minister will be aware that, earlier this month, the European directive on exposure to carcinogens, mutagens or reprotoxic substances at work was updated to acknowledge the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer’s reports, which recognise the firefighter occupation as carcinogenic. The European Commission is also developing guidelines and mandatory decontamination procedures for firefighters.

What assurances can the minister provide Scottish firefighters that they, too, will have their health protected in law? Will she consider establishing a joint collaboration—including the Scottish Government, the national health service and SFRS’s leadership team, occupational health unit and statistics unit—to progress that and much-needed routine health monitoring for firefighters?

To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on its discussions with the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service regarding the plans required to address the carcinogenic nature of firefighting. (S6O-03133)

I appreciate that we are at the beginning of the process and that, although we have done a lot of mainstreaming, there is still a lot of work to do. However, one of the challenges is that, when we look at what is happening in communities and neighbourhoods around Scotland, we see rising inequality and more people being threatened with exploitation at work and modern slavery-type situations. Are we on the way to following the pound—to better understanding that a particular investment will mean that someone does not fall into modern slavery? Do we have mechanisms for tracking such specific impacts?

I appreciate that. It is worth saying that, if it was easy to track the impact of spending, we would have been doing it by now. I appreciate that the process is not easy.

However, I sometimes wonder whether we look at equality and human rights accountability from the wrong end of the telescope. Last week, there was an interesting discussion in the Scottish Parliament on different strategies for tackling poverty. Somebody posed this question: what if our starting point in every budget was to look at everything through the lens of eliminating or reducing child poverty? If the starting point for everyone, whether it is the Cabinet Secretary for Transport or the Cabinet Secretary for Wellbeing Economy, Net Zero and Energy, is that every decision that is made needs to address child poverty and other such issues, we will start to get very different types of decisions.

Over the coming year—in some ways, next year’s budget process starts now, as we conclude this year’s budget process—will there be space for those conversations, not only with your Government colleagues but with external stakeholders who have routes into understanding the impacts and who have experience of assessing every decision that they make through a rights-based lens, because this is about rights realisation? What are your thoughts on that?

I understand that. I appreciate your openness towards considering how we can get better at this, because everybody would probably agree that nobody does this right. We are trying to do something quite important in Scotland in focusing on rights realisation through our budget.

My final question is linked to what you have said in reference to the Scottish child payment and tackling child poverty. How confident are you that gendered inequalities and inequalities related to other protected characteristics are being considered by the Government and the strategic leadership team in ways that look at more than just economic poverty and inequality? Are we asking each other the right questions? Have we got the right information? Are we collecting the right kind of data to understand poverty that is more than economic?

Thank you, minister, for being with us this morning. I welcome you and your officials.

I have some questions on accountability for equalities and human rights. In some ways, they follow on from Kevin Stewart’s questions and points that he picked up. They are about how we understand the impact of decisions on people who use services, whether or not they are vulnerable and marginalised.

One of the questions for us is how we track analysis of impact from previous decisions into future decisions. Will you say a little bit about what we need to do to better understand impacts from past decisions before we even begin to think about future decisions?

I note the forthcoming externally led review and the cabinet secretary’s acknowledgement that prison is often not the best place for people. Given the risks of violence, drug addiction, suicide and other issues that are associated with incarceration, how will she ensure that the review is not just a tweak around the edges of what some people consider to be a broken system? Will she explore ways to include recommendations in Howard League Scotland’s recent submission on Scotland’s prisons to the United Nations Human Rights Committee?