Chamber and committees

I am glad to hear about the project in your constituency. It is always good when such a campaign is successful, but you have to ask why a campaign was needed in the first place, because good decisions should be made at the earliest stage.

We do a number of things in relation to the point that you raise. Obviously, the equality and human rights budget that accompanies budgets is an important tool that can be used to understand, to mainstream and to influence things. The fairer Scotland duty and the public sector equality duty are other elements that focus in on the issue. We are reviewing those duties alongside our work on mainstreaming and on the new human rights legislation in order to ensure that they all work well with one another.

As part of the public sector equality review, we have had a lot of responses from stakeholders asking us to go further and deeper. In the summer, many organisations in the race equality area contacted us to ask us to do more, so we decided to spend a bit more time with stakeholders in order to enable them to influence and focus that process in a way that would meet their needs. That includes working with our colleagues in COSLA on its work. The new boards are just getting off the ground. I have met Councillor Chalmers, who is the new chair of the community wellbeing board. Much of the work sits in the wellbeing portfolio. I have met her to discuss a few issues—it was a general session to get to know her and to ask what the focus of the committee will be over the next few years. We also looked at the work on which we can collaborate. That includes work relating to public sector equality duties, the fairer Scotland duty and local authorities’ general core duties.

I am meeting Councillor Chalmers in the next few weeks to discuss our work on women, domestic abuse, gender discrimination and inequality. I am also meeting her to discuss a specific point to do with our new human rights bill. We are working with local authorities and other folk in the public sector to look at how we can improve processes, and the PSED review is now under way.

The equality data improvement programme demands plans. If we are to strengthen public sector equality duties, the data that is collected, disaggregated and used will be incredibly important. That ties into that work, too. How we use all that to influence things is incredibly important.

In the new Scottish human rights legislation, we will incorporate four United Nations treaties. As there are no UN treaties on older people or LGBTI people, we are looking at how we incorporate in the legislation sections on equality for those people so that those have the same effect in law as the UN treaties.

Part of the issue is to do with people not having their human rights and inequality issues realised by public authorities. Legislation is a tough tool to use. I would rather public authorities uphold the fairer Scotland duty and their public sector equality duties in a way that people do not feel that their rights are being disrespected and that they have to seek judicial remedies. The legislation will give us another tool in the box to effect societal, organisational and institutional change. We know that that needs to happen—we have been working towards that for many years. We are seeing progress now, but there is more to do, and I am always open to hearing ideas about how we do that.

I will give one example of where we spend money and how that makes a difference. JustRight Scotland is one of the organisations that we fund, and it is included in our six-monthly report. It has launched a free and confidential second-tier discrimination advice helpline, which is directly aimed at advisers and other front-line workers who support members of the public. The line helps to ensure that the people who offer such services are trained in a way that responds to an individual’s needs, should someone pick up the phone and say that something is not working for them and that they need support. The line gives people the support and the opportunity to tackle and challenge that.

That is just one example of the organisations that we fund to do front-line work. Those organisations are much better placed to understand the needs, wishes and challenges that people in Scotland have, especially when their rights are not being realised.

I have mentioned my for-info folder. There are lots of documents for my interest in that folder in which those conversations are taking place and in which actions on those issues are referred to.

When I sit down and talk to finance officials or other ministers, they use the language of the PANEL principles approach. It is really reassuring to hear that, but we then need to ensure that that is reflected in the work that they do.

A joint ministerial group on the public sector meets every few weeks. There will not have been a time when I have not spoken up on behalf of the organisations, groups, stakeholders and individuals who have spoken to me over the weeks previous to those meetings. I am always injecting such issues into those meetings.

I referred to the work that Jo Ozga did on the effect on women. There is the same impact on unpaid carers and family carers. I am able to feed back some of what people are experiencing, and what I am hearing is about the adult disability payment and the child disability payment and how different the application processes are. I just heard from a family who had fought for personal independence payment for years and got adult disability payment without having to go through all the assessments that they had had to go through for PIP.

I inject such examples into the discussion, because that puts a real human face on a policy, and when I feed that back to the Deputy First Minister and other colleagues, that clearly demonstrates the impact that the right decisions can have on people’s lives. I will continue to do that, and I am always open to hearing about ways that we can do that better. I will use all the avenues that I have to raise such issues as many times as I can.

I absolutely accept the principle of integrating intersectional gender analysis in all our policy making. I am an intersectional feminist and always have been. I have never looked at just my characteristic of being a woman; we are all different and we have a set of characteristics that bring us together. Where those characteristics cross over at intersections for some women is where the deepest areas of deprivation, discrimination or lack of access to better outcomes manifest themselves. The pandemic exposed that in a really stark way.

That is why we are very keen to make sure that the process of integrating an intersectional budget process will allow us to take forward some of the work that we do in the wider area of equality and human rights budgeting. I return to the point that I made about always going back to stakeholders. We work very closely with all the women’s organisations that are stakeholders in the work that we do.

We also work with the Scottish Women’s Budget Group; you will have seen some of the work that it does. It has been working with officials in our Government to train us in a number of these areas, and we have been attending training delivered by that organisation, which, basically, is to grow our competence on gender in this area. We often hear, “Where are women in this?”, “Where are minority ethnic people in this?” or “Where are Gypsy Travellers in this?”. It is about being able to pull all of that out and having it there.

We recognise that the impact of the crisis will not be felt equally by all people, and certainly not by women. There will be a disproportionate impact on certain households and groups, including women. In 90-odd per cent of single-parent households in Scotland, the head of the household is a woman. In lots of those families, the woman is a carer, because there is a disabled person in the family as well. We take all that into account and we recognise that those are the people who will be affected the most.

We are also exploring whether the public sector equality duty and the Scottish-specific duties could be appropriate vehicles to put an intersectional budget process on a statutory footing. I am not saying no to putting it on a statutory footing, but we are still investigating whether that is the right way to go. There are different opinions in the sector around that. We have asked for stakeholder views specifically on the practicality and feasibility of placing a duty on listed authorities to do it and are awaiting that work coming back.

The Scottish child payment is a perfect example of how we support those families. Bridging payments have been doubled, and the child payment has been doubled and is now paid up to the age of 16. That is a perfect example of how we understand where this impacts women and families, so we know where to inject resources to address those inequalities to a point where people are not being discriminated against or marginalised because of their status in society. They are valued, and the work that they do as mums and carers is valued, too.

It is probably not for me to set out what cabinet secretaries and other ministers will want to do in that area. However, it is certainly for me and the mainstreaming team to ensure that such ideas, proposals and resolutions to challenges are injected into the whole process, and that is what we are doing. I will bring in Rob Priestley in a minute to give an update on where we are with the mainstreaming strategy and how that ties into the work that we are talking about.

I am disappointed to hear that organisations, especially learning disability organisations, felt that they were not listened to or were the last to be listened to. I will take that on board and deal with it. A big piece of work that we did just before the pandemic—we know that the pandemic had a disproportionate impact on some folks and that people with learning disabilities were very badly affected because they lost lots of their services—involved developing, jointly with COSLA, a programme called the keys to life, which the committee probably knows about. On the back of the comments that Pam Duncan-Glancy has just articulated, I want to speak to the minister responsible to see whether we should be looking at that issue to ensure that organisations and, more important, the people they represent—the stakeholders in those organisations—get to hear their voice in all this. I take that point on board and will take it away.

I ask Rob Priestley to give an update on mainstreaming, which is a fast-moving feast at the moment. There was been work right across the Government. That has included our response to the emergency budget and the resource spending review, and it will include our response to a normal budget if we ever get a normal budget round.

You will not be surprised to hear me say something similar to what I have already said. Policy development and policy outcomes are incredibly important and must be informed by lived experience. If we take an intersectional approach to the issue, we see that those are the very women and folks who emerge as facing multiple layers of discrimination and equality issues.

The work that we do with stakeholders across our portfolio is incredibly important. As a privileged white woman, I would not speak for the women in Scotland’s diverse minority ethnic communities, so stakeholder engagement is incredibly important. During the summer, I spent a good amount of time meeting stakeholders from organisations such as Amina—the Muslim Women’s Resource Centre and Shakti Women’s Aid; I spent almost a full day at Shakti in Edinburgh. We spoke about disaggregated data. A number of women were there, but there were also a number of women from the Chinese community who had experienced different forms of domestic abuse, and there were women from different cultural backgrounds who had experienced honour-based violence, female genital mutilation and other female-orientated issues.

I sat with my mouth shut and my ears open to hear those stories and learn about the issues that those women had, and I did the same during my visit to the Saoirse project. There were women who came from areas of multiple deprivation and who were also carers or victims of domestic violence or who had addictions. We see the deepest inequality at those intersections, so that is where we focus our work; partnership and intersectionality are criteria for organisations to receive money from the delivering equally safe fund. Organisations such as Shakti, Saheliya, Waverley Care and a number of others allowed me—as someone who does not have first-hand experience—to understand what happens, how it happens and how we can use those experiences to inform and improve our approaches.

A lot of those organisations train people across a number of sectors, by which I mean that they embed intersectional approaches across many sectors so that, if an individual who has different characteristics from those that they deal with walks through their door, they know how to tackle that and who the experts in the field are to help them. Shakti, Saheliya and others might say that it is them, and that that person should come and work with them. That is why the delivering equally safe fund had partnership as a key element, because, with the best will in the world, a person could walk through the doors of an organisation that does not reflect them. Going through those doors is a big step, so if a person can step through the doors of one organisation and be signposted to an organisation that is more culturally or religiously appropriate—or whatever that person needs—that is the way to do it. The Saoirse project gave great examples of that.

That is how I do it. When we are mainstreaming across Government, we are looking at how money is spent to tackle these issues. You will not be surprised to know that I work very closely with justice colleagues and colleagues in other parts of Government in relation to our equally safe strategy. I work with health and education on access to services and justice when a victim or witness is going through the justice system. We have worked with many organisations to do that, and we continue to work with them. Hopefully, they will say that we provide feedback, but you have sparked an idea in my head: we should consider how we can create some feedback loops.

An example of that is our draft proposals in response to the EHRBAG’s recommendations. We gave it the draft proposals to ask whether we are on the right track. We go back to stakeholders to say where we think something will work and ask them whether it works for them. It is about testing that and ensuring that it works when it comes to final publication, so that the person who walks through the door of an organisation—whether they are minority ethnic or have other protected characteristics—gets the service that they need and deserve.

I totally agree—please tell your mum to engage with that group. I think that I have an idea of which one it is, but I am going to find out about that, and see how we did it, so that we can replicate that approach across the board.

You make a really good point about faith communities. Since the change in portfolios after the election last year, faith communities now come under my portfolio, so I have spent the past six months or so building relationships with them. Just a few weeks ago, I met all the faith leaders. It was interesting to see that there were few women around the table; we need a few more women there. However, the interaction with all those leaders was incredibly positive. That particular meeting was on hate crime, but a few other issues were brought up at the same time.

Over the summer, I took part in a number of events, including with Shabir Beg and the Ahlul Bayt Society. I also attended the Interfaith Scotland event at the Baha’i temple in Edinburgh at the end of June; the focus there was on women and gender inequality. I was able to take part in that event and answer questions in that format.

The most recent piece of work by the National Advisory Council on Women and Girls focused on minority ethnic women and the work that they do, and you make a good point about faith communities in that regard. Over the past six months, I have been getting up to speed with that area, because it did not previously sit in my portfolio; it sat in the communities portfolio. I have been doing a lot of work to build those relationships—when we do that, we get good, frank and honest feedback because we build an element of trust.

The project in which your mum will—I hope—get involved is just one example of the many ways in which we do that. I will go back and have a wee look at how we did that and ensure that we replicate that approach across the board.

That was an ask from a number of forums and organisations, and it was one of the recommendations from the National Advisory Council on Women and Girls. There was also a call for better policy coherence, in relation to not only the budget process but how different parts of policy work together to produce better outcomes.

With regard to the equality and fairer Scotland budget statement, work is being done to reverse the process a bit, so that outreach is done not at the end of the process but at the beginning. Budget scrutiny in the Parliament is an example. Pre-budget scrutiny includes all the questions that members have asked me today about the process and how people can engage with it, and being much better at ensuring that stakeholders’ voices are heard.

A number of the recommendations from the previous iteration of Angela O’Hagan’s EHRBAG centred on how we improve those processes. There are a number of recommendations, and we are carefully considering them all. As I said, we have produced a draft response that has gone back to that group to ensure that we are on the right path. As soon as we have that feedback and come to conclusions on it, I can give that information to the committee for your consideration in the process. Much of what we are doing is around ensuring that we take a participation, accountability, non-discrimination and equality, empowerment and legality—PANEL—principles approach at the beginning of every policy development. Every policy development will have a financial impact, so not looking at the budget at that point would seem to be a bit myopic.

When I first came to the Scottish Parliament, I was on the Education, Culture and Sport Committee, and we did a piece of work around trying to track £1 from the Government to the front line. We found that that was impossible—it was especially tricky when it started to go through COSLA agreements and so on. What we produce now gives us a clear understanding of how equality and human rights considerations can make budget processes and the outcomes much fairer and more able to tackle endemic and systemic inequality. The approach is much better, but I am not saying that it is perfect, because it is not. That is why we are considering the recommendations from the EHRBAG.

The equality and human rights budget advisory group helps us to understand some of that. Also, the equality and fairer Scotland budget statement—there are so many acronyms in my head; I try to remember them all but I try not to use them because I do not like them—becomes incredibly important with regard to how we do what we do and how we ensure that the processes are transparent enough for people to understand them and see themselves in them.

I will take your comments back. I cannot comment on how the Minister for Mental Wellbeing and Social Care is working on that, but I give you a commitment to look at that and come back with a more detailed response. I will look for that across the whole Government.

The work that we are doing with the mainstreaming team is important in ensuring that those processes are done in a way that means that people’s lives are reflected and real human stories are carried through those decision-making processes, so that we do not have the issues that stakeholders commented on in the committee’s previous meeting. We take all that very seriously, and I inject that into the work that I do. I am not silent on any of that, as you can imagine, and neither are other ministers. The Government is committed to doing that better, so we will come back to you with a more detailed response. I hope that that is helpful.

I thank everyone for all their good wishes. I am glad to be back, too. It is good to be here. I hope that you are feeling better, Pam.

Three great reports were published last week, including the Inclusion Scotland report and the UN’s guide report. With all the reports, we are considering the impact of Covid and the areas in which we can tackle the associated inequalities.

I have been really pleased to see the work that disabled people’s organisations are doing around incorporation of the UNCRPD—it is something that I have been advocating for for a long time, personally, professionally and politically.

The human rights bill process is under way and will be led by the Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Housing and Local Government, Shona Robison. I chair the advisory board for that, and we have learned lessons from the work of the social renewal advisory board and the national advisory council on women and girls. We are hosting a number of opportunities to hear from stakeholders. You will not be surprised to hear that disabled people’s organisations are front and centre in that. I know Glasgow Disability Alliance and the work that it does. Like you, Pam, I herald the work of the GDA and other organisations, and hold that work in high regard.

The GDA and others have been pivotal in the work that we are doing in developing the policy around the bill. They have contributed to the advisory board and have considered some of the intersections with disability, including those relating to race and age. We are working on all of that.

To get to the crux of your question, which is about how we ensure that such organisations are adequately funded, we are not quite sure yet what they need and what we will do as far as incorporation of the UNCRDP goes. We are at quite an early stage in that work and in understanding what that will look like. However, the bill will incorporate several treaties into Scots law and will give people a remedy so that they can challenge public authorities when their rights are not being respected. That is a huge shift in how we do things.

You would think that, as a Government, we would be quite nervous about that, but actually we are fully centred on ensuring that we create a Scotland where people have a judicial route to realise their rights. We hope that they will never have to use such a route because all the other work that we are doing emphasises the responsibilities on public authorities to deliver. However, it is a real step forward for people to know that such a remedy is there and that they can use it, and for public authorities to know that they have responsibilities that they must act on or they could be challenged in court.

The advisory board has started to meet again—I met the board a few weeks ago. It is looking at a whole host of issues in relation to incorporation but there is a question about how far we can go within our devolution settlement. There are challenges; it is a huge piece of work, but one that we have entered into with open hearts and minds as well as lots of drive and determination. Disabled people’s organisations are incredibly important in helping us to understand that. They are there at the beginning so that they get the outcomes that they need at the end.

I will update the committee as we develop that work on the question that Pam Duncan-Glancy is asking, which is one that I like to ask: what difference will it make and how do we ensure that it works? That is where we are focusing right now and we will come back to the committee on 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.