Chamber and committees

She has done lots of engagement over the past few weeks and she has either met him or is just about to meet him. We can update the committee on that.

Maggie Chapman’s point about how we connect the dots is well made. I initiated that process at the very beginning, because none of these things sits in isolation. Whether it is the public sector equality duty review, the review of this funding, the immediate priority plan, the Gypsy Traveller action plan or our equality data budgeting, they all have to be part of the same mechanism to end inequality. I go back to the points that I made earlier about equality data. What we collect, how we collect it and how we use that data to drive change is incredibly important.

You will be interested to see the update from the chief statistician, but I will confirm with Lesley Irving whether she has met him yet and made that connection, or, if not, when that will happen. I will update the committee in due course.

Nick Bland can say a bit more, because he was involved in this work when I was away.

Thanks for your question and for your good wishes, Pam. We had a lovely day doing the international women’s day event, at which lots of questions like yours were brought up. They give a lot of food for thought.

I was very mindful of ensuring that we had a culturally diverse communities approach during the pandemic, and I worked closely with a number of stakeholders. However, I recognise the issue. It does not just sit squarely within our race equality plan; it sits within our violence against women work as well. You will know that the national advisory council on women and girls did a piece of work—the year before last, I think—on intersectionality, which brought many new voices into those circles on access to mainstream services, how we tackle female genital mutilation and honour-based violence, and some of the cultural nuances that are involved. We have taken all that on board.

We are doing an immediate update and refresh of our equally safe plan. We are also looking at its long-term sustainability—that is what the group chaired by Lesley Irving will do. We are also looking at the important intersections with race.

We have looked at the make-up of our equally safe joint strategic board, which is jointly chaired by me and Kelly Parry, who is a spokesperson at COSLA. Its work is being taken forward across many portfolios, including with our justice colleagues.

One of our priorities is primary prevention, including how we ensure that the strategy works very well in the area that you have raised and how we tackle the intersections. We talked to some of our key partners about how they could engage with the board. It was apparent that we needed some of them to come on to the board, so I am really pleased that Mariam Ahmed from Amina—the Muslim Women’s Resource Centre will join the joint strategic board. I think that you know her, Pam; I have known her for a number of years. She will be supporting us in our responses and the actions that we take by helping us understand how actions around honour-based violence and FGM could work, through the lens of our equally safe strategy, which is a wider strategy for reducing violence against women and girls. Again, we are taking that gender and race equality lens to the issue. I really look forward to working with Mariam on that.

I hope that that gives you some reassurance that we are attempting to address the gap, or concern, that you have brought up.

I find it quite poignant that passing that bill was the last piece of work that the Parliament did before we went into lockdown. It was great that we were able to do that, but then we went straight into lockdown mere days later, and we had to focus all our work on supporting people in their communities in all the ways that I have already explained, including through the ethnic minority resilience network. The FGM guidance has been delayed as a result of difficult decisions that had to be taken at that time, but we are now re-establishing that work.

There will be a couple of key achievements in developing that work, including the publication of our multi-agency non-statutory guidance on FGM. It is important that that covers all agencies, because, as we have seen, work on this area needs to be done in education, health and justice. All of that was included in the bill—now the 2020 act—and we are continuing to re-establish and implement that work and, indeed, use it to enhance our equally safe strategy, which contains specific references to FGM. The practice is, as you have made clear, abhorrent, and it is an abuse of human rights.

The issue of data has been raised a number of times with regard to a lot of equality measures, and I can tell the committee that the chief statistician is undertaking a piece of work on how we can collect more equality data, the responsibilities that will be placed on public authorities to do so and how we use that data to force and drive change. As I have said, that work is under way; in fact, the chief statistician has already published some of it. Again, I am happy to initiate an update on our work on the equality data improvement programme—or EDIP—and to get back to you on the points that you have raised about the data that we collect, how we collect it and how we use it to drive change. The chief statistician is working on that just now and, as I have said, I will get you an update on it.

The tone that the committee set in the debate was superb and allows us to move forward in a positive way.

The group will meet for the first time on 31 March. However, over the past few weeks, and after the debate, we had a bit of a think about who should be on the group, and whether we had touched on all the intersections and issues that we need to focus on. The debate helped us in that area, and we have added a few people to the group. They have yet to respond to say whether they can participate, but we will know by 30 March, and I can update the committee on the membership at that point.

Please be reassured that we took a wide view, to make sure that every person who might be able to support us in developing the policy is on the group. We also wanted there to be good intersectional lived experience, which is what some of the additional members will bring to the group. They will develop the work that the group is doing.

The group’s remit goes pretty broad and deep. That includes recommending what practices should be prohibited and giving consideration to a definition of conversion practices—many of the things that we discussed during the debate. As soon as I know about the membership of the group—that will be on Wednesday or Thursday—I will let the committee know, and I will give you an update on what it decided on Thursday.

Thank you for the question and for your good wishes, Karen.

You will have heard me say in response to Pam Gosal that we have included Mariam Ahmed on the equally safe board. She brings to the table all her past experience, including the work that she has been doing at Amina and more widely in her community, which will allow us to focus on taking the intersectional approach that we all want to see. She is a busy woman, and I am pleased that she has given up some of her time to help us develop our equally safe plan. That is really welcome, and we are grateful for it.

Primary prevention is one of the main pillars of our equally safe work. That work involves not just the equally safe at school programme; we also have the equally safe in higher and further education and equally safe in the workplace programmes. The approach in those areas is being driven forward by other ministers in the work that they do.

Recently, we have been hearing about the benefits of the equally safe at school programme and equally safe in further and higher education. You will be familiar with the work of Fiona Drouet and her organisation, EmilyTest; she is driving that forward in campuses across Scotland. She is absolutely formidable, and we are grateful to her for all her work in this area.

We have a bit of a review under way. After elections, we come back and look at the strategies and action plans that we have been working on, and think about where we are starting from now. We asked stakeholders whether we should do a big, long-term full refresh, and they said, “No, because we think this works.” However, they wanted us to look at the areas where we needed a bit more focus, which is what we are doing through the short-term refresh that we are undertaking right now.

I met with the board just a few weeks ago, and we started to action a number of those points. Again, I will come back to the committee with a fuller update on that in the coming weeks, if you do not mind. We had a 100 days commitment to direct new funding to this area, with £5 million going to rape crisis centres and domestic abuse services. The aim of that was to cut waiting lists, because we know about some of the challenges in that regard.

We have a new delivering equally safe fund, and we fund 121 projects across 112 organisations to the tune of £38 million. We could have funded three times the number of projects, given the number of bids that came in. There is a lot of work going on in this area, and we have just opened our new victim-centred approach fund to support victims of crime; I know that that issue has been brought up a few times.

We have also funded the Respect Phoneline for perpetrators. We have a number of programmes for perpetrators. Primary prevention is about consent, healthy relationships, being equally safe at school and where to go for support—it is about how we do all that. The same applies in further and higher education, and in the workplace with regard to how people can support colleagues.

Another aspect is how we deal with perpetrators to change the culture. White Ribbon Scotland has done a fabulous piece of work about the need for men to take responsibility. It is great to see the narrative changing from women having to be protected to men taking responsibility for their actions. The “Don’t be that guy” campaign that Police Scotland developed was a superb resource and really got people—especially men—to stop and think about their behaviour and their responsibility as a bystander or as someone who can intervene if it is safe enough to do so. A huge amount of work is going on across this field, and we are looking at all the aspects and what we should focus on. Primary prevention is a key aspect of that, and the funding to do that is in place.

Alongside that is the review that Lesley Irving is undertaking. Another big issue that the sector faces—it was reflected in my comment a moment ago on the number of people who put in bids for the delivering equally safe fund—is the amount of work that needs to continue to be done in this area, and how we make that much more sustainable and less precarious for all the organisations involved. Lesley Irving has started that work; I met with her just a few weeks ago.

Again, I am happy to come back to the committee at a later date to give an update on the work of that group. Lesley was the head of the Scottish Government’s equality unit for a long time, and she has an extensive professional background in services that deal with violence against women. I am sure that she will come back with some incredibly robust and challenging, but very welcome, recommendations. When we have an update on that work, I can let the committee know.

That goes back to my earlier point about how, in my policy area, I do not do anything in isolation. We certainly do not develop policy in isolation. It is always done with participation and takes account of not only lived experience but living experience, because there are people experiencing right now some of the issues that we want to address. We are developing a participation framework to ensure that that happens.

During Covid, we went straight to stakeholders, asked them what they needed and tried to address that need. That was successful. Certainly, that is what we had to do in my portfolio area. We asked organisations including those that address violence against women, older people’s organisations and disabled people’s organisations, what they needed in order to get through. There was a lot of service redesign and enhancement of current services. We have learned a lot about how to do that.

We also learned a lot about how to do that, and how to implement lived experience, through the national advisory council on women and girls, which has taken a real interest in how we reduce inequalities and make our budgeting processes more equal.

We have continued that work in the area of engagement. The excellent social renewal advisory board was led and driven by participation, and we have learned a lot about good practice and a lot of good lessons on how we can mobilise quickly and flexibly to deal with a crisis. The participation framework has become incredibly important. If the committee is interested, I can give it more detail on how that will work.

One of the things that will come from that is how we implement good practice, and how we use that to get engagement and participation at the level that people need it. I am talking about simple things. If we ask disabled people’s organisations to come to an event at 9 o’clock in the morning, with the best will in the world, for some people that means rising at 5 am to get organised to be there, because they may need support. It is about thinking a bit differently about how we create opportunities and access for people, which will help us to build the policy that we need to build—policy that works and produces the outcomes that we want.

That is another great question, but I am sorry to say that it is not one for me. I will get an update for you from the appropriate minister. The work that we are doing around the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Incorporation) (Scotland) Bill and our human rights bill puts the UNCRPD front and centre.

As far as meeting the targets is concerned, I would not hazard a guess at where the relevant minister is sitting with that at the moment, so I will come back and give you an update on that.

Thank you for all your questions, Pam—there is a lot in that. As you will know, the Deputy First Minister is leading on the Covid inquiry work. I am sad to hear that organisations felt that there was a closed door, because that is certainly not the way that I see it, given the work that we do in Parliament. However, you make an incredibly powerful and important point about participation and how people can feel that they are listened to.

If you will allow me to do so, convener, I am happy to take that back to the DFM and let him know about it, because it is important to see where we can go with that. I know that he wrote to the committee some weeks ago with a lot of detail on the inquiry, so we will look at that as well.

I know that colleagues across Government have been looking at the impact on women, and the impact in relation to unpaid work. Again, that aspect does not sit within my portfolio, so I will endeavour to take that away and raise it with the relevant minister, and come back to the committee and to Pam Duncan-Glancy on her questions.

On the issue of universal credit payments, I just wish that we had control of the universal credit system in Scotland, because if we did, it would not be in the shape that it is now. It would not have a rape clause and a two-child cap in it, for instance. I would hope that, with our launch of the adult disability payment pilot, the horrible process that people need to go through to be reassessed over and over again for conditions that are not going to get better will end in Scotland. That is a welcome advance, and an indication of how we would do things very differently if we had control of that system in Scotland.

I am an advocate of splitting universal credit payments but, again, I note that there are things that we can control in Scotland and things that we cannot. I am always happy to work with the relevant ministers who have responsibility in this area—in this case, the relevant minister is likely to be Ben Macpherson—to challenge the UK Government as many times as we possibly can. I am happy to take that question on board, and if there is a renewed push in that regard, I am happy to raise the matter with colleagues in the UK Government and to take it forward for Pam Duncan-Glancy.

If it would help, Pam and I could have a one-to-one catch-up on some of those issues. I know that she will have an ear in many of the communities that she mentioned, and I would find it incredibly helpful to hear from her about brass tacks: what people are experiencing and feeling. I would be keen to do that, if she is open to doing so.

We are currently considering the recommendations. That sits within another portfolio, but I will get you a proper, detailed update on that.