Chamber and committees

Local authorities are responsible for ensuring that their staff have access to appropriate equipment in order to carry out their work. The Scottish Government has focused on supporting digital inclusion amongst learners and to date, over 67,000 devices and almost 14,000 connectivity solutions have been distributed.

The Centre for Workplace Transformation is being developed in a way that is wholly consistent with the Scottish Government’s National Performance Framework and commitments to inclusive growth and fair work. Embedding equality – including gender equality – will be at the core of the Centre’s activity.

The Scottish Government recognises that the pandemic could exacerbate existing labour market inequalities for protected groups including women. The Centre will help strengthen the range of activity already being undertaken through the Gender Pay Gap Action Plan to improve the experiences of women within the labour market.

The Scottish Government is in regular contact with the GFG Alliance both at the Lochaber and Dalzell sites, as well as at Group level, mostly via officials. I chair the Lochaber Delivery Group meeting which last met on 23 February 2021.

Expressive arts (which includes music education) is one of the eight core areas of Curriculum for Excellence that all children and young people have access to. Provision of the curriculum, as well as the way instrumental music tuition is provided, is for local authorities to determine, depending on local circumstances, priorities and traditions.

Curriculum for Excellence places learners at the heart of education and for some young people, learning a specific instrument will be an important part of their personalised learner experience.

The Scottish Government remains committed to working with others to ensure instrumental music tuition remains accessible.

The short-life Ministerial Working Group will form part of our approach to establishing a Centre of Expertise in Equality and Human Rights to work across the Economy portfolio within Scottish Government. This involves ensuring that it advances upon our wider equality and human rights mainstreaming strategy to inform the development of approaches across the Scottish Government.

Once we have established the Centre of Expertise, then the working group would form part of its initial governance.

We are currently developing our approach to establishing a Centre of Expertise in Equality and Human Rights to work across the Economy portfolio within Scottish Government. This involves ensuring that it advances upon our wider equality and human rights mainstreaming strategy to inform the development of approaches across the Scottish Government.

As promised within our Programme for Government, this mainstreaming strategy will be underpinned by a comprehensive approach to improving data collation and analysis, and that harnesses the voices of those impacted to shape our approach and policies.

Our previous reply highlighted this information is not held centrally, as there is no Classification of Surgical Operations and Procedures (4th revision) code suitable to identify operations for the treatment of lipoedema in the data supplied by NHS Boards.

We are able to provide data for the number of liposuction and brachioplasty procedures that have been carried out by financial year, from 2006-07 to 2019-20 as these are procedures frequently used to treat lipoedema. Please note that these figures are for the total number of these procedures completed for all conditions; it is not possible to identify how many of these procedures were carried out to treat lipoedema.

Table 1. Number of liposuction procedures 1,2 ; by NHS Board; 2006-07 to 2019-20

We are driving forward an ambitious and progressive agenda to ensure women’s equality rights are embedded within our economic recovery planning, and in all we do, to mitigate against the disproportionate impacts COVID-19 has and will continue to have on different groups, including women, women from minority ethnic communities, older women and disabled women.

We will develop an equality and human rights mainstreaming strategy, as promised in our Programme for Government, that is underpinned by a comprehensive approach to improving data collation and analysis, and that harnesses the voices of those impacted to shape our approach and policies. As part of our wider mainstreaming strategy and to inform the development of approaches across the Scottish Government, we will establish an Economy Centre of Expertise on Equality and Human Rights to drive progress in this area.

Furthermore, improving women’s position in the labour market remains a priority for the Scottish Government and a key part of delivering inclusive economic growth. We committed in our Programme for Government to review the actions within our Gender Pay Gap Action Plan in light of the pandemic, ensuring they continued to support women through the economic recovery. We have taken this work forward and published our Gender Pay Gap Action Plan Annual Report on the 8 March 2021, setting out our progress to date and new actions we will take.

As part of this work, we have commissioned research to explore and evaluate international mechanisms that revalue (or aim to revalue) women’s work. The research will consider the impact of COVID-19, and findings will inform our work to improve women’s position in the labour market going forwards.

We recognise the crucial role both Rape Crisis Scotland and Women’s Aid Scotland centres play in providing specialist support for women and children at risk of gender-based violence.

At present, over £12 million this year is being invested into frontline services and across the sector to help tackle violence against women and girls. We have also opened our new Delivering Equally Safe Fund, which will provide up to £13 million of funding every year between October 2021 to September 2024.

Furthermore, at the start of the Covid pandemic, all organisations and projects currently being funded under the existing Equally Safe Fund were granted an extension on their funding until September 2021. Last year we also allocated an additional £5.75 million to frontline support services to ensure that women and children can safely access the support they need.

Women having access to frontline services dealing with violence and domestic abuse is vital. This is why we have also committed to review the funding and commissioning of frontline specialist services to explore how we can ensure both quality and sustainability of services. Councils also have a responsibility to recognise the importance of such services and to fund them accordingly.

The Scottish Government does not hold this information. The three specialist centres, including Glasgow, are the responsibility of local NHS Boards and are funded through their existing NHS budgets.