 Maen nhw ymwyfu ddigitwch o'i fuddiwch i'r ddigitwch amser dwith ddweudwyddiolion i Richard MacDonald, maen nhw'n ei ddweud diwethaf i ymweld sy'n iawn o'r ddigitwch o'i ddweud, meri ff ו, ond rwy'n gweinos ffordd o'i ddaliadolion i'r cyfans ac Maen nhw e'n gweithio o'r ddigitwch gyda'r ddigitwch i'r ddogfiaith, a i ddaliad o gweithio o rhoda Grant, dim i gyrinu weithiau, gyda Alex Cole-Hamilton ar y peirwydeg. Agened item 1 is a decision on taking business in private. Agend item 3 is considering the work of the Scottish Human Rights Commission and the Equality in Human Rights Commission. I welcome Judith Robertson, who is the chair and Cavita Chetey, who is head of strategy and legal at the Scottish Human Rights Commission. We are very welcome. I invite you to make a statement of up to five minutes, please. Thank you very much. I will do that. I just want to say first of all thank you for the invitation to be here. We really appreciate the Parliament and this committee spending time understanding the work of the commission. We are Scotland's national human rights institution. We are an age status organisation, which means that the way we work and the law that governs our work comply with a set of guidelines called the powers principles. We are a body of the UN and a recommendation by the UN that nation states with have a responsibility to ensure that human rights are progressed within the country and the establishment of national human rights institutions. We are really designed to do that. We have a foundation in national law. As you are aware, our legislation, we are independent of government. We have a mandate to cover a broad range of international human rights standards. We need to develop to demonstrate pluralism, I found it hard to say that word, and independence in the selection and appointment of our members, and we have a responsibility to work with both civil society and the state. We need to have adequate resources to function well and we need to have adequate powers of investigation. Those are the standards that the UN has established as being the principles against which we have to function and those are the standards that we are deemed to have met in order to give us a status. A status entitles us to speak at the human rights council and to represent the human rights landscape in Scotland to the bodies in the UN. We are the only Scottish organisation that can make direct contributions to the human rights council on issues affecting people here. We act as a bridge between human rights in Scotland and the international human rights system and we monitor the implementation of international human rights treaties as they apply in Scotland and working closely with civil society and others to gather evidence and produce recommendations for change. Our mandate is a general mandate. We have a general duty to promote awareness, understanding and respect for human rights, all human rights for everyone in Scotland. That would be economic, social, cultural, civil and political rights and to encourage best practice in relation to human rights. We also have powers—I will talk very briefly about them—to conduct inquiries, enter some places of detention in the context of an inquiry and intervene in civil court cases. That is the general duties of the commission. Today, we are 10 years old—not today, but this year or last year, we were 10 years old. We have been functioning really since 2008 and operating to deliver that mandate and build a culture of human rights in Scotland in partnership with a range of organisations. We have seen over that time a real development of the landscape in Scotland in relation to human rights. The good outputs from that would be a much-increased level of debate, which includes and involves human rights. It is a much better understanding of human rights in some settings. Specifically, there are state commitments from the First Minister to make significant progress in relation to the incorporation of human rights into domestic legislation in Scotland. That would include the commitment to incorporate the Convention on the Rights of the Child, fully incorporate the Convention on the Rights of the Child and then a commitment to take forward a task force to deliver on the recommendations of the First Minister's advisory group on human rights leadership. The second aspect of that context, which I would consider to be very favourable for human rights—there is a lot more to come, but to highlight is that of the committee's inquiry into how the Scottish Parliament could show more human rights leadership and bring evidence of itself as a human rights guarantor. That inquiry was full and extensive and covered the basis of how to progress that within Parliament. From our perspective, that is part of the picture of evidence of significant progress. There is a strong context in Scotland that we will be talking further about as we go ahead. However, I also want to highlight some of the surrounding context that is not so positive. That would be the implications of Brexit in terms of the rights that would be lost, but more concerningly the potential impact in relation to people's livelihoods, people's lives, the economic status of the country and the potential reduction in people's enjoyment of people's rights in relation to that. The wider international narrative about human rights has been in recent years often negative. That threatens the human rights framework and the willingness of countries to support the rule of law. We have seen that decline in some settings internationally. Again, that threatens the compliance with international human rights standards. More importantly, obviously, people's lives and how they are able to live them. The other thing that I would highlight in Scotland that does threaten people's rights is our relationship to accountability. In some settings, we have a strong and positive relationship to accountability, but in other settings, we seek to weaken it. We undermine it, potentially, by not resourcing accountability processes well enough and not understanding that delivering robust accountability processes enhances people's capacity to achieve their rights. There is a job of work to do to support people to understand that effective and positive accountability mechanisms help us all. I think that that has exceeded my time. Is it that you are perfectly on time now? Can I start by asking you about your strategic plan, please? How are you prioritising the aims in it and, more importantly, how are you going to measure outcomes and success? We are currently developing our new strategic plan. The current plan finishes, which is the last year of the current plan. We are currently undergoing, with developed draft strategic priorities, and we are about to consult on those priorities that are published today. We will briefly talk to you through where we are at with that and how we will take that forward. There is an extensive process of consultation. We have done internal consultation and internal conversation to look at the environment and to talk about the process of developing those draft strategic priorities. We are clearly looking at the Paris principles to determine what is our role in relation to progressing rights in Scotland and, in the context in Scotland, how we should use our resources to best enhance what is happening. A range of strategic decisions will be made. The committee's chair has been invited to contribute to the process around supporting us to develop those strategic priorities. We launched our strategic plan for 2020-2024 today to coincide with the evidence to the committee. As Judith MacDonald said, we have really tried to ground our priorities in the current context that we see and what we see as the emerging challenges in the coming period. We think that there are many challenges, as Judith MacDonald has already highlighted, economic, environmental, technological and constitutional, that will arise in that period of 2020-2024. We think that human rights really need to play a role in anchoring us through those uncertain and challenging times. We are very much trying to respond to what we see as those challenges coming in that period. As a result, we have four emerging strategic priorities. The first is about economic, social and cultural rights, and progressing our understanding and strengthening of those rights in law. In the next four years, we would like to see that taken forward. We see potential through the implementation of the First Minister's advisory group recommendations to take that forward. However, even without that, we think that those rights are our priority for us here in Scotland. It is what we hear from our stakeholders when we talk to them in consultation. We think that, with the loss of protections from Brexit and any potential impact of that, putting economic, social and cultural rights into the law in Scotland can help us again in anchoring devolved power in Scotland through navigating those challenges. The second strategic priority that we see is strengthening accountability for meeting human rights obligations. Judas already talked to the challenges that we see around accountability and our understanding of accountability as a full spectrum of things from the conversations that people have in everyday settings, such as healthcare settings, social care settings through to judicial enforcement of rights and everything in between, including scrutiny here in this Parliament. We would like to see that taken forward, working with accountability bodies across the country to embed human rights into their processes. When you talk about an accountability body, what do you mean by that? For example, we have worked over recent years with HMIPS, the prison inspectorate. We have worked with the care inspectorate on their standards. We are in conversations with Audit Scotland about how they embed human rights. We have on-going conversations with the public services ombudsman. Those types of accountability mechanisms will have a new social security commission, a poverty inequality commission. How do those accountability bodies across Scotland use the human rights framework to enhance the work that they do? Our third strategic priority is on building wider ownership of human rights. We think that there is a real opportunity to do that, and it is an essential part of the human rights culture in Scotland. Research that we released last year, conducted by YouGov, showed that there is considerable support for human rights in Scotland, slightly more favourable than south of the border. Nevertheless, there is a sway of people who are conflicted about rights, but we know that when provided with accurate information around rights and understanding, they are persuadable to be supportive of human rights, so that we can have our rights respecting Scotland. We would like to build on that research and communicate about rights effectively to rights holders, reaching them with the messages that we know are important to make them supporters of rights for everybody. The fourth strategic priority is on us showing global leadership in human rights as a national human rights institution. We are very small compared to our sister NHRIs around the world, of which we are one of around 100, but we seek to look to international best practice and emerging international standards and how we can use that in Scotland. Historically, we have looked at how the sustainable development goals and commitments to those sustainable development goals can be used in concert with human rights protections to advance rights protection in Scotland. That is seen as international best practice and as a national human rights institution we have sought to learn from others and bring that into Scotland, so we want to seek to continue to have that bridge between international emerging best practice and human rights and Scotland. There are four strategic priorities that are launched today. As Judith said, further to much more consultation and we would welcome views of the committee on emerging strategic priorities. We have further work to do to consider how we implement them in practice in accordance with our resources. The second bit of my question is about measuring success. When you talk about ownership of human rights, it is part of making it real for people. The accountability bodies that you mentioned, if people are achieving their rights through them, are something that makes it real for our constituents. How will you measure success on those things? We do this structurally through a range of means. We look at the outcomes that we are seeking to achieve under all those strategic priorities. The final version of them will represent what the commission is seeking to do in Scotland. Under that, we will identify key outcomes that we want to get to in relation to that. Then we start to pick up, how do we do that? For example, I can just use the example of the Audit Scotland conversation. We are very much in conversation with them around that. For example, an indicator of success in working with Audit Scotland would be that some of their audits, in the first instance, start to bring human rights standards into the conversation and the dialogue that they have with public authorities in Scotland. We can track that. They will make that explicit. That is one of our success indicators. They will make that explicit. The questions that they ask of public authorities in Scotland start to draw out from those organisations how we are meeting those human rights standards. For us, that enables an organisation like Audit Scotland that has reached into public authorities across Scotland to bring them on board in a way that we would simply never, to be honest, have the resources to do. That is quite a strategic approach from our perspective. Our measurement of that is to track the explicit evidence of that as we go forward. That is one route. The other side of that is to say, what difference does that make? We have had some impact. The conversation has increased Audit Scotland has taken that forward, but what impact does that have on people on the ground in communities? In honesty, that is a much harder thing to assess. I am trying to think of another example where we would be able to track that change. In terms of the standards, for example—we can come back to this if that is helpful—in relation to health and social care standards, the commission has worked with the care inspectorate and Health Improvement Scotland to transform the health and social care standards as they are currently framed in Scotland. The new version was launched last year. That has completely turned around the way that the care inspectorate is asking questions of bodies in social care settings, in health settings, about how I am experiencing the care that I am receiving. Here is the standard that the care inspectorate expects, but how does that impact on the individual's experience of that care, whether it is health care, social care or whatever? From our perspective, that has really turned the relationship to a standards approach and accountability mechanism on its head and put people, human beings, at the heart of it. It is not about the standards that we expect, it is about what does that feel like for the person and that is what is being measured. Over time, we will be able to see what difference that makes in terms of asking the question differently and having different expectations of what good looks like. I am trying to give you examples to highlight our processes. That is helpful. Thank you. Gail Ross. You mentioned a couple of human rights issues that we are facing right now in Scotland, Brexit being one of them. Do you see a rolling back at all of human rights standards if we leave the European Union? Brexit related law reform and the securing of a renegotiated relationship with the EU and the positioning of our political leaders and parties at both the UK and the devolved level have the potential to have a profound impact and a long lasting impact on our human rights laws and our human rights culture. The commission stands by its position that any changes to our laws in relation to our rights need to progress forwards and not to progress back in the coming years to build a stronger society. To guide us in that forward journey, we have some key principles. We want to see non-regression of standards for protected rights. We want to see measures taken that enable us to keep pace with progressive developments both across the EU and globally. We really want to see Scotland lead the way in advancing the international collective commitment to human rights. We are concerned that the EU charter of fundamental rights will no longer directly apply in the UK or in Scotland as a consequence of the EU withdrawal act. It is notable and of concern that it was the charter that was singled out as the only aspect of the EU law not to be retained as part of domestic law on withdrawal from the EU. That result in a substantive loss of protections in the immediate. It also results in a loss of evolving protections over time, as well as remedies for all areas that previously fell in the scope of EU law, such as privacy, data protection and a fair hearing. Without the charter, there is the loss of potential for fuller protection of the social rights of principles, workers' rights, access to social security, healthcare and so on, as that might evolve over time. Even where current standards beyond the charter that have been transposed into domestic law, discrimination law, environmental protections, consumer rights and wider social protection have been replicated, they remain vulnerable to future repeal or regression. There is no guarantee that they will keep pace with any progressive developments that are made at an EU level. That concern about regression or diminution of rights is exacerbated by the so-called Henry VIII powers, which allow ministers to manage legislative change to retain EU law by statutory instrument. There is no other mechanism through which to protect retained rights from amendment over time. We welcome the attempt through the EU continuity legislation to retain the charter, but, as you all know, the Supreme Court found aspects of the continuity bill, including the retention of the general principles of EU law and the charter, to be outside the legislative competence of the Parliament. In any effect, that would have been relatively limited, of course, in that it would only apply as far as devolved retained EU law is concerned and where Scottish authorities deemed to be implementing that devolved retained EU law. For current standards of rights to me, maintained Westminster Parliament would have to take those similar steps, but we think that move was very much in line with where Scotland is at. It is in line with the Scotland Declaration on Human Rights, which was a declaration signed by more than 150 civil society organisations and others that expressed really united support that Scotland should be a leader in human rights protection and implementation as we embark on our journey on leaving the European Union. Is that going to have any effect on the priorities in your strategic plan that you laid out? It does, as I think that we have said earlier. In particular, we are interested in the implementation of the recommendations of the First Minister's advisory group on human rights leadership, the recommendation of one of which is that there should be an act of Scottish Parliament to provide leadership and a new framework of rights to improve people's lives. Clearly, that does not fully mitigate the loss of protections through the charter or broader EU law. It certainly does not do that. However, it does advance our human rights protections. We were pleased that the First Minister expressed that she shared the ambition of the group for the recommendations towards that act of the Scottish Parliament, but we now have concerns that there are no concrete steps being taken, no announcement has been made in relation to the advancement of and implementation of those recommendations. In one of your priorities, it was building wider ownership of human rights. How do you plan to do that? Oh, that is quite a big question, to be honest. How can we help you to do that? How can we help you to do that? How can we help you to do that? Well, I can come on to that. Actually, the inquiry and the recommendations in the inquiry absolutely enable building the ownership of rights. The commission has the intention of continuing to support the Parliament and the committee in ensuring that those recommendations are delivered to the best effect, as we can do, when we can talk about the detail of that. The Parliament absolutely has a role. The more explicit this Parliament makes human rights in its conversations, in its scrutiny, in its legislative processes, in its engagement with all the organisations that you engage with across the piece, not just in this committee but across the committee structure, the stronger will the public ownership of human rights be. You have a unique and significant role in providing leadership in relation to that. We see our role as supporting you to the best we can within the resources that we have—I will talk about that later, hopefully—to do that to the best effect, and how we do that I can come back to. In effect, all that we do has the capacity to build that public ownership of rights. Specifically, we also recognise that in order to reach rights holders who are not necessarily the people who will engage with this Parliament or who will be out in community settings or the people who walk into your surgeries on a day-to-day basis whose rights are being infringed by whatever process they are encountering. They are harder to bring on board to be part of that public ownership. We have been developing in the last number of years a means of communicating with people which people can better access, such as videos of explaining what people's rights are. We are just about to embark on one, looking at the right to food, helping people to understand what the right to food means, what their rights are and some of the implications of how that is being delivered or not being delivered in Scotland today. We are really talking into communities and engaging with people in communities to say, A, what does this feel like but B, if you have the rights, how can they be better realised? That brings me to that accountability gap because we have a problem with accountability. We can raise awareness of people's rights, but if they have no means of gaining access to their rights or holding people to account for the lack of delivery against those rights, that is why that is our second strategic priority. We need to support our public authorities and institutions in Scotland to recognise that their responsibilities in relation to rights are real and that maybe we need to be thinking about how we prioritise our resource allocation, the way in which we are really looking at people's rights and how they are best being delivered in communities. That public ownership is quite broad. It will happen through all our activities, but we will have specific targeted activities that will be intended to touch into people for whom that is a much harder conversation to access, if that makes sense. I was interested in the comments around Brexit. I do hear the points that you are making, but it is in fact a prerequisite of leaving the EU that human rights would be eroded, because I would certainly recognise that there are significant domestic and international protections that remain in place. There is no reason to suppose that human rights law would not continue to develop and be enhanced as it has done prior to the United Kingdom joining the European Union. First, we have concerns about the loss of the charter and the broader EU protections as they evolve over time. Further to that, we still have deep concerns about the position of the Human Rights Act 1998 and our relationship to the European Convention of Human Rights and the Council of Europe. In recent correspondence between the EU justice sub-committee and the current Government, the stated position was that the UK has no plans to withdraw from the ECHR. However, that is really, to some degree, insufficient reassurance in that regard, because it leaves open still the possibility of weakening accountability for human rights through changes to the Human Rights Act. The chairwoman of that committee noted that the Government still will not give assurances that it will not repeal or reform the Human Rights Act, which essentially incorporates the ECHR into our domestic law. We know that it has been the previous intention of the Westminster Government to do so. Historically, the various proposals that we have seen and the ideas that we have had mooted around the future of the Human Rights Act and our relationship to the ECHR have been troublesome in that they talk about limiting the application of the convention, reducing its extraterritorial effect and diminishing the role of the Strasbourg court in making judgments advisory only. Our view as a commission is that that undermines the collective enforcement of human rights across Europe and puts us in a collision course with Strasbourg, where, as part of the convention, it states that states need to abide by the final judgments of the court. The commission's position is that we need to maintain and fool, as you say, the protections that are provided for in the Human Rights Act, that we currently have embedded in the Scotland Act and in devolution, but we think that there is probably no room for complacency there going forward. Progress is notwithstanding. We still have concerns. Also, the EU membership to some degree and the application of the charter have acted as a deterrent to withdrawal from the ECHR to some degree. That notion of stepping back from the ECHR and accountability is still deeply concerning, as it is one of the most effective regional protection mechanisms for human rights globally. We still have concerns about the existing protections that we have, as well as the loss of other protections as a result of Brexit. I think that it is worth recognising that I was in Geneva a number of weeks ago at the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions, but we met the UK ambassador to the UN mission, who was saying that they were seeking to increase their profile within the UN and double the size of the embassy there. That in itself gives some assurance that Britain's commitment to the international human rights system is seen as important and valuable. That was a reassurance. However, all that the convener says absolutely applies in terms of the loss of protections and the backstop that the EU membership provides in terms of our on-going membership of the Council of Europe and commitment to the European convention. Is it not the case that the right to withdraw from international organisations to reform your relationship with them is the democratic right of a sovereign state and that those things are not particularly unusual? In 47 nations and 800 million people are within the European human rights system, which arose out of a situation post-war in which it was recognised that there was a need for collective enforcement of human rights internationally. No democracy has ever withdrawn from the convention while I recognise that it is every state's right to do so. However, the convention has protected a whole raft of progressive things in this country from ending corporal punishment in schools, protected our privacy against intrusion, protected our right to protest, put in place protections in mental health detention settings and created positive obligations to safeguard people from harm and protect their right to life. The Human Rights Act through the Scotland Acts also had significant impact in the Scottish courts and in case law, as well as the broader culture of human rights in Scotland. The impact of that of the Human Rights Act and our adherence to the convention has been felt by people in so many settings, sectors and spheres from prisons and police custody to the media and safeguards and personal data, etc. While that is within the gift of any state to do so, we would say that that would be an absolutely regressive step both for the citizens of the country but also more globally. It would send us truly damaging message across Europe and globally for the UK to, in any way, withdraw from the national protection of human rights. The commission has heartened that there is no appetite or little appetite for that in Scotland as we saw in the debate around the Human Rights Act, through the Scotland Declaration, etc. Generally, we are pleased that it has been welcomed that human rights compliance is built into the fabric of devolution in Scotland through the Scotland Act. We want to see that secured and progressed. Earlier on, one of the answers spoke about success and how it gets measured. My question is, what is the commission's biggest success and how does it measure that success? I would say that our biggest success is progressing understanding of human rights and the need and capacity for human rights protections in Scotland to the extent where the First Minister established an advisory group to look at how better we could develop human rights leadership around filling that accountability gap in relation to protecting the rights, the economic and social and cultural rights that remain unprotected in domestic law under the Human Rights Act. The human rights act only primarily protects civil and political rights, so that gap—if we talk to people in communities about their rights, the things they say first of all are their economic and social rights. They care about health, housing and education and then their income to support their general lives. Those are economic and social rights. They are not civil and political rights. The things that people care about in Scotland, and I would say across the UK, are the least protected in our domestic law. From the commission's perspective, that translation from the local setting to a response from the First Minister and the Government to say that we want to protect those rights is a huge success. When I came to the commission three years ago, I was aware of it from its establishment. Ten years ago, when we started, there was no way that conversation would have taken place. We did not understand the incorporation, but we did not know what that meant. The notion that rights could be protected through domestic law—while the Human Rights Act was there and people were clear about that, and it was enshrined in the Scotland Act, the notion that economic and social cultural rights deserved the same protection was not. I would say that that shift from understanding both economic and social cultural rights generally and turning that into something that is protected in domestic law is a huge achievement. The commission has played a major role in that. I also have to recognise that a number of other actors have engaged in that proactively, and that has been really important. I would say that as another key success is our capacity to work with others. We would not have made any of the achievements or many of them without that capacity to work with others, and it has been a key part of our strategy since we started. I might just talk briefly in sort of internal governance terms about how we measure success. Firstly, all of our operational planning under our strategic plan has a strong outcomes focus. We work across 10 broad outcomes as an organisation, and every single project and activity has its own set of outcomes that we want to achieve and where possible key performance indicators of whether or not we have achieved it. We report to the commission against those outcomes on a quarterly basis. Our measurement of that is really proportionate to our size and our function and is tailored to the types of work that we are doing. In some instances, we will have more substantial inbuilt evaluation of our work. For example, we had University of Glasgow do an independent evaluation of SNAP, Scotland's national action plan for human rights, and we have had our internal researcher do work on our housing project in Leith to assess that. In some instances, we have got what we regard as relatively clear and measurable impacts. For example, we gave evidence to the committee for parliamentary reform that led to this committee doing an inquiry into how the Parliament could be a human rights guarantor, which we hope will now lead to an implementation plan and progress. It is difficult to measure, in terms of the convener's original question, the impact for individuals on the ground. From our perspective, we wanted to see human rights embedded more systematically through the Parliament, more regarding international obligations and treaty body recommendations, and we are beginning to see that happening. Another example is social security legislation. We very much raised the profile and understanding of the right to social security with the Government, with Parliament, with civil society through the passage of that legislation. We think that our intervention contributed to enhanced accountability mechanisms, for example, the scrutiny body, which must exercise its functions in accordance with the right to social security asset and international law. We see that as an outcome of our intervention or our work around working with Government to secure an explicit human rights outcome in the national performance framework. We now have a human rights outcome, which says that we want to respect, protect and fulfil rights and live free from discrimination within our national performance framework. That adds to human rights being part of the fabric and governance of Scotland, and we see that as a direct result of our intervention. There are other places in our work where it is less measurable for us as an organisation, particularly relative to our size. For example, we provided extensive training in advocacy settings with the Scottish Independent Advocacy Alliance. It was only when we were looking back at what our success measures were over a 10-year period that we were able to speak to advocates on the ground who had used that training and understanding, and they were able to talk to the direct experience about how that would help the people that they support. Then there is that much broader picture, as Judith said, where we really think that the commission has made a difference in raising the profile of economic, social and cultural rights, understanding of incorporation and understanding of how we can strengthen our laws and put them into practice. That is much less measurable, but I have been at the commission for 10 years now. If you go back 10 years, I know that many of the debates that we have now, we would not have been having 10 years ago. Good morning, panel. You mentioned, just in the last bit there about the Scottish National Action Plan, I was going to ask a wee bit about that in the Outcome A. The annual report says that SNAP is achieving its medium-term outcomes. Can you expand a wee bit on that format and give us an update on how you are achieving that? One of the medium-term outcomes of the first iteration of SNAP was to strengthen the protections in domestic law in relation to earth. Actually, it was about Scotland fulfilling its international obligations in relation to human rights. One of the reasons that we have said that that is achieving some of its medium-term outcomes is because of the commitments that have been made in relation to enhancing those protections, which were not there when SNAP started. That is the indication of the progress that has been made. In terms of an update, we have hosted and facilitated a process. We are still in that process, a development working group that is made up of about 20 organisations and individuals who were some of whom were part of the original iteration of SNAP and some new people engaging in that to drill down into what are the priority actions that the next round of Scotland's national action plan can undertake. In the last year of the last action plan, we had a full participation process where we engaged with communities around Scotland to say, well, what are their priorities? There were some quite interesting outcomes of that process. Again, I would say that most of them are related to people's economic and social rights, but we identified 25 themes from that process. I will share them with you all 25. We have systematically been going through those themes to say, well, what are the priority actions that would best progress in relation to that from our human rights terms? That is not too big a task to do that work, but the need to prioritise down and then identify what are the key actions that we think are important in Scotland over the next iteration of SNAP. However, one of the key challenges of the first iteration of SNAP was the resources that were made available to make that as successful as it could be. We did make significant progress, but the lack of explicit resource base in relation to Scotland's national action plan is a real constraint. Unless resources are enabled to ensure that the next phase of SNAP goes forward, we will not see the progress that is required in Scotland. There are a number of quite urgent areas of action, and there are clear priorities for activity that we have identified. We have come to the end of that analysis in relation to the key actions. We will be doing some work to further prioritise, but we need clear engagement from the Government in relation to developing that prioritisation and supporting the process going forward. That has not been as new. I am not saying that it has not been there. There has been engagement with the Government with the process, but it really needs to be extended right across Government to deliver a national action plan on human rights for Scotland as a priority. It is explicit in the first recommendation to the First Minister's advisory group, so it was very much integrated into that conversation. Delivering a new act of Scottish Parliament in relation to economic social rights is a significant part from our perspective of what should be included in a national action plan going forward. When you said there that you engaged by a wide range of people across the country, did you notice—I suppose that there are two parts to my question that I will join together—a difference in different geographical areas and locations about what were priorities for people? How did you feel that you reached out to communities that can sometimes be harder to engage in those issues? We covered cities and rural areas. We sought to go into the rural communities because they are in and of themselves. I find it harder to engage in national processes just by dint of the distance, although I know that there are lots of endeavours to make that happen well across Scotland. We were in Dumfries and Galloway, we were in Inverness, we were in Dundee, we were in different places and different locations to have those conversations. I would say that we achieved limited success. We did achieve success in reaching out into some of the groups that would find it harder to engage. We have representatives from the Gypsy Traveller community on our group. That, as a community in and of itself, has got lots of historical discrimination stacked against it. Their engagement is also really important. Yes, there was a difference in people's analysis. There is no doubt about it. Rural areas are very differently impacted on by the delivery of public services in Scotland. This Parliament is well aware of that. I think that you have got good analysis and good understanding of that, but that came out again and again and again in terms of people's ability to act. One of the top things that came out was transport. I do not want to say that I lack, because there is not a complete lack, but the lack of transport—an effective and integrated transport system around rural areas in Scotland really impacts people's capacity to access the things that deliver on their rights. That would be employment, health provision, future education and further education access. Yes, there was a difference. It was not, to be honest, much of a surprise that that analysis and understanding of the different geographical locations in Scotland and the different needs that different groups have—how they are met, how they are served—came out. I would say that we also needed to do more to reach into other settings. Black men are more to ethnic communities and children and young people. Those were two areas where we have more to do, both as a commission and as a national action plan. We have good engagement, particularly from the children and young people sector in the national action plan, and they are very well organised. Their understanding of rights is pretty strong. However, the engagement with children and young people is something that we also need to make sure happens. Thank you, convener. The annual report demonstrates that you have had a busy year. Will that be sustainable in the longer term? What issue might there be in terms of resources, which I know that you have already mentioned? Let me talk about the resource base of the commission. The resource base of the commission has declined slightly in real terms over the 10 years of its existence. That is principally as a result of a 15 per cent reduction in all public sector bodies about four or five years ago before I had started in the commission. Over time, and the small increases that we have had in our budget have been to accommodate percentage salary increases, pay deals, etc., rather than any actual increase in the resource base of the commission. When we first started, the budget that we have, which is just around £1 million, was sufficient to establish the organisation, set us up on a solid footing. Over the 10 years of our life, as you said, we are very busy, we cover a lot of areas and that has been a successful process. I think that Scotland and the Parliament can be proud of having a national human rights institution that has made such progress or supported the country to make progress in relation to human rights. However, I also totally recognise now that, 10 years on, the commission needs to grow. We need to be able to respond to that increased demand as understanding of human rights increases. As we succeed in delivering our mandate, so does the demand on the organisation to respond. For example, the Parliament itself is keen to see the capacity of MSPs grow in relation to engaging around human rights standards, international instruments and monitoring, for example. The treaty body recommendations and how progress is made in that, we would expect the commission to be fully engaged in that process. If we did that now and we will endeavour to do as much as we can, that would seriously displace other activities that we have been developing over the years. The positive side of that dynamic in terms of the context in Scotland being something that we really want to respond to well and being in a position as an organisation to do that has really come about as a result of the work of the last 10 years. That would be the delivery of an act of Scottish Parliament in relation to economic and social and cultural rights and environmental rights requires support in Scotland. If that is to be a good process and a process whereby at the end of the day there is consensus, there is an understanding around the country of what is at stake and why that is an important outcome for the country to have, we would anticipate the commission being fully engaged in that process of working to build capacity to understand and make sure that legislation is as strong as it can be. Those are the positive settings where we see that there are opportunities for progress to be made and that would, from our perspective, justify looking at the resource base of the commission and growing it. The negative context is that of the potential reduction in rights in relation to Brexit. We do not know how that is going to pan out but the potential for a short, medium—I do not know how long—term economic impact as we leave the European Union. If that pans out in a negative way for communities and individuals around Scotland, then the need for rights protections and the need for a strong human rights institution that is able to effectively monitor, understand and report back to say that that is the impact, whether it deems out as the impact of Brexit but if there is a negative economic impact over time, we are able to see that and support understanding that human rights have a role to play in that. From our perspective, developing our new strategic plan, the time to put a new resource proposal to the Parliament and to the SPCB and the Parliament is now. We will be doing that, developing that proposal over the summer and making that submission to the SPCB. Just to get an idea, I know that it is unfair in the context of that, to ask you what you envisage in general terms. We talked before about the UN UK team increasing by, I think that it was a third, is that the sort of— Are you envisaging doubling in size? I would envisaging really celebrating if we were doubling in size. I think that I said yesterday to Sandra White MSP, who is the office holder representative of SPCB that we wouldn't necessarily expect to double, but expectation is a wonderful thing. The honest answer to your question is that I don't know. We are still in a process of pinning down the strategic priorities and then looking at those strategic priorities. If we are to deliver them really well in Scotland, what is it going to take in terms of the commission's size and resourcing? We haven't fully answered that question. As soon as we have, we will inform the committee and give you the same information as we will be giving to SPCB if that's helpful to you. Just as an indicator also, because I talked about the UK mission at the UN, the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, which is slightly bigger than us—they have £1.1 million, so I mean slightly. They are also anticipating doubling in size over the next year in response to a range of things, but partly in response to Brexit. I'm not expecting to double in size. I think that that would be ambitious, not because we couldn't absorb it. We absolutely could do that, but I think that the financial realities are such that that would be challenging. However, should the Parliament decide that that was necessary, we genuinely would be in a position to provide a really positive programme in Scotland that would absolutely enhance people's rights. Another part of the conversation that we are aware of, obviously, is about our powers, and the powers that we have as a national human rights institution—I don't know if you were going to come on to that. Would a grant actually just come on to that right? I'll let you ask your question. Good segue. It was just to be absolutely clear on the first answer. If you didn't see an increase in resources, you don't feel that you would be adequately able to do your job. Is that too far? What we would have to do would be a version of the—clearly—we have been operating, I would say, extremely effectively on the money that we have. We will continue to operate effectively on the money that we have. We will just have to cut our cloth to ensure that the job that we do is doable for an organisation of our size, but it will mean that the resources that we put into progressing some of these processes will just be reduced. We will absolutely function as well as we can within the resource that we are allocated. Thank you. You said in your opening statement that you had power to intervene in civil proceedings, but at the last evidence session 2017 you said that you hadn't used those powers. Have you used them since then? Yes, you are right. We have the power with leave of the court to intervene in civil proceedings where it is relevant to our general duty and where it raises a matter of public interest. To date, we have not used those powers. However, we are imminently about to make an application to the court to intervene in proceedings against the private provider of asylum accommodation circle in relation to its lock change policy to evict asylum seekers who are believed to no longer be entitled to asylum accommodation. Our first intervention is imminent. We would like to increase the use of those powers and intervene in matters more going forward that are relevant to our strategic priorities and raise those matters of public interest. We do consider that our legal powers are an important part of our mandate that gives us the necessary teeth that we need to hold public bodies to account for rights. While we have not used them to date, we are ambitious to use them in the future. It is worth reflecting on the Parliament's view of our powers when our legislation that set us up was first going through the Parliament. From debates at the time, it was considered that our primary function was to support bodies to meet their human rights obligations and raise awareness of human rights in line with our general duty to promote awareness, understanding and respect for human rights and to promote best practice. The legal powers, to some degree, were secondary to that primary purpose but, nevertheless, as I say, important to give us the teeth that we need. The fact that we have not used them probably slightly reflects the strategic positioning of the commission over the past 10 years. It is relatively limited resource pool in staff team and budget, and it needs to make strategic choices as we can, as was referred to in the question by Oliver Mundell earlier. However, the commissions always remained receptive to using its powers where issues were identified. The current intervention that we are embarking on is instructive to us both in terms of the impact that we can have and that we can make and also internally for us what resource space is required in order to take forward interventions and civilisation. The getting rights right inquiry talked about a review of your powers. I wonder if you agree that there should be a review and if there was. What powers would you envisage that you would need? Undoubtedly, as I think has been alluded to earlier, we have less legal powers than comparative bodies and other national human rights institutions globally. The report of the joint committee for human rights in 2018 enforcing human rights sets out a helpful summary table of the powers that we have relative to our sister bodies, the equality and human rights commission and the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission. For example, we do not have the power to take judicial review or any other legal proceedings in our own name nor do we have the power to give assistance to individuals in relation to proceedings concerning the protection of human rights. We welcome the recommendation of the committee and we think that the future careful consideration needs to be given to extending the commission's power that commends it with our resources and allows us to fulfil the full breadth of our mandate, recognising the type of resource that is required to fulfil those types of functions. Our inquiry power is worth touching upon here also. It is far-reaching but perhaps gives us less flexibility than analogous powers of other institutions. Our inquiry power allows us to look at public bodies of one nature. We cannot look at, for example, one local authority. We would have to look at all local authorities or a public body that is providing a unique function. We have to set out terms of reference and our methodology and all of our inquiries have to be conducted in public. Other institutions, for example the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, have an investigation power that allows us to conduct investigations however they see as expedient to do so. Here in Scotland, the Children and Young Persons Commissioner Scotland has a general and individual investigation power, allowing further flexibility in terms of the scope and subject matter of the investigation. Those and many other considerations will have to be looked at carefully as the committee and ourselves undertake that work in the future and our powers are considered. Meanwhile, the commission will continue to look for ways to exercise its existing powers while also fulfilling the full breadth of our mandate. Obviously, there are powers versus resources, and we are talking earlier about the workload that is going to grow and the need for more resources. Would you have the resources if you had those powers? Would you need more resources to fulfil that? It seems to me that it could open up quite a number of investigations, especially with local government, because they have considerable powers to exercise at will, which would be different from all councils. I can imagine that there would be cases—I am just thinking about my own mailbag, really—where individuals or groups of people would look at the practice of one council and be looking maybe for support from yourselves. With regard to our inquiry power, we have internally, over the course of the last year, led some relatively detailed scoping work as to the methodology and the resources and potential subject matters for use of our power. We have also had direct and extensive engagement with the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission about its experience of conducting a public inquiry into accident and emergency services in Northern Ireland and its investigation into gypsy traveller accommodation, primarily to understand what resources it took from them to conduct that work. It is fair to say that the resources to conduct that work were considerable. In relation to the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission inquiry into A&E, it absorbed almost all of its organisation for almost two years. Although the Scottish Human Rights Commission could make such a choice, it is clear that it would divert resources from the rest of our work. The commission actively has an interest in using the powers, and we are keeping that under review. We are continuing to try and hone our methodology in a way that is commensurant with the resources that we have and in a way that will still be meaningful and have impact. However, that is certainly a challenge for the commission, one that we are grappling with and one that we will take into consideration in our review of resources and structure. In a more general sense, if our powers were to be enhanced or additional powers were given, we would absolutely require more resources to deliver against those powers effectively. That is the underpinning message from Cavita's response. For example, if we were to have the power to take our cases in our own name, the resources that are required to do that are significant. Even as we have found in the resources in relation to making interventions in civil cases, we have very limited resources, not in terms of staff time, but in terms of actual costs of engaging counsel in those processes. There are practical matters in relation to staff time, but there are the financial resources to support that process. If we welcome the prospect of reviewing our powers, we also recognise that doing that has got resource implications. You have mentioned in your evidence the First Minister's advisory group and the committee's report that the recommendations from both those things are out there. Just to finish up, can I ask you what you think the next step should be in moving those recommendations forward? Broadly, both of those processes require a clear action plan and a commitment to resource those action plans to deliver against the recommendations for both of them. Cavita's got some specifics, but for me that is the next step. In both of those processes we see ourselves as active participants and potentially both in developing those action plans as well as being involved in the delivery of them. We have a clear interest in seeing them progressed. Specifically in relation to the First Minister's advisory group and human rights leadership, recommendation 6 of that process outlined that there should be a process of implementation with a national task force established. As I say, that national task force has yet to be announced, but we very much hope that that announcement will be imminent and we have concerns if it is not. We would see ourselves as playing a role in increasing understanding across all actors of the rights that we seek to enshrine in an act of the Scottish Parliament in a broad public participatory process in that regard and in terms of the capacity building that is required for the implementation of such an act. To reiterate Judith's point in relation to the inquiry recommendations, the getting rights right inquiry of this committee, we look forward to seeing an implementation plan to take that forward. We are committed in this operational plan year to work with officials in the Parliament to look at advancing a human rights-based approach to scrutiny and also human rights capacity building within the Scottish Parliament. The commission looks forward to working with the Parliament to do that imminently. That brings us to the end of this panel. Thank you both very much for your evidence. We will suspend for five minutes to change witnesses. Welcome back everyone and can I welcome our second panel, Alasdair Pringle, Executive Director, Lynn Welsh, Head of Legal for Scotland and John Wilkes, Head of Scotland, Equality and Human Rights Commission. You are all very welcome. Can I invite an opening statement of up to five minutes, please? I thank you for the opportunity to share some of our highlights from 2018-19 and our priority aims for the year ahead. We have sent you some background documents that cover all the key points that I want to make, including a bit of the background to our organisation being GB, etc. I am not going to go into that just now. This last year has been one of us review of our organisation refinement in the way that we operate and a bit of a refocus on the work that we do. We have set out in our soon-to-be-laid strategic plan and we have sent you that plan on a page. On review, we went through our periodic tailored review, which is something that is undertaken on all arms-length bodies. That highlighted a number of our successes and recognised many of the improvements that we have made over the last few years. I also understand that we have identified some key areas for improvement, in particular how we prioritise, how we show the impact of our work, how we influence and engage with our stakeholders. The review also recommended that we were much clearer about the use of our unique powers and levers at our disposal. That is a key theme that has also been picked up by the Westminster Women and Equalities Committee, which is currently undertaking an inquiry into the enforceability of the Equality Act and the role of the EHRC as the enforcement body. I will say a little more about how all the impact on our work is going forward, but I first wanted to share some of the highlights from the past year. We launched our three-year review of progress on equality and human rights, which is a significant body of evidence, and part of our is Britain Fairer reporting. We concluded work on the Scottish city deals, influencing and embedding equalities in the inclusive growth policy agenda in Scotland. We have engaged and influenced all city regional deals and the Ayrshire growth deal over the past year. We have carried out research on the impact of Brexit into the benefits of EU funding, which has been delivered for equality in Scotland and the need for future arrangements to continue to support equality. We wanted to take a major review into the effectiveness of the public sector equality duty. That found that compliance with the specific duties is not having the desired effect in terms of driving change for people with protected characteristics, and that evidence we will use to inform the forthcoming consultation on the specific duties. We completed our housing inquiry into the accessibility of homes for disabled people, and have called on the Scottish Government to set a 10 per cent target for accessible housing. We have undertaken a growing number of successful compliance, enforcement and legal interventions. Looking forward, the breadth of our remit and the size and reduction in our budget mean that we need to make some really difficult choices about what we work on. We have based our priorities for the next three years of our new strategic plan on evidence of the most challenging equality and human rights issues facing society, as set out in Is Britain fairer and is Scotland fairer. We consulted widely on those priorities and had a great response from our Scottish stakeholders. Our priorities reflect our dual remit as a national equality body and as an A status in HRI, and of course respect mandate of SHRC in Scotland in terms of devolved areas of human rights. We have a close working relationship internationally and domestically with the SHRC, and that allows us to complement their human rights work when we're appropriate, for example in our criminal justice inquiry. As you'll see from the plan on the page, we're now working to achieve change in five priority aims which cover work, transport, education, access to justice and work on institutions. We have a core overarching aim, which is that we ensure that we maintain strong equality in human rights laws that protect people and that we have the data available to show what's happening to people in practice. Our main areas of focus here will be on safeguarding laws post Brexit, seeking a strengthened and more impactful public sector duty, supporting work to incorporate UN treaty rights into Scotland's law and influencing the collection of data across our aims on protective characteristics to ensure that we can measure progress. We're happy to share more about the specific work that we plan in any of these areas. However, I just want to finish briefly on how we'll work, and you will see in our plans an increased focus on compliance and enforcement. A key plan of our new strategic plan is legal support projects, taking multiple cases on particular areas of life aligned to our aims, and this is to create a critical mass that makes it clear that areas of life are regulated to space. We've created new compliance and enforcement teams and that's seen increased staffing in Scotland. Lyn will be able to tell you a bit more about that, and we've increased our investigations and inquiry work. We're currently running two inquiries with more on the pipeline, where previously we would only run one every few years. However, I would also defend the importance of the full range of our powers and levers. We're part of the architecture for equality that goes beyond legal enforcement and litigation. Many of the root causes require other types of activity, for example encouraging good practice or providing evidence such as is Scotland fairer. We're clear that we need to focus on prevention as well as on cure. You mentioned in your opening statement that improving how you prioritise your aims was an area that you were working on. Can I ask you to expand on that, about how you're going to go about doing that? As I said in my opening narrative, the challenge, for many, is being clear on the work that we do as an organisation. Is Scotland fairer evidence provided us with some of the key areas of significant inequality in Scotland? We've used that as the backdrop for our engagement with stakeholders. John might want to say a bit more about the work that we've done on engaging on the Scotland fairer. We produced the report in a later part of last year, but in the run-up. It's a report that was built on the 2015 report. The whole process of developing the report and gathering evidence takes a couple of years. In terms of the Scotland fairer, we obviously feed into the is Britain fairer report, where that's appropriate. We mined the relevant data sources. We worked with loads of stakeholders in terms of other sources and impressions that people have. When we had the first cut of the evidence, we had a series of roundtables in Scotland with key stakeholders from those particular areas around education and work and participation to check out the test-out that the evidence met with their experience. That was very helpful in producing the final report. In terms of Scotland fairer 2018, compared to 2015, the progress overall—we were looking at very similar things that we looked at in 2015—has been slow overall in very little areas where there's been improvement. We started with an evidence base. The next step for us was looking at the areas of work that we were uniquely best placed with our powers and duties to undertake work. As I said, that was also part of the tailored review process. At that point, we went out and consulted on, I think, 10 prior teams. On the back of that consultation, we narrowed that down to five. Who do you consult with and who are your key stakeholders are? We consulted very widely. We got over a thousand responses to our consultation, so we were overwhelmed by that. We had to put more researchers on to the case. Proportionally, there were a lot of good responses from Scotland to our plan. We did a consultation period for the middle of the summer last year to December. There was a general questionnaire that was out on our website for people to complete. We had lots of responses to that, both organisational and individually. We spoke individually to some of the key stakeholders that we have in terms of protect characteristic organisations. We spoke to other key stakeholders, had meetings with Government and other interested parties. We had two stakeholder events with ranges of organisations to test out our draft thoughts about what we might include in the plan, and as Alistair said, we used all of that to narrow down to the plan that we are currently taking forward. We received a disproportionately high response to the consultation from Scottish stakeholders as a GB organisation, which was great. There was a strong consensus on the ranking. We asked people to prioritise the 10 issues, the ones that we thought people would prioritise but they did not. It was interesting to listen to the evidence earlier from the Scottish Human Rights Commission on Transport. Transport was an issue high on people's agenda. It was not something that we thought would be prioritised in our plan, but we were committed to taking an honest approach to the consultation. We had the notion of tech quite high up, as many organisations do. It was not high on the agenda, we had social security high up on our agenda and it was low down. I think that people recognised that we were not maybe best placed to be campaigning on increasing funding in social security, for instance, but we were well placed to tackle issues like accessibility of transport, which is a major gateway for people to participate in life. It was a really interesting exercise. In terms of technology, we are looking at that in every aspect, so we have not dropped that forward look. For instance, in our work aim, there are some really interesting, potentially challenging issues around human rights, microchipping of individuals in the workplace, and the use of algorithms in interviewing people to see if they are fit for a company. I know that we were surprised as well. The use of algorithms that identify individuals fits an organisational culture, but when you look at how algorithms are designed and who designs them, the inbuilt bias often of a gendered nature. There are some really interesting stuff that we need to keep an eye on, and we have had an interest in gig economy for some time and taken some cases in that respect. I think that we are reading the same book at the moment on algorithms and gender bias and data gathering. You said that microchipping of individuals in the workplace. I really need you to expand on that sentence, please. Do you have any of the details of that, Lynn? I am looking to you because you are nodding as well. It is something that we have talked about and I do not have the evidence to hand, but I can get the background information. I think that it is to gather—sometimes it will be to open doors easily, if it does that kind of stuff, so instead of having a little past, you can just have a microchip. It also lets employers know, in some instances, where you are at any time in a workplace. It is not a new concept. I worked in the electronics industry back in the early 1980s in Scotland, and in those days the company that I worked for would chip your badge so that they could track you in terms of where you were. It was positioned as a health and safety thing, but it was also used for other things and then fell out of favour, I think, in terms of that. I am happy to send some of the background information that we were looking at in terms of the priority aims. Please do, and rest assured, put our minds at rest that they are not actually implanting chips into people. It seems they are. I am sure that that is a case where somebody was. Okay. I think that we would appreciate some more information on that in Britain form. Gosh, that has really thrown my train of thought there now. You obviously were listening to the evidence that we took in the first session. What would you say is the biggest human rights issue and, obviously, equality issue that we are facing in Scotland at the moment? It is quite hard to identify one issue, to be honest. If you look at Scotland fairer 2018, that shows the state of progress on a whole range of issues for a whole range of groups of people in life in Scotland today. While there are some areas of progress, some aspects of gender equality, progress on issues such as gender pay gap, at least reporting if not reducing the gap, there are a whole set of areas of life where there is not progress for some groups of people, particularly the evidence that is pointed to lone parents, disabled people, gypsy traveller communities. I would not say that there is one specific issue. I think that the challenges for British society and Scottish society in a time of on-going austerity and in a time of more divided communities, be that politically or economically, are significant challenges in terms of people's ability to participate equally in any aspect of life. As Scotland fairer is not an easy read, I think that you will agree. The areas that we have identified to work on are those that we think that we can have the most impact on. For us, it is those five areas that are about people getting free access to work and being treated well in work. It is about people being able to participate in life through transport. While we have identified disabled people in Scotland, rural aspects of transport are important. Again, the gendered nature of the way that transport runs education. I think that some of the evidence that was given earlier by the Scottish Human Rights Commission and the public views of equality and human rights are potentially becoming more disparate, we think that the education system has a key role. Previously, we looked at issues like bullying, which were quite specific, but we are more interested in the role of schools in building better societies. We will be focusing our attention on things like who gets into school, who is kept in school, believing that contact with diversity improves people's understanding of difference rather than pulling apart. The role of schools in tackling what eventually becomes hate crime, to be honest. Access to justice remains a significant challenge and a significant issue, and I am sure that Lyn will be happy to say more about that. Even though we have seen some significant improvements and interventions in Scotland, we are still concerned about people's ability to access justice and the justice system's ability to evidence that is making improvements for different groups of people. They are the key areas of inequality rather than the big one, as it were. I want to explore one specific aspect of the evidence that we have. That is the city deals, or city regional deals, as we should call them. Do you feel that the investment is welcome as it is going into those areas? Is it going into the rural areas as much as it should be? There are, I think, 15 city deal partnerships across Scotland at the moment. Our work over the last two years has basically been to work with the city deal partnerships to try and ensure that whatever it is that they are doing in their local areas that they take fully into account the ability of these significant investments from the Scottish and UK Governments over a long period of time to ensure that you can address some of the barriers that exist for different groups. In employability terms, in terms of some of the projects that will go forward, are the city deal partnerships a way—clearly they are—a way of addressing some of the long-standing issues around access for certain groups, women and employment in certain areas of technology, those sorts of things. In terms of building programmes, it is an opportunity to address some of the housing issue needs that our housing inquiry threw light on. What we have done over the last two years is to try and work with the city deal partnerships. We had some great support from COSLA and we had some good engagement from city deal partnerships about using those opportunities to address—for each individual city deal partnership—the issues that they want to address in their local area. However, it is about ensuring that whatever it is that it is doing, it is looking clearly at the equality in human rights aspects to those. Our work has finished in terms of that initial pilot phase and our understanding is that the Government, the minister, has committed to providing some resources to continue the work that we started. Does that help? Just to say that we have not—in direct answer to your question—we have not been looking at the rurality aspect of it. It has been much more about how you use procurement and investment to address the issues that are important to us. It is a plank of our new public sector quality duty strategy that we think that procurement could be used much more as we think that positive action could be used much more to drive the sort of change that we want to, which aligns to what I said earlier about more compliance and more enforcement rather than just necessarily gentle handholding. Okay. Just finally, really quickly, convener, if I can, you also heard the evidence from the Scottish Human Rights Commission that they would welcome added powers and added resources. Would that help you if they had more powers and resources? If they had more? Yes. Yes. The arguments that they make about additional powers and resources to further and promotion and progression of human rights in Scotland is absolutely aligned to our own. We are, in comparison, fortunate with our resources, even though we have seen a cut of £70 million down to £17 million this year, which is why I say that we have had to make some tough choices. We are still far better resourced than the Scottish Human Rights Commission given the mandate that they have. People think that that proportionate size is smaller, but in reality we are dealing with the same issues across the same breadth of areas of life on the SHRCR. They need adequately resourced and adequate powers to help them to achieve that, I would say. We would also like more money and powers, but that is a separate room. Thank you, convener. Good morning, panel. My question is just going to be the same as what you asked the SHRCR this morning. What has been the commission's biggest successes and how do you measure that success? It is very nice going second, I have to say. I am happy to start that and maybe my colleagues might want to say something about legal successes and policy successes. For us, and what you see in front of you in terms of our strategic plan, one of the successes for us as a Scottish part of the GB organization is that we have a strategic plan that is fit for purpose for three countries and that properly reflects the devolved aspects of our role and remit. That feels like a success, because that is not an easy thing to come by in a big GB organization that is trying to respond to three very different countries' aspirations on equality and human rights. Is Scotland fairer is a big success, I think, because this time it sets out some key recommendations for action? It is a major thing, it is not just a report, it is a major driver and indicator and spotlight on the significant issues that governments should be worried about if they are worried about equality and human rights. The recommendations this time round say, if you want the picture to look differently in three years' time, here is what we think you need to do and our strategic plan says, and here is what we are going to do to try and hold you to account the ones that we think are most, well, our constituents are the most important. I want to say 100 per cent compliance and gender pay gap enforcement last year and a new approach to shining the spotlight on non-compliance this year. I say that because we were established as a statutory body to undertake high-level strategic cases. We were not established to do regulation and enforcement on mass and gender pay gap reporting and enforcement was a real challenge to us. It links a little bit to the powers and tools, but we have had to use our investigation powers as the threat to ensure compliance with gender pay gap reporting. Our investigation powers have been used on things like the MET on bullying and we are currently using them on the BBC on equal pay. They are not designed to go after every country in the land who are a part of those regulations. However, we achieved 100 per cent compliance and that was through some kind of quite creative working in a lot of focused resources. I would like to say 100 per cent compliance on gender pay gap is a highlight. I would also say, with the backdrop of the budget cuts that we have faced over the last 10 years, that we have increased compliance with increased enforcement. As I said, we have got two inquiries running, a major investigation, more in the pipeline. I think that we are big visible headline issues that make people see who we are and the powers that we have. I remember sitting here a couple of years ago, people saying that you are not using your powers, you do not have teeth, but I think that we are showing them now in a quite constrained time. The business plan that we have also shared sets out our success measures for all our work. We have an organisational theory of change that says what is the aim that we are trying to achieve, what are the intermediate changes because some of these are long-time, lifetime changes and what are the success measures on the way. Some of them are quite specific that we would expect to see changes in legislation. We would expect to see 100 per cent compliance. For instance, if we go down the route of ethnicity pay gap reporting, our recommendations around what would make that effective, which are not the same as gender pay gap reporting. I hope that the success measures are here. They are quite high-level and we are developing those for Scotland separately, but they are good impact measures that we will be able to report on. I do not know if John Eirland would want to add anything to the highlights, they were mine. I suppose that we are Scotland specifically. We have always had 100 per cent compliance with the PSD Publications duties over the four-six-year period that those have been in, which I think has sent a good message to organisations about what is expected of them. I mean, we think that the duties could be improved, but we keep them on people's agenda and they know that we look to see whether they are complying or not. Some of our enforcement legal work in the last year, I think, has been really effective in seeing real change for individuals, which is obviously what we want to see, I suppose, on the ground. If you look at the work that we have been doing along with Royal Bank of Scotland, where all of their mobile services across all of Britain will now be entirely accessible, that is a lot of people you are helping, if you like, through one relatively small piece of work. However, those things have really wide implications. I think that the same with our section 23 agreement with Police Scotland and Flexible Working, it is difficult for an organisation like that to work flexibly, but when you work with them and get those kind of agreements in place, you are having a really wide effect on who can get the police force and how they are treated there. So some of that work, I think, has been really excellent this year. Do you want to add anything, John? I suppose that, in terms of some of the other areas that Alasdair mentioned in his remarks about the housing inquiry, that was a GB-wide inquiry, but there was some very specific evidence and recommendations to Scotland because of the different contexts, and we made some recommendations to the Scottish Government and just received a response after some months and some of the recommendations that we have suggested are going to be taken forward. I think that the headline one, one of the headline ones about setting a 10% target that the Government felt that was not appropriate for them to do and do it other ways, which is obviously disappointing. I think maybe another quick example would be we did a piece of work last year looking at asylum seekers' rights to health. That was again a piece of GB work. That's a mixture of reserved and devolved matters. I think what it showed was that the situation in Scotland was much better in terms of access to healthcare because of the different policies here to England, where there's issues to do with charging and access and data transfer and all of those sort of things, but it did pick up in Scotland the fact that there was confusion around primary care providers and GPs about who had access. Some of that confusion I think came caused by the Home Office sometimes, and as a result of what we said the Government committed and hasn't done, I think now I've produced some new guidance for primary care GP providers to make that a lot clearer in the system. Thank you very much, convener. Thank you, convener. I'm back in February 2017 when you previously gave evidence to the committee that there was a discussion around restructuring and the impact that was having on some staff. Are you able to give an update? Yes, restructures are never easy, particularly in a time when you're facing a financial cut, and we went through a fairly major restructure to ensure that we were fit for purpose for the future. We've got through that, we've got through that, not without some scrapes and bumps along the way, but we now have the operating model fully in place, and we have undertaken some refinements in fact since we were last here, which includes the establishment of a compliance and enforcement team and increased staffing. Essentially, our budgets are quite restricted in terms of how much money we get, which is administrative, which means that we've got much less choice over what we do with it and programme funding, where we have more choice. What we've done is taken some of our programme funding to increase our staffing in Scotland, Wales and GB. I'd say that we are fully through that. All our staffing are in place in the new operating model that is working effectively, and it is working much more effectively across GB. One of the key planks of that was identifying an executive director with responsibility for a third of the organisation and a country, so we all have to champion a country as well as our functions. I thankfully cover Scotland, which is kind of handy, and the delivery of our business plan across GB. I am able to, at the highest level, ensure that we build a nation focus in. It is a difficult process. I think that we are in a much better place. Our recent staff survey showed that we are pretty much in line with civil service averages, which is not bad a couple of years ago. Two years ago, we would not have necessarily had that result. Do you feel that the structures that you have identified are fairly stable, even in light of potential changes around the decision of the UK to leave the EU or other challenges that you face? I think that that was the whole point. We were trying to future proof that the danger was previously. We were quite siloed in a way. Scotland was not necessarily as built in to the fabric of how we worked across GB. That has been a big bit of our work. A big bit of the strategic plan is ensuring that we have aims that are fit for purpose for all of us. Historically, there might have been stuff about, for instance, a priority might have been overrepresentation of black and ethnic minority people in prisons. That is not an issue here. Therefore, we would have immediately been excluded from that activity. I think that both the aims that we are working on are fit for purpose for all countries. We are about to go into another spending review round. Who knows what we will face then? We feel that we have trimmed a bit like the Scottish Rites Commission. We have trimmed as far as we can in order to be effective. There are new expectations on the horizon for us on things such as website accessibility, potential ethnicity pay gap regulations. We will struggle if we have to put all our resources into that activity, given our aspirations for much bigger compliance enforcement work, which we think will have the impact that people want to see. A long answer to the short question is that we are fit for the future. Thank you. Can I ask some questions around the public sector equality duty? Lynn Welch had mentioned that she felt that that could be improved. I am wanting a wee bit more detail in your opinion on how it could be improved. We did our review of the duty last year, both of general duties of GB level, as well as how specific duties were working in Scotland. We are left with a number of concerns out of the end of that. The outcome focus for the duties was absolutely the right one, but it does not seem to have been effective. Authorities do not seem to be able to understand how to set an outcome that they can measure that is actually aimed at individual protected characteristics. They tend to be that we will train staff, we will help everybody, rather than we will help me on the black and ethnic minority group that we have. They are too wide, too homogenous, and you cannot see the outcomes that are supposed to be achieved. Although outcomes sound like the right idea in practice, we are not seeing that as being effective. We are potentially looking towards the Government taking more of a lead role in setting the kind of outcomes that it would want to see for Scotland, which might then allow it to lead, basically, and to other authorities where the areas are where there are the worst inequalities in health or in local government effect areas. Those were the main issues. We also have issues around stuff such as employment reporting. What are the different protected characteristics that you are recruiting, retaining and developing? Authorities, for some reason, seem to find this incredibly difficult to do. You would think that it is a fairly basic kind of information crunching, but the information does not seem to be there, so there is something fundamentally problematic about how that particular duty is working as well. The equality impact assessments are, in principle, a great idea to look at the effect that your policies and your practices are having. I think that there is always a danger that that becomes more tick box than an outcome-focused. Perhaps that needs to have a bit of thought about how that gets developed and how it can be regulated. If I may, the role of regulators, inspectors and ombudsman, who are inspecting public bodies, strengthening the link for them in terms of their responsibilities when they are doing that, to look at how public bodies are faring against the public sector equality duties would be another one. Can we look at equality outcomes that are set by public authorities? There are thousands of them, if not tens of thousands of them, and they are all disparate. They do not add together to achieve impact in any single area because they are up to individual authorities to set. That makes it impossible to monitor progress against. In terms of our role, it is a very difficult set of duties. The duty of regard is also very general and very difficult to enforce in any meaningful way. I will go back to Scotland fairer. It sets out the significant inequalities in life. If they were set as the areas in which we would be undertaking public sector equality duty work, we would tackle the gender pay gap, we would tackle disabled people's access to employment, we would tackle any of the issues, or that public authorities were required to set out what they would do to achieve that goal. We think that that would be a much more effective mechanism. It would allow us to look specifically at the experience of different protected characteristics rather than tens of thousands to try to identify what will any of that do for anyone. Unlike human rights, we do not have to fight to gain an understanding of why equality is important or what the equality framework looks like. People generally get it, but the slight danger is that it has become an industry. I have sat in meetings where someone has pushed over box files of proudly their equality impact assessments and pushing them aside. It is one thing that has changed as a result of that, and the bead of sweat appeared in the brown. It is like, why are we doing this? Our view is that when we look at reviewing the public sector equality duty and looking at the future of incorporation of human rights and thinking about how we make that a practical realised aspect of decision making within public authorities, let us not just bolt on more on something that we do not think is working particularly well, let us take a fresh look. On the other side of that boxload coin are issues where there are big major strategies and policies that have not had any equality impact assessment, which we have had to follow up with certain public authorities about when they have been drawn to our attention. There is a whole mixed bag of stuff in there. There has been some criticism of your own role and your power to ensure compliance by public authorities. You are talking about the issues and the problems about how you get public authorities to work with their duties. Is that why people are criticising your own role about ensuring compliance? Is it very difficult to do that? What do we need to change to make sure, one, that the duty works and, two, that your role in ensuring compliance works as well? It is that breadth piece. We have looked at how we monitor, let alone enforce and have struggled to do that. It has almost felt like being counting over the years and it makes it quite difficult to identify specific areas where we might take action, although we have taken action over the years. In terms of our new strategic plan and our new approach to the public sector equality duty, we will focus specifically on the duty across our aims. Rather than trying to look at the compliance across all public authorities, we will take the transport aim, look at the role of public authorities in providing accessible transport and use every lever at our disposal to achieve change. The public sector equality duty is built into each of our five big aims. It picks up on John's point what is the role of regulators, inspectors and other agencies in overseeing the delivery of those plans, holding them to account in terms of their public sector equality duty. It will be a much more focused targeted approach. It will be as well as a focus on compliance and enforcement. We are communicating much more widely and loudly about those cases. In the past, we were more likely not to publicise when we were taking action in the hope that that would encourage people to do the right thing. We are more likely to publicise because I think that that lets people know that this is regulated space. What sits under that, as I have also said, is taking on each of those aims as many legal cases as we can. We will be going out actively, advice clinics, going out actively to communities saying that we are looking for cases on transport. We want to know if people who have experienced discrimination have not been able to access the transport system. We want to take as many cases as we can. We want to hold regulators and inspectors to account. We want to focus on the strategies that set the national transport strategies. Is that the kind of combined use of our levers and powers that we think will achieve change and will show people that we can use the public sector equality duty effectively? I think that it is true that we do it and that it might not be evident. There is no piece of work that we would do that relates to the public sector where we would not be asking PSD questions ever. If we had some concern about anything that those organisations would do, our first question is where is your EIA of that. It is an outcome relating to that. It is built in intrinsically and is a lot of what we do. However, it takes a lot of resource to directly enforce it, so we have been enforcing over the years the publication of it. That takes a ridiculous amount of man-hours to do, and there are 250 on public authorities. There is something about the strategic nature of where it is that we would point. As Alistair says, we very much are looking at regulators who we do not believe necessarily are doing their own equality duty and are not regulating the duty when they are going into the organisations that they see and also looking at the areas where the strategic plan is biting and using our PSD powers more in relation to those areas. You have provided us with some examples of cases that you have supported. I wonder if you want to talk a little bit more about those and be interested to know if you are seeing an increase at all in the number of potential cases. It sounds from what Alistair said there that you are actually going to proactively go out and get more, but if you want to speak a little more on that. We did that last year. We ran a specialist project for education cases and then broadened that out to services cases. That gave us a good bit of learning, I think, about how better to try to find those cases. The bottom line is that in Scotland there has maybe only been about 25-30 cases service cases taken ever in 10 years, so it is ridiculously tight. The employment cases are education cases that are a few more coming through, but basic service provision cases are rarely in court. There are a lot of reasons for that. Sadly, one of them is not being that there is no discrimination in services. There are a variety of reasons. People are not particularly litigious in Scotland, strangely enough. Issues that have to come out in discrimination cases, for example, speaking of your disability, or similar, are very difficult, or outing yourself with ghee, and those kinds of issues also play into that. We are going to do a really targeted bit of work around transport to start with, and then probably again education and reasonable adjustments and exclusions in that area to say that we are here and we will offer you that support. We will be actively going around Scotland, especially up North Highlands for the transport stuff, because there are very particular double whamies that you were speaking about previously in relation to that, to try to build people's understanding of what their rights are, which is fundamental. They are actually something that they can do about those things, and then make clear that we are offering that kind of direct support for them. We still do not see as many individual cases, if you like, as we might want to, where we can actually help individuals. I think that our enforcement work more broadly when we are using our own powers. We are doing more of that, and I think that we are being more effective about it. A bit of that will be in our annual report coming. The work with the Royal Bank of Scotland, the work with Police Scotland, the case that we had in relation to Cwmarnock Football Club, so we spread the learning from all of that, so it is not just one case and one individual that gets help, but you try to then expand out to contacting others and saying, do you know this is what happens when you do not comply with some of that work? We are using our judicial review power, because we have a power to take judicial reviews in our own name, where we think that authorities are breaching either equality or human rights. We are looking to do a bit more of that, because that then takes the pressure off individuals having to claim a sort of discrimination if we can look at it more strategically. We have one running at the moment, and we are hoping to have more of those going forward in next year as well. Thanks, convener. I had a couple of questions, but I think that the detail and the responses are covered a lot for already, but one of the things that we heard quite a lot about was how difficult it can be for folk to access justice. You were just talking about that both there and a wee bit earlier. I wonder if you could expand a wee bit more on the legal support project that you have got going just now? That is the idea of going out and saying to people that we will do transport cases, particularly at the moment, but we will give you advice and support. There will be two or three staff who are going to be focusing on that quite strongly for the next little while. Building people's knowledge and going out to disability organisations, for example, local ones and explaining what people's rights are in relation to transport or discrimination more generally. We are also doing at the moment a little bit of research into legal aid that is available. We want to make sure that those who have discrimination claims are not being stymied by the fact that they cannot fund them. We are working on the legal aid boards now to look at some of the figures that they have about who is applying for legal aid and how often they get it around discrimination issues. I think that part of the problem is that there is not enough data being collected. We are not sure how much information the legal aid board has, for example. Certainly the courts do not also seem to be looking at who is using those courts and what kind of cases are getting brought there. A lot of the information that we have is fairly apocryphal. We are supposed to be told when a discrimination case is raised, which is where we get our figures from, but we are not absolutely certain that there is a case that is there. I think that there is a bit of work being done by our research colleagues to say that organisations have to start gathering that information, because to be blunt, how do you meet your equality impact? Here, equality duties if you have no idea who you are serving at all. I think that there is a real fundamental issue there as well that will help to access the justice aim. The biggest thing for us in the short term is to say to people that we are here to support your individual issues. Is that something that the SHR is involved in with you, given the potential overlap? Not directly in that project, because it is mainly going to be about quality cases, but absolutely they are reaching out to those same organisations and areas of interest. It may well have a lot of good synergy that we can certainly look at and it would be helpful. It is probably just worth reiterating that we are not going out taking every case in every area and going back to the fact that we are funded and we are set up to be strategic. The sorts of cases that Lynne has already referenced, such as RBS and Police Scotland are ones where we think that we can have greater impact or where we are going to test out the law and that the legal aid projects are specific to our aims, so there is a way of building up that body of evidence and really shining a spotlight on what is regulated. That brings us to an end of this session. Thank you very much for your evidence. The committee has already agreed to consider evidence in private, so we will now move into private session and pass the public gallery to clear. Our next meeting will be on 30 May and details will be published on our website in advance.