 Welcome to everyone to the 26th meeting of the Equalities and Human Rights Committee. Can we please make sure that all electronic devices are on silent mode? We have apologies from Oliver Mundell and I'd like to welcome Alison Harris, who is attending as a substitute for Mr Mundell today. Before moving on to the main agenda items, I would like to say a few words about the visits that the committee members took part in at the weekend and at the beginning of the week. We and Annie Wells visited St Mary's secure unit, where we had the opportunity to speak with staff and young people, and it was certainly a very rewarding visit. We would obviously like to place our thanks to them for it. We had some very interesting feedback on age of criminal responsibility and in particular on young people's experience of being held in police cells and on their interaction with the justice system. I don't know if Annie Wells wants to add anything about the visit. I thank everyone who helped us to have some informed discussions at St Mary's. It was really interesting for me to have that contact with the young people to understand exactly what it feels like going through the justice system at such an early age. Mary Fee and Fulton MacGregor visited Cibyl. Mary, do you want to tell us a bit about that? Yes. I at the outset put on record our thanks to all the staff at Cibyl for what was an extremely informative visit on Monday. The staff gave us an overview of the facilities that are available at Cibyl. They gave us an extensive tour of the buildings. They also spoke about the support and the help that is available to the young people that are in Cibyl. They covered the range of ages of young people that come to Cibyl and the reasons for them being in Cibyl. We had a discussion about the age of criminal responsibility and the way that young people interact with the justice system. The staff were very open and honest in their views on the work that we are doing on that piece of legislation. We also had the opportunity to spend time with a young person who is in Cibyl. I have to put on record again our thanks to that person for the very open and honest way that they spoke to us about the issues that had been in their past. The very frank way that the young person explained the reason that they are now in Cibyl. They also went into some detail about the help and support that had been available in Cibyl for them and the benefits that they had got from being in Cibyl. All in all, it was an extremely useful and informative visit. Cibyl is in the area that I represent and it is a place that I have visited before. Cibyl has worked very hard to build a very good relationship with the community and has done that very successfully. I want to put on record my thanks again to everyone at Cibyl. Thank you, Mary. Alex Cole-Hamilton, you were at Houdon Hall. Yes, that is right. I, myself and a member of Spice, visited Houdon Hall on Monday. Houdon Hall is the local authority run secure unit. I was blown away by it. I think that the staff in particular had a wonderful compassion about them and the levity that I found very common with youth workers. They talked to engage young people. We learned about the pace approach that they take to behavioural management, which is about playful and accepting manner in which they approach young people and uphold the position and the situation that they find themselves in. I am very grateful, first and foremost, to the staff, but, as Mary said, we got to meet a couple of young residents of the unit who were very frank and quite open about why they were there. They were very interested in the work of this committee. One in particular is starting to understand the direction in which their life has taken and is wanting to make a change. He is a bit aspiration toward becoming a vet and he is keen to know that the offences that they were guilty of before they were 12 would not impact on that aspiration. There is a real lived experience around that. I was pleasantly surprised by the nature of the surrounds, the comfort that the staff seek to provide young people. It was a much warmer experience than I was expecting, so thank you to everyone who helped me to make it happen. Thank you. Fulton MacGregor, you were at the Scottish Youth Parliament sitting in Komarnick. Do you want to feed back on that? Thank you for giving me a chance to get my breath back there. I just wanted to quickly associate myself with Mary Fee's comments about Cibble. First and foremost, I thought that it was a very good visit. I do not have much to add to that other than to say that the welfare approach that they said they were taking at Cibble was something that I really found useful and that they totally agreed with, so what they were saying they already take a non-criminalising approach to the young folk that they have. The Scottish Youth Parliament, again, has very good discussions. I know that Pauline was there as well, and very good discussions. They are actually very similar to some of the discussions that we have had on committee. The young people were reflecting that back. I think that there was a general consensus that 12 seemed to be the age and the room that people wanted to be at this time. There were various discussions around that, and also discussions about the police and police contact with young people. A few people raised concerns with that, and it is about the nature of how police approach people. So, actually, a wee bit outside the bill, but again, discussions that we have had as well. So, yep, very interesting, isn't it? Okay. Can I just add to the community? Sorry, one thing I forgot to mention is that I asked extensively with staff and young people about whether 12 was the desirable age to raise this, too. To a person, they all felt that it was too low, and that they would like to see an increase beyond that staff and young people alike. I think that, interestingly, it depends what question you ask. Annie and I heard different opinions in St Mary's from young people, although I suppose that what we would reflect is that, when speaking to the young people directly, they probably feel that it would be a slight on them to suggest that they were not mature and adult. There was certainly a culture of wanting to be older and responsible, although we did hear some interesting comments from practitioners about unintended consequences that I think not for today, but it would warrant more exploration from the committee. Successful visits all round, I think. Our first agenda item is a decision whether to consider item 4 in private. Is the committee agreed? Agenda item 2 is draft budget scrutiny, and our evidence session is on scrutiny of the 2019-20 draft budget. Today, we have a panel of equality and human rights experts. Can I welcome Dr Alison Hosey, research officer with the Scottish Human Rights Commission, Dr Angela Hagan, chair of the Scottish Government's equality and budget advisory group, and Chris Oswald, head of policy with the equality and human rights commission. If I could invite panel members to make brief opening remarks, I will listen if you wish to start. I have been doing a lot of work over the last year on human rights budgeting. It is a new area of work for the commission, and I have been thrown into learning a lot about budgets over the last year. What I have found, and looking back through the evidence from your sessions last year, is that there has not really been a lot of progress yet in relation to human rights budgeting, perhaps not to be expected, but there are a lot of areas of learning to be done across the board within Parliament, Government and local authorities. However, there have been some encouraging progress moves in terms of process. Things that the committee itself asked for last year in relation to making the desire to see better connections between the NPF outcomes and fiscal decisions. That is not happening yet, but I know that the Scottish Government is working on that. There is some current work in that area. That is encouraging. We have also seen potentially some development in and around moves towards better understanding that rights-based budgeting—there are two aspects to it—budgeting and budget analysis. The committee and other committees in Parliament and ourselves and scrutiny bodies such as Audit Scotland need to be moving towards using human rights as a method of assessing whether or not the Government's budget is realising people's rights and what the rights budgeting work needs to be using human rights standards as the principles on which the budgets are based. At the moment, we are still not seeing that. Thank you, Alison. Chris, do you wish to make some opening remarks? Certainly. Thanks very much for inviting us again today. Today is really significant for the Equality and Human Rights Commission. We have published Britain fairer and Scotland fairer this morning. This is a statutory duty on the commission to produce a state of the nation report every three to five years. The statute changes a little bit. There is a wealth of information inside Scotland fairer, and we are encouraging particularly public bodies and employers to use that as a benchmark to start going forward. Whilst we find lots of encouraging signs in Scotland, particularly in terms of the human rights commitments around social security, the plans around race, gender and disability, and the legislation for 50-50 balance, lots of ambitious things, we still find that too many communities are falling behind, and I think that the budget in itself has potential to look at that. I am sure that the findings will not be unfamiliar to the committee. We focus on equal pay, we focus on workplace segregation of men and women. We know that disabled people in Scotland today are twice as likely to be living in poverty and without work. We have concerns about ethnic minority graduates having lower attainment at university and not going on to postgraduate study at the same degree. We have particular concerns about housing for disabled people. We released a report earlier this year, which identified 17,000 wheelchair users inappropriately housed, and 60,000 ambulant disabled people still waiting for aids and adaptations. However, as in everything with equality in Scotland and particularly of interest in the budget, we find massive holes in data, particularly when we move away from sex, race and disability, sexual orientation and faith. The available data simply does not give analysts the ability to look and seek for areas. I will go on later in the evidence, I hope, to talk a bit about our work on cumulative impact assessment, where we published work earlier this year, which looked at taxation and social security, and what was described as being the winners and losers both across GB and Scotland. We will publish a further report in about two or three weeks' time, which adds to taxation, social security and public spending decisions. I can talk a bit about that, but I think that it is particularly illuminating when you look at the marriage of central government policy with the situation at local government level and the cuts that many communities have experienced. We are able to estimate, for example, that the Bangladeshi community across Great Britain has lost on average £3,400 as a result of tax and spend decisions over the last eight years, but I am happy to go on to that a little bit later. Good morning, convener. Thank you very much and thank you for the invitation. I have appeared before this committee many times, but it is the first I am here in the capacity as chair of ebag, which is very exciting, I think at least. I think that it reflects a commitment to reconfigure the work there to maintain the commitment that there is, but also to drive forward what is quite an ambitious work plan that is linked to the budget review group recommendations, as well as the issues that Ali and Chris, from their respective commissions, have highlighted. I think that, particularly to draw the committee's, or refocusing again, on the recommendation from the budget review group around committee scrutiny, and that that is a year-long process where we are in terms of some of the structural constraints that we have in terms of the budget process. We are trying to alleviate that bottleneck of scrutiny at this time of year. To that effect, under my name came from ebag reminding all committees of that scrutiny across outcomes, impact and process around the budget. How we engage in a collective endeavour to improve the budget process in Scotland, so that it does, we already have a quite unique process in Scotland, and that was highlighted in the budget review group. With everything, there is opportunity to build and improve. The engagement in scrutiny and analysis drawing on a wider range of sources of information and using an equalities and human rights approach, using the tools that we have there and using the principles and the norms, legal and practice norms, we can advance a budget process that is even more cognisant of the kinds of issues that Chris has just raised. That leads me nicely to my question. I would like to start off by asking about the importance of embedding equality scrutiny in the budget process. I would be interested to hear from panel members how committees can successfully embed that scrutiny. You mentioned the time frame and how there is a bit of a bottleneck. Perhaps some further comments on that would be helpful. Also, how the new budget process might lead to an improvement in that scrutiny. I think immediately to return to the budget review group recommendations. The recommendations straight-forwardly state, maybe not straight-forward to implement, but the committee should take a broad approach to budget scrutiny, shifting the focus from annual changes to inputs and looking at what different spending is making, what is the direction of travel, scrutiny of what is being spent overall, what is it achieving in terms of the specific output and what kind of outcome measures there are. Overall, the key scrutiny question is what progress has been made in advancing equality and tackling underlying inequalities. That is a deceptively simple question because it is a massive question, but it is one that can direct whether it is the health committee or education or local government or infrastructure or Europe. How, within each committee's area of scrutiny, or across the Government's priorities and across the measures in the national performance framework, how are those measures interpreted and analysed from an equalities impact perspective and from an advancing and realisation of rights perspective? By engaging in that way, it opens up a conversation and it opens up a scrutiny process to look at what is the direction of travel, what are the outcomes, is it spending that is making a difference or is it spending that is the problem? Is it the direction of that spending rather than the amount? That is always attention and equalities analysis to look at not necessarily the amount but what is the impact, what is the effect, who is benefiting, how are resources being directed and how are they being directed in such a way that they address the kinds of issues that Chris has just raised and that we are seeing again and again in the Scotland fairer report and that are the stated ambitions of Government, so are resources being directed in such a way to address those underlying inequalities and are the committees engaged in a scrutiny of spending and of policy outcomes in such a way that equalities and human rights are at the centre of their analysis rather than an add-on and rather than solely restricted to the timeframe of the draft budget process? Thank you. Does anyone else want to comment on that? Perhaps maybe to give an illustration of how this could work in practice, taking the report, the formal investigation that we did into disabled people's housing supply across Great Britain. A number of the issues, traditionally you could say, well this is a local government matter, this is purely about the supply of housing but we found significant impacts in terms of NHS costs and some sort of bed blocking, people being inappropriately housed in care homes for a number of years. We found in terms of disabled people's ability to work, if you are inappropriately housed you are four times less likely to be in work, so there are issues which come up across the budget and I think it's for each committee to be able to look at distinct areas of policy very much in terms of what Angela is suggesting. The headlines from the inquiry, 50,000 affordable homes being built in Scotland, a huge number of homes coming through the city deals programme but very few of them are being taking the opportunity to build housing which is for wheelchair users or for people who are ambulant disabled or indeed housing for people as they age to be able to stay in the same place. So I think that there are really live issues and obviously I've described this in the quality terms, there are huge issues about the right to appropriate housing as well there and for the committees to be on the front foot to be asking about the different aspects of okay we describe this as a housing problem but it has impacts on the NHS, on work, on the economy overall. I think I useful when you're talking about equalities and you mentioned the human rights aspects to do with housing is that at the moment the right to housing wouldn't necessarily feature in terms of the thinking when assessments are being done they might think that well it's about the right to housing but not what the specifics are in relation to the different attributes that are set out in the international covenant there's lots of information there about what we should be looking at in terms of what is quality housing, accessible housing, adequate housing and so that I don't think yet features in looking back through the evidence that local authorities gave to you already this year. I think that was quite clear that it's a word that they mentioned or human rights they mentioned but there's not really an understanding about how that is actually put into practice and through your inquiry I know that you had contacted all local authorities to ask them questions about what they did in terms of equality impact assessing and what point in the budget that they did that and we looked at that evidence from a rights perspective to see whether or not they were talking about income generation allocation and spend because they would be the aspects that we would be looking for and again there was not a lot of information provided there was some in terms of generation and income maximisation but not to the degree where we can really see whether money is being spent or allocated in certain areas to the right areas and whether or not it's then being spent in those areas and if not what it has been spent on. Just to add to something that Angela said in relation to the data and having the right kinds of information at the right points in the year the commission has been involved in a project on budgeting and one of the areas that we've been developing is trying to replicate the open budget index for Scotland and it's a global index that looks at transparency, accountability and participation in budgets so it's to be able to put us on a footing with the rest of the world see where we do how well we do and at the moment we're partway through but one of the aspects that we have identified problematic area is in relation to access to information and the score that Scotland's coming out at is about mid-range and the reason for that is that three of the key documents that would be considered to be good practice aren't produced by the Scottish Government so we don't have the pre-budget statement and we don't have an in and mid-year reports that really bring that analysis of what is being spent and the impact that that's having throughout the year so there are three areas where there could be improvement made for information to provide us with that. Thank you, Mary Fee has a supplementary on this. Thank you convener it's more a convenient time to come in with an actual supplementary. That's okay, thank you. One of the questions that I always ask when we have these sessions is how easy is it to follow the money and I would be interested in the panel's views on whether or not it is getting any easier to follow the money but given the comments that have been made in response to the question that convener put about direction of travel and policy outcomes I'd be interested in the panel's views on whether particularly in committees when they're doing scrutiny of budgets whether there is still too much focus on the now and if we look at direction of travel should we be looking at what we actually want to achieve in work backwards rather than work forwards? I think that's a really good question. The national performance framework at the moment sets some high level goals outcomes for Scotland. What we also have are a range of indicators and unfortunately the process of developing those indicators has been a bit rushed and it's come before there's been any real logic modelling as to what do those goals actually mean in practice, what does success look like and we need to go through that framing we need to ask what those to identify really what it is that we're asking what are we trying to achieve to be able to then work backwards and the human rights budget indicators is an area where we'd suggested to the Government and we will continue to encourage the Government to look at at the moment the NPF produces outcome indicators result outcome. What human rights indicators can do in support that is also look at the structures and the processes on the way to those outcomes so what commitments have Government made what policies and laws are they putting in place are they the right ones and then at a process level bringing in that programme action what actually happens and budget so that's the layer that I think is potentially missing and it's where those indicators could help tell a better story as to where we are on that journey of achieving outcomes and maybe where things are not where money is not being put in the right place where it needs to be changed as well as different programmes that need to be activated but I think at the moment there's a there's a big gap between the aspirations of what we want to achieve and what we have on the ground and the budget's not in there in terms of directing what we are wanting to achieve. Okay, Chris Alangelo. Again, I completely agree and I agree with the sentiments of the question that is far more important to focus on achieving things rather than saying things. One of the challenges that we put out today is in Britain fairer is for all Governments across Great Britain to get one million more disabled people into work. Now it seems a straightforward challenge but we have to work backwards from how are we actually going to achieve this so we have to start right in the primary schools again but equally we have a large cohort of unemployed disabled people now who are work ready who are not getting in so we need to think about that. One of the as a practical example of that we've been doing a lot of work on city deals in the commission and if you take for example Glasgow where 29 or 39,000 jobs are going to be created depending on what documents you look at sometimes the challenge that we put to Glasgow council on their partners is how many women, how many disabled people, how many ethnic minority people are going to benefit from these jobs, are going to benefit from this huge public investment and then work backwards from that. If you're saying you want 10% of these new employees to be disabled people, tell us how you're going to do this because it isn't going to happen by magic. One of the conversations that we've had a lot with public bodies, particularly local authorities, when we've been doing work around procurement is that equalities implicit in everything that we do will make it explicit if it's put a number on it in the same way as you will put a number on the amount of people from deprived communities who you want to get into work and I think we need to to see a lot more ambition but I think as you say the outcomes based approach of this is the challenge and you now have to work backwards. You may have to work backwards to how do we achieve that is entirely the right one. That focus on outcomes again to return to the budget review process so that the process that is being turned around at the moment is to encourage strengthening of performance planning, thinking ahead, what are the outcomes and reporting that provides a greater focus on the delivery of outcomes. That means improving the information, as Allie has highlighted, about what activity public spending will support and is it supporting. If we take the national performance framework again, outcomes based, as colleagues have said, the scrutiny there is about are the actions that are being executed by the range of public bodies to whom the budget is dispersed, are those actions the right ones to address the inequalities and the equalities challenges and are those actions being resourced in such a way? Is the evidence in terms of the need, the issues and the evidence of action being recorded? In terms of a forward look, another area that is very significant in terms of the new financial management arrangements that we find ourselves in under the fiscal framework and the budget review is the medium-term financial framework published in May this year of Scotland's fiscal outlook. That is the horizon scanning that is looking ahead and we absolutely have to see the equalities ambitions within that forward look. Yes, it deals with big issues at a macro level, but they are a jam-packed fool of equalities dimensions. If the forward fiscal outlook is looking at public sector pay, there are enormous equalities issues within public sector employment and public sector pay, for example. It is the read across that we need to be getting better at setting the high-level objectives in whatever policy area, but when you read through the detail of policy or you read through the warm words around policy areas, we are not seeing a follow-through then. What kind of resource tracking is happening? How are the links being made with excellent work going on in active healthy ageing and the resource allocations there? How is that action plan being scrutinised through committees and being joined up across other policy domains? That is the big set of challenges. I would like to ask the panel, have they seen any evidence to suggest that the Scottish Government is giving equalities dimensions of the budget greater priority? I do not know who is best to come in there. How long have I been on e-bag? Six years? Possibly? It has been a job. It is enormously useful. I think that when the equality budget advisory group started, it was an experiment and everybody was not clear about what we might be able to achieve. I think that some of the early work was about establishing the models, about establishing the credibility and testing ideas. I think that, particularly since the First Minister came in to post, there has been a re-energisation of the equality agenda and the human rights agenda. That has provided a number of opportunities that were not there before. There is always a role of leadership, which is enormously important. It sets the tone. Over the years, I think that it is sometimes difficult to think back. I think that the debate and the discussion that we are having about equality and human rights in the economy today in Scotland is much advanced from where we were five or six years ago. I think that things like the national performance framework and the fear of Scotland duty are becoming much more into play in terms of debate and discussion. Generally, yes, I think that we have made a lot of progress in Scotland over suddenly my time in EBAG. I know that one of the benefits of being in a GB organisation is the ability to look at what is happening in Wales and in England. Whilst Wales is developing similar models, Scotland is way ahead in consideration. We need to always come back to the issue of outcome. To supplement that, in relation to the question of data, the commitment by the Government to improve the equality data for the new indicators in the NPF will be a test for me how far that commitment goes. That information is difficult. We know that it is not readily available for a lot of areas. Yet, to find the nuances of who is worst affected by certain decisions or by certain policies or budget decisions, we need that information, so that will be a test that is moving forward. In your question, you said that there is greater priority on equality dimensions in the budget. Do you mean in terms of spending or in terms of the process? I would say that it is quite a wide question, so it would really be how you interpret it. If you think that there are two aspects to that process, then I would be interested to hear both your aspects. In terms of analysing the spending, that comes after, in a sense, what is the process? I think what EBAG was set up to do, we do not have an influence in Government policy. We are very much focused on process and to act almost as a kind of challenge function to say, where is the equality analysis happening here? If it is not, why not? That is how, for example, the work on that the EHRC have led subsequently in work going on within Government around the city region deals. The need for robust equality impact analysis at policy formulation stage is absolutely essential. As Chris said, it is very much a work in its ongoing development work. We absolutely are the envy of colleagues with a member—now not a convener—of the Scottish Women's Budget Group. When I work with colleagues in Northern Ireland, UK or Wales, Scotland is absolutely the envy of sister organisations in the UK because of the process that we have, because we have the dialogue that we do with Government and Parliament, but that is not to say that we need to improve the equality budget statement, we need to improve other—we have used words certainly—indicators, processes, measures—all of that needs to be improved, but we are in a very fortunate position in that there is a disposition from Parliament and Government and we can do a lot of learning from international progress as well. That is very helpful. Can I also ask whether the Scottish Government will provide clarity on how a policy or activity will contribute towards improving the specific national outcomes on the NPF or the national performance framework? I know they are. They are involved at the moment with the OECD, which is running a programme looking at improving change systems. The big questions that are being asked of the Government is what is it that you are trying to achieve, because until you formulate that and frame it, then you will not know how you are going to get there. There is a great deal of thought going in to the processes of how they decide what level of transformational change they are able to undertake with that. It is a big change. At the moment, the NPF may well sit in all of your offices and the nice laminated version from the last time. How much further it impacted on activity is the question that is being asked around the implementation of the new NPF. I think that there is the ability for the NPF to be transformational. There is no doubt about that, but there has to be much better co-operation and co-ordination between Government departments and an understanding that those are national goals that everyone needs to be working towards. I know from the evidence that you collected from local authorities last year that there is difficulty in the national priorities and local priorities and the tension between the two. The fact that moving towards the launch of the NPF, there was a big push to get COSLA on board in terms of its delivery and support of the NPF could make a big change this time in terms of delivery on the ground. Thank you. That is a very full answer. Anyone else want to comment? We have talked about this for a long time, but there is still a significant room for improvement in the quality and consistency of how they are conducted across policy domains and across departments, and how those impact assessments are then used to inform the committee's scrutiny. Thank you very much, convener. Good morning to the panel. It's lovely to see you again. Since we last met in this context around budget scrutiny, the committee has been engaged in the conclusion of its inquiry into the incorporation of human rights into the work of the Parliament and the wider Government. I think that one of the things that we all agreed from that evidence and from that work was that, when the observance of human rights is everybody's business or everybody's responsibility, it sometimes becomes nobody's responsibility. That is where having human rights defenders within committees of Parliament and within the directorates of government is very important. My first question is about your interface with Government officials. In terms of human rights incorporation within the budgeting processes of departments, are you satisfied that that is taken seriously? Do you get the access that you need? Do you think that it continues after that meeting that it is not just something that a box-a-tick and that we have met with these human rights organisations and that we can forget about it? I think that the simple answer is that they do not do human rights budgeting yet. I think that that is in very early discussions in terms of understanding what human rights budgeting is. I would like to think that that would be the direction that we were moving in. It would not just be a conversation that was had. Human rights budgeting is transformational. It is quite a change. It is not that difficult to do, but it sounds like it and it can be made to sound very complicated when it is about looking at what income you generate, how you allocate it and whether you spend it and what you have allocated it on. From there, it is then drawing on the key standards that you will be familiar with in terms of maximising available resources. That is in your generation. I know that not all the levers are there in terms of Scottish income, but there are aspects that we can look at. Maximising available resources and then in terms of your allocation and spend, we want to make sure that the allocations are based on your international human rights obligations. What we do not have yet and what we need to be moving to in the NPF can possibly help with that is that you cannot start by just doing human rights budgeting. It has to start with policy. It has to be in the law and policy development. You have to have those human rights standards in mind when you are developing the policies for them to be able to then be reflected in the budget. I think that that is the point at where we need to be having the discussions that will then lead to human rights budgeting that is effective. The human rights budgeting is very much the SHRC's issue. If I can pick up Alison Hosey on your point just there about us needing to put the centre of gravity of this in policy and then see that to be the driver for budgeting processes and also local delivery, we keep coming back to the fact that sometimes there is a disconnect between political aspiration and what happens on the ground. I always come back to that example of the 2014 Children and Young People Act, which for the first time put children's rights at the top of the bill, gave ministers duties around raising awareness. That same year, half of all local authorities lost their children's rights officers. There was clearly a demonstrable disconnect between high-level policy intent and delivery on the ground. Has that improved, not just for children but across the board? I think that it is still a work in progress. I think that there are too many examples that still exist where there is very good intention at the legal legislative level and the reality on the ground does not happen. The budget is a big part of making that happen. I think that the self-directed support is a very good example of very good rights-based legislation, which is massively underfunded. The aspiration is there, there is no doubt, but you cannot achieve those outcomes without the appropriate budget. I think that there is still a long way to go in connecting those two aspects. I think that I would not disagree with anything Allie has said. I keep coming back to the word process and the role of eBag in trying to build the analytical competence and understanding of what an equality and human rights budget process would look like. As part of the challenge to eBag, to reconfigure our membership and our approach, we have in the work plan a meeting with the minister to be scheduled to talk about human rights budgeting and to take forward. That will be very much dependent on the timeframe of when the commission is able to share its findings. We are also doing some deep dives into particular policy and spend areas, including taxation and revenue. Reconfiguring our ways of working, which I would say is a way of catalyzing and supporting some of building that understanding and building that competence, rather than a kind of command perspective from eBag, but rather to hold a much more discursive approach with different policy departments on how the analytical process and the operational process of formulating policy objectives and resource allocations join up. That is a kind of tall order, but that is the plan. If I could perhaps extend this a bit more into cumulative impact assessments, I think that it is much closer to— We are going to come to that a bit later on, if that is okay. We will let you share your thoughts on that. On Angela's issue around process, the work that the commission is doing at the moment is very much focused on that. When we tried to, as part of our project, develop indicators, we wanted to look at indicators on process and indicators on allocation generation and spend to try and follow on what we found. We could not do that, but the processes were not in place to really provide us with the information that we needed. We are currently working on developing a range of process indicators that will help to show progress within the budget's changing processes, to look at issues of transparency and accountability and participation within the budget. That is something that we will have available. We are also going to be aware of the fact that, to explain what human rights budget work is, to explain what budget analysis is, there needs to be some good, accessible information on that. That is something that we are working on as an output from the project that we did as well that will be more widely available. Are those the two main challenges around this that you see getting the indicators right and actually explaining exactly what human rights budgeting is? Are there any other issues that we can share at this time? I think that, as I said before, it is about having that mindset in development of policy, because those two things need to be connected for rights budgeting to be understood within that context and to be effective. I suppose that the committee would be quite interested in the specific practical challenges around doing it. Is there anything more that you can share at this time? I think that it is about understanding what the human rights standards and norms are and how they apply to budgets. When we talk about people who will understand generation, allocation and spend, what human rights standards relate to that. You are maximising available resources by having a minimum core that you then progressively realise on. Those are all related to generation, allocation and spend. It is making those connect so that it is making the language that everybody, everyday people understand and go, that is what we mean by rights budgeting. The budget process review group, as we have said earlier on this morning, has said that all committees should have a focus on this when they are going forward. The Finance and Constitution Committee now has a partnership with the Scottish Government and Agreement for the budget. It has published some guidance for committees on how to take forward equality's budget in particular. It talks about how the equality analysis should be published before the summer recess in order to reflect the change in nature of the budget process that we are currently going through and that it should undertake public engagement on policy priorities within the remit prior to the publication of and in order to inform the Scottish Government's process. Do you think that that guidance is strong enough and do you think that committees are following it? I would like to comment on that if I am looking at their papers at them all. Angela Constance It is a guidance strong enough. It is certainly the recommendations from the budget review group. Are they following it? I am not about to let anybody off the hook, but we also have to realise that we are in the first iteration of the cycle. It will be this time next year when we will know if it has happened or not. From now on, we are looking to see what engagement are committees doing with a wider range of stakeholders on equality's analysis within the subject committees and how are committees shaping up to do the kinds of equality analysis that the budget review group recommends. Ahead of the summer recess, ahead of that pre-budget formulation process that is outlined in the budget process. We will be looking from here on to see whether the committee is doing that. I think that it is very welcome that the finance committee has issued equality's guidance. That in itself is quite significant. Angela Constance Yes, absolutely. You wrote to them on 8 October. Angela Constance I did. Angela Constance Have any of them responded? Angela Constance I understand that there has been one response so far from one committee. Angela Constance Did you give them a deadline or is it up to them to respond when they feel able to do it? Angela Constance I am just having a quick look. Angela Constance Thank you. Angela Constance No, we did not. There was not a deadline in the letter but pointing out that ahead of the draft budget coming out in December, the committees might like to be focusing their attention. Rather than a deadline, they are setting out the time frame again. Angela Constance What sort of will they be getting feedback this time next year as to what they have done correctly or what they can maybe improve on? Angela Constance It is not really the role of, what do you mean, from e-bag? Angela Constance Just how is it going to work? How do we know that or what we have been speaking about performance indicators and outcomes? How do we know that what they have been doing or how do the committees themselves, how are they going to know that what they have been doing is what they should be doing, what we are looking for from them? Is there any way that maybe we can feedback to them? Angela Constance One of the indicators that we developed as part of the project was quality of participation in the budget process. We developed a traffic light system looking at seven different areas of what would be classed as part of the consultation charter for good consultation, looking at integrity, visibility, accessibility, transparency, disclosure of fair interpretation and publication. We have based a range of questions to look at the committee processes and to inquire of those who had been participating in the committee processes as to their experiences. We did not to be represented to get a bit of a baseline as to people's experience. I would like to see us develop that work and then incorporate it. One of the notes was that this will have to change once the committee process has changed. To look at that and to see whether the committee is engaging beyond the usual suspects or the same names that are coming up in terms of who is responding and what aspects. I was having a look at the subject committee guidance and all the way through I am noting that this is good if it happens. This is good but missing. The guidance is good. Seeing it through is important that there is a bit of scrutiny of that. Without committing the commission to doing that, I think that it is something that the indicator that we are developing should try and capture. Interested in seeing as it develops, if you are willing to share it with us. Given that the finance committee has issued the guidance, it would be helpful if the finance committee were to follow up as well engaging with other committees as to how the guidance was being used, how it can be improved and in your question there, if committees are doing it and are they doing it right. I think that there are plenty of guidance there to do it right but there is also willingness on the parties here and the commissions and others in eBag to help and assist in that process. Just to follow up on something that Allie said, I think that one of the key things here will be stakeholder engagement, who the committees are talking to about equalities, because equalities concerns and analysis do not just reside within the committee. When the public authorities are charged with delivering our services, delivering equality outcomes appear in front of other committees, are they being asked about their equalities activities? That is why it is included as an example of the kinds of information that committees could and should be drawing on in their pre-budget scrutiny and in their equalities analysis. Are the publications produced as part of the public sector equality duty compliance? When public authorities are saying all the great things that they are going to do in the equality outcomes statements published as part of the public sector equality duty cycle, it would be interesting to see to what extent those outcomes are active and real and that can formulate part of the pre-budget scrutiny. I think that every single one of you has mentioned the importance of the data that is available. I do not think that from what I have heard there is not the right data available at the right time in order to use it as such. Just two questions. What are the challenges in collecting such data? Have you been working with the Scottish Government on improving the quality of equality's data? One of the challenges that we have seen has to come from the UK Government, where there was a decision taken to reduce the amount of administrative data that was collected and there are reasons behind that. Regrettably, for the commission, the census remains the gold standard of equality data and we wait every 10 years to see what has been turned up. We would want to see far greater use of administrative data rather than a restriction or a contraction of data collection and expansion of it into areas where it is clearly justified. There is a disinclination at times. Particularly in Scotland, it is unhelpful where the ethnicity categories are collapsed into five, where they are gathered across 14, so you cannot tell the distinctions of outcomes for Pakistani, Bangladeshi or Indian people, which are really quite stark if you are looking for nuanced policy. The second bit of the question. The second bit you are working with the Scottish Government on improving the quality of equality's data. One of the things that we are encouraged by is the fact that the Scottish Government has, along with ourselves and others, identified some of the key challenges. Again, I am happy to report on the city deals work that we have been able to give the Government a whole series of indicators that they can then use. Initially, a lot of the city region deals were focused very much around gender and sex and I think that is absolutely fine, but they were missing data on disability and ethnicity, which is available, which they were perhaps aware of, which they can feed in. The other issue then is, I think, just how local the data is. It is fine publishing stuff on Scotland-wide, but often you replicate a greater Glasgow issue by doing that in some areas, so better data about rural, semi-rural communities would be very welcome. In terms of trying to do analysis with the available data from a rights perspective, we generally do not find it very easy at the moment to do. I know that, in previous sessions, the issue around following the money and looking at the levels that have been produced within Scottish data sets, they are not currently making it very easy to follow the money through the budget. One of the activities that we tried to do was just that. We were looking at four particular rights areas that were part of a project that was running at the same time, so we were looking at the right to health, housing, food and social security. We were trying to look at key aspects of those various rights and where we could find financial information in the budget relating to those particular spends, and it was really difficult. I think as well, and this is maybe where better connection with the NPF and the budget will help, is where there are directions of policy. Back to the Christy commission, preventative spend is a big focus within health and other areas, but there is no budget line called preventative spend, so it is very difficult to have to delve into lots of different budget lines and find out which bits have been spent on that particular issue. When we have a lot of information, it is just top-level. It is on a national scale, not even on a regional scale sometimes, so it makes it very difficult to look at anything beyond top-level allocations in budget areas. Chris Oswald, you mentioned the cumulative impact assessment a couple of times. I know that you were wanting to go on and speak about it. Now is your chance, so I am just looking to expand on that. I will do this very quickly. The commission has been working with land and economics to develop better scrutiny of budget decisions that were taken at a UK level between 2010 and 2015, and now we are just about to publish a report on projections of that from 2010 to 2022. I think that what is useful is that the second report does not just look at taxation and spend as taxation and social security, but also adds it in the impact of public services coming in. We have been able to identify with this kind of level of scrutiny that the largest losses that we will see going forward are an income desail 2. We see that any family with more than three children and lone parents are the three largest losers significantly. Black and Caribbean communities are then the next affected people with severe disabilities, and then in terms of age, it is the 18 to 24-year-old age group who has the most significant losses. In some of this, we are talking about really significant figures. Families with one disabled adult have lost £6,500. The Bangladeshi figure is actually £4,400 going back on this. We have broken this down for Scotland. Scotland is performing better than other parts of Britain, but it is still not a good picture when we are looking at rising inflation and contracting household income. The good news from all of this is that we have now developed a forward-looking approach, and this is something that I know that landmen have been working with the Scottish Government in terms of child poverty. There has also been a significant amount of engagement with the social security agency as well. We are trying to build in this learning to say that if you pull this lever over here and then that one there, there is an unintended consequence over here that you did not think through. It is giving the Scottish Government an ability to project forward the likely impacts, which is very much what a quality impact assessment is doing, but not just in a silo of housing. It is saying that if you change something in housing and then social care, you have an unintended consequence over here. It is adding a new layer of sophistication to the argument, to budgeting. We are hoping to bring landmen up at some point in the next six months. One of the areas that we want to do is to get them to engage with themselves and other parliamentarians to talk through the model, as well as talking to policy people and also civil society about how we can all best use this, because for budgeting it is a very exciting thing. Certainly exciting and interesting, I suppose, about a whole session on that, but also some very worrying stats and trends that you have said there, in terms of chill poverty and other issues, not surprising. How can local authorities and other agencies on the ground, if you like, that are working with people who are going to be affected directly? How can they take into account those cumulative impacts? That is exactly where we are heading now, is to take the Government work and then try to apply that, particularly in a local authority context, where there are income-raising powers and how does that affect and interact. It is a slightly different exercise, but at the same time, I think that the principles that have been established through this work are applicable across a wide range of settings. I certainly heard from local authorities last week about the challenges of them attempting to do it, but I think that there is a desire to look at the cumulative impact, and this committee would certainly be very interested in hearing more about it. Thank you, convener. One of the criticisms that politicians quite often get and indeed committees is that we sit in our little silos and we do not think about or talk to anyone else. Is that something that hinders the process? Because equality is in human rights cuts across every single committee. If one committee specifically looks at what affects them without thinking about the impact of spending on another committee, if there was better data collection and committees spoke to each other in a far more constructive and helpful way, would that help to drive forward the change? I can see Angela's nodding, so clearly that is a yes. Yes, absolutely. I think that we have touched on participation, engagement in the budget process, the range of stakeholders, not just the public authority's charge, not carrying the responsibility for service delivery, but who is in receipt, who is using services, who is not using services, what has happened to those services over the past period. Hearing from the lived realities of people's lives is as important to education committee, fisheries, local government, education etc. as it is to this committee. I would absolutely encourage the two things that you suggested, that wider engagement across wider range of stakeholders and into committee working and dialogue and information sharing, because, as I have said already, equalities do not just sit within this committee, but across all domains. One of the slightly more disappointing aspects of the work that we did not quite get far enough with the NPF was getting a better understanding of the international framework, the human rights framework that sits over the entire NPF, that is just waiting to be connected, that not just the human rights outcome, which I think at this stage in our country's journey on human rights, needs to be there as an individual outcome, but the fact that every single one of those outcomes, the framework is there to be connected to. I think that that gives that overarching way of approaching the interconnections between the different areas, because it is not that the outcome one is about the right to this or outcome three, it is that there is a long list of all the different international conventions that are relevant throughout all of these different areas. I think that that provides an obvious framework to look at to make those connections. How and when can that framework all be joined up then? If you say that it is all there, it just needs to be joined together, how can we join it together? I have a lovely spreadsheet at home where I spent far more time than I care to think about. We have done some of that work. The Danish Institute for Human Rights has done some fantastic work linking not just that framework but that framework to all of the SDGs, so that you can go online and say that this is the area that I am interested in and it will tell you all of the different areas. There are a lot of tools out there to help us to do that. It is a case of there being a willingness to make those connections explicit. Thank you very much for your evidence this morning. It has been very helpful. We now move into private sessions, so I can ask the public gallery to be cleared.