 Fy hoi, i hawddau ymddi adolyniadau. Mae gwasiwn i gorffodau 5 yn mae mor 12-14 yn seisio. Mae'r Gwladys Uniforol, Fyhoedd, Vidriw, Cymdeithio Aelodau, neu ddorol gweithioedd Gwladys Uniforol, yn ddigwyddodd. Cyngor nesaf, Cocab Stwyth rydyn ni'n ddiogelio am ddymarchau'n ddigwyddodd iawn ar y ffordd mae'r staff iawn a'r ddarparu yn yaynodd. Felly yma dw i gael wneud am gweithio'r dgeindig. The committee will be invited to choose a new convener. The Parliament has agreed that only members of the Scottish National Party are eligible for nomination as convener of the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee. Can I ask if we have any nominations for convener? Yes, Fulton. Thank you. If you can come to my meeting and listen to what is going on in the morning. I am not sure whether I can make a announcement on the committee's leadership role or I would like to put some records and echo your remarks about the previous convener, and I would like to nominate Karen Adam. Thank you very much. Do we agree to choose Karen Adam as our new convener? Agreed. Agreed? Agreed. Thank you all. We have agreed that Karen is our new convener. Congratulations. I will now hand the chair over to you. Thank you so much, Maggie. I just want to say that it's an absolute honour to be able to serve as convener of this committee. I really look forward to working with everybody over the next few coming weeks, months and years possibly. Thank you very much. We will now move on to agenda item 2. It's the gender representation on public boards amendment Scotland bill. It's our evidence session with the Scottish Government. We have with us today Shirley-Anne Somerville, Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, who is accompanied by supporting officials, Aileen Flanagan, head of the women's equality unit, Lucy Galloway, solicitor from the Scottish Government legal directorate, Annie Milovich, senior policy adviser from the gender equality policy team. Thank you all for joining us this morning. I refer members to papers 1 and 2. I invite the cabinet secretary to make a brief opening statement. Thank you very much, convener. Can I begin by congratulating you into your new role? It is a pleasure to be before the committee this morning to speak about the agenda representation on public boards amendment Scotland bill, which seeks to remove the section 2 definition of women from the 2018 act. This follows decisions of the inner house of the court of session, which were effective from 19 April 2022. The court decided that the section 2 definition was outwith the legislative competence of the Scottish Parliament and was accordingly not law. The court decided that the section 2 definition had no legal effect and it has had no legal effect and this has been the position since 19 April 2022. At that time, our council told the court that we would remove the definition. This bill, if passed, will provide clarity by removing the redundant definition from the statute book. I appreciate that bringing forward such a small bill is very unusual. We have looked at other planned legislation but did not find a suitable vehicle to take this forward. Furthermore, of course, this change did need to be made through primary legislation rather than through secondary legislation. The short bill is therefore simply a small technical fix to the statute book to remove the redundant definition and to ensure that no one is misled. The bill does not change the policy intention of the 2018 act and we still need the boards of public bodies to better represent and reflect the population of Scotland. As I have said before, the bill is simply to clear up the statute book to make sure that it is not misleading. Removing the definition from the statute book will eliminate the possibility of any confusion for readers of the 2018 act who are unaware of the court's orders in 2022. We are now going to move on to questions. I will kick off with the first question that you have touched upon in your opening statement. What is the purpose of the bill? What is the main purpose of it? The main purpose is to remove the redundant definition. As I said in my opening remarks, it does not have any legal standing following the court action but we did give that commitment to the court that we would remove the definition and I think that it is important that we do so. I look forward to working with you in the new role. Good morning to the panel. It was a useful introductory contribution by the cabinet secretary. I wonder if we could explore the timescale slightly. We know that the judgment came in April of 2022. That effectively changed the law by virtue of the definition. This is a tidy up exercise of the statute book. Why has it taken until now into 2024 to get this going? I touched on that briefly, but it was important that we looked to see whether there was another legislative vehicle that we could use, another bill that was going through Parliament. In many ways, that would have been an easier process than having a whole bill just to do this one thing. That was not possible. We were very, very aware of the Government that we had made that commitment, so it was therefore important to move forward with it. Once we had endeavoured to find another way, found that there were no other routes open to us through primary legislation, I did feel that it was important that we took the decision. It was unusual to have such a small bill, but it was important to do it that way rather than to continue to wait to see whether there was another bill that this could be attached to. I assume that the work from 2022 was looking at the Government's programme and trying to establish that. Were there any bills that were considered as being an avenue or were they all dismissed straight away out of hand? When you look at the bills that the Parliament has passed, there was no alternative that was available within the scope of bills. In many ways, that was a decision not to continue to wait until an appropriate bill came along but to make sure that we lived up to the commitment that we had made up to in court. Thank you. Thank you very much. We now have a question from Megan Gallagher, please. Thank you, convener, and good morning Cabinet Secretary and officials. If I may pick up on stakeholder engagement, because I understand that the Government of course did not go to consultation on this matter. However, officials have engaged with LGBTQI plus community in the past over legislation relating to gender. Following the court ruling, has the Scottish Government engaged directly with women's groups following the outcome of the court ruling, perhaps to mend relationships and to reassure them that there will be no repetition of what has happened with this bill? As Megan Gallagher rightly points out, there was no formal consultation for this, given that it was a technical fix to a commitment made in court, so the Government did not feel that we needed to go through a full consultation process. Clearly, given the time that has lapsed since the court ruling, the Government has had a number of discussions with a variety of stakeholders with differing opinions on a variety of issues on equalities. If those stakeholders wished to bring that up, we would have those discussions with them. On the context of the bill, we felt that there was no need to have a formal consultation given that it was a technical fix. Thank you very much for that Cabinet Secretary. You said that there are a variety of stakeholders. Does that absolutely include women's groups? Yes. Yes, thank you. If I could move on to a question surrounding the legislative competence, can the cabinet secretary confirm that the Scottish Government has accepted that to be legislatively competent, the act must use the definition of the protected characteristic of sex and within that the definition of women as applied under the Equality Act of 2010? Can she confirm that there will be no further amendments that would take the bill out with legislative competence? The Government has absolutely no intention of making any amendments to the bill. It is short enough. I think that convener has only one purpose. Therefore, the bill, as introduced, is certainly our intent to carry on with that. Of course, the legal definition of women stands as in the Equality Act and the Gender Recognition Act. The legal definitions are there for all to see. There is no definition now in this act. Finally, if I may, just in terms of a more practical question, does the cabinet secretary believe that a board with five men, four women and someone who was born male, who has transitioned, who has obtained a GRC, who describes and identifies himself as female, achieves equality for women? As I said in my previous answer, convener, the definition of women is based on what is in the Equality Act and the Gender Recognition Act 2004. That is the legislative basis of the definition for which we will refer to for the workings of this act. I thank the cabinet secretary for that answer and I please remind members to keep questions within the scope of the bill and what we are scrutinising today. I have a supplementary from Kevin Stewart. Thank you very much, convener, and congratulations on your new role. Cabinet secretary, maybe not a question for you directly, but maybe one for you to take back to colleagues, and that's around about technical fixes and finding the right legislative vehicle to deal with them. Obviously, you made that search and couldn't find the right legislative vehicle. All of us who have been ministers have had that at one point or other in terms of some simple things. I wonder, convener, if the cabinet secretary could go back to colleagues and to Parliament to see if there is a way to deal with technical fixes across the board rather than with individual pieces of legislation in some other way. That may require amendment of the Scotland act, I know, but it seems to me that sometimes we make things overly complex in this place because of the Scotland act and sometimes things remain on the statute books that should be fixed for longer than they should. I wonder if maybe a conversation with the Minister for Parliamentary Business, the corporate body, the bureau and others could lead to something different in order than having what are very short technical bills. You raise a very interesting point because clearly the process of bringing a bill to Parliament is sometimes a time-consuming one and the process we have to go through. This is an example of it for quite a small, very small technical fix is the way that it has to be done. I think that it raises another interesting point when we all look at what should be in primary legislation and what should be in secondary legislation. There is clearly and quite rightly sometimes a discussion that has had about getting specific details on to the face of our bill. I am not saying that this is the case for this, but again Mr Stewart brings a wider point in how quickly we can make changes and obviously changes can be made quicker to adapt to circumstances, events and so on if it is through secondary. As I said, that is not the case in this bill. This bill is dealing with a specific issue that was dealt with through the courts and needed to be done through primary legislation and quite rightly. That is a wider point in which I will ensure that colleagues are made aware of. I can maybe just go on a little bit. This is from an equality's viewpoint as well. If you roll me out with Scope of the Bill, I will understand. From an equality's viewpoint, we have the use of language in pieces of primary legislation, old legislation, particularly around folks who have mental health problems, which are outdated and, frankly, completely and utterly out of order. I think that these kind of things should be looked at if we are going to look at a way to deal with technical fixes as we move forward. Thank you very much. We will now move on to a question from Annie. I will have any questions. It is a short bill and I think that we will have heard from the cabinet secretary. Thank you, Annie. Likewise. Do we have anywhere Fulton? Would you like to come in? Thank you, convener, and welcome to your role and welcome to the cabinet secretary and officials. It is just a very, very quick question, which I think has been partly covered in the opening statement. I guess the obvious question is what would be the consequence of not introducing the bill to the committee. In many ways, there is no legal effect. There is no legal effect, not in many ways. There is no way that there is any legal necessity for us to carry the bill through. It is a tidying up exercise because it remains on the statute books even though it has no legal effect and therefore can be confusing. If we have something that people are reading in the original bill that people with wider knowledge will know that the court judgment has dealt with, that leads to confusion. I think that it is important that we tidy this up. Thank you, cabinet secretary. If there are no more questions, that concludes our business in public this morning. I thank the cabinet secretary and her officials once again for their attendance. We will now move into private session to consider the remaining items on our agenda.