 Good morning, and welcome to this 4th meeting of the Equality and Human Rights Committee of 2017. Make the usual request that mobile phones be switched on silent, or air flight, mode. Our first agenda item this morning is a decision on whether to take agenda item 3 in private. Our committee condemned to take agenda item 3 in private. Our substantive agenda item this morning is agenda item 2, which is a report from the Equality and Human Rights Commission. We are going to take some evidence on the UK business plan and how the priorities relate to Scotland. We thank you for copies of the business plan. I was up at 6.30 this morning and read it cover to cover. So, thanks for that, but can I welcome both our witnesses this morning? Rebecca Hilsin-Raff is the Chief Executive Officer of the Quality Human rights Commission and Chris Oswald who is the head of policy in Scotland at the commission. Chris, you have been to committee before and we welcome you back in Rebecca. I know this is your first time at this committee and we are very grateful for you coming along and we are really interested to hear what you have to say this morning. So, I believe you've got a brief opening statement you would like to make. I'm grateful to all of you for inviting us here today. As you say, it's my first time speaking to this committee, in fact it's my first time in this building. But it's not my first time in Scotland. I've been the chief executive for 18 months, and before that I was the chief legal officer. I come up to our Glasgow office be mathodraw клwsoedd ac ydy, mae'r hun efficiencych yn yr awd labr yn fawr am fy mod. Mae'n ystafodion cyf 160-rhyw l occasions ar rhoi am enw y byd shoots—VAIL refreshed. Dyma fy mitynd o ymbrifysgiliau ar y maes cyfer hwyl Cymru. Fy yw rhe ychydig o bAm yw hwynnw rhaid professionell sy'n gallu cymdeithasiet y byddurol ymdark gydwysus i ei ddatblygu arill a'r mynd— I appreciate you, the opportunity, I appreciate the opportunity very much Thank you. We have... We have obviously... This is a relatively new committee in this guys because of new responsibilities conferred on the Scottish Parliament. So the old equal opportunities committee has been expanded to take into account the qualities in human rights, so it cuts across all of those aspects and we're taking on that work with some figure, with some of the inquiries that we've launched. I see that you've got a couple of strategic aims in your plan that relate to Scotland. I know there are some UK-wide aspects of the work that you are doing that affect Scotland as well. Will you give us a wee overview of the strategic plans that you have, that would be an overview for the whole of the UK, but focused on the ones that would be specific to Scotland? I'm happy to, but we might play a bit of a double act, Chris, in a way. It's ond dyfod ond y bydd y cysylltu ar y cyfnod bwrdd cyntaf, ac yn おz- righta gofyn cysylltu ar y cyfnod cyfnod, yw'r corff ddaw yn erbyn mor ddiffenol, yw'r cyffnod cyfnod? Felly, mae'n gwneud thros rhagiau hynny ond pob gyfnod ar gyfer yr aethau. Mae'n gweithio'r gwneud ar gyfer yr aethau ffordd fewn cyfnod ar gyfer yr aethau. ond ti'r masfarae, a ddarganiad i gael gael gael gwyrdd gripwydol mwy olaf yma, sy'n yourlygrau gwleil yma yn ôl mewn gwirionedd, ond mae'n nhw'n cleifant ar howyn am ymargrws iawn ei gweld ar gael. Fy nid bod, y ddwylo'r gafachol o'r hunai iddiol bydd oes brydiau, yn ysgrifiann dechrau, mi'n fydd i'r rhain i gael gyffredin ni'n amdweithio, mewn gwirionedd Tyw'r gydawsfasol o ran diverseithio roi'r cyllidau cerddiyneb yn wirwghael. Roedd gyda shefyd yr oedd cydwyd yma yn ysgwrthio a'u cyfrifysgwr i gyf�idol gydaeon hwn. Felly mae'n meddwl o'r cyllid ymddangos o'r lefydd yn fawr iawn. On That is also about our access to justice project. We are looking at how we can ensure better outcomes in that place again across GB. Felly, we are also looking at our third object—I may have got it the wrong way around— looking at significant impact in human rights and equality. That's about how strategic litigation work, it's also about our inquiries work and our investigations, and we are also looking at increasing our own capability in terms of the way we operate as a GB and a Scottish and Welsh organisation, and that's about the work that we're doing at the moment, both in terms of our structure but also in terms of our systems and IT and offices going forward. In terms of what we're looking at specifically going forward, we're in the business planning stage as you appreciate looking forward to the 17-18 year. I don't know whether you wanted to talk specifically about Scotland in that regard, Chris. Absolutely. It may be at this stage easier if I get a real awful list of things, which we've got interests in, and if you want to come back to me about detail on any of them, more than happy to talk you through that. Our work programme in Scotland is very much driven by the publication that we released last year at Scotland Fairer, which is a compendium of the big data about equality and fairness in Scotland. We take our working priorities very much from that. The seven of those, the first, which is a very much one very familiar to the committee, is about the lack of evidence in Scotland around diversity in human rights. We have particular concerns about attainment in education. We have particular issues around employment, recruitment, retention and reward in employment. We are very interested in community relations, particularly issues around hate crime, targeted crime. We have strong interests in public participation through the lens of protected characteristics and the nine groups that we work with, and the human rights aspirations around participation, access to justice. We are not as strong, perhaps a priority in Scotland, given the commitments to employment tribunal fees that have been made, which are very welcome. We have concerns around health, concerns about very basic issues of harassment, security and the ability to live independently. Breaking that down into specifics in terms of employment work, I am sure that the committee is aware that we have been doing a lot of work on pregnancy discrimination. We estimate that 5,500 women lose their jobs in Scotland every year because of pregnancy discrimination. We are doing a lot of work with the Scottish Government on that. We have a very strong focus on equal pay and pay gaps, and we also have a very strong interest in board diversity, whether that be private boards, public sector boards or the boards of private companies. In terms of our legal work, we accept cases, we make interventions and courts, we take cases in our own name. You may well have seen last week that we were in the Supreme Court on what is known as the buggies against wheelchairs issue. In Scotland, as I said, we do legal representation and intervention. We also have a very strong emphasis on transfer of expertise, so skilling up unions, CABs and advice agencies to understand equality and human rights law so that they can represent people themselves. We are coming towards the end of the first four-year cycle of the public sector equality duty phase. On April 30, public bodies in Scotland have to publish what they have been doing and what they have achieved over the past four years, as well as a new set of outcomes. We have just signed off a major review of that, where we are going to look at the activities and outcomes that each of the 250 bodies have achieved. That is a major piece of work, and we will report back publicly, we anticipate September, to be able to say, with some recommendations about what is this working, is that not working, what would we suggest going forward. We have been doing some work around the outcomes of Scotland fairer, particularly around targeted and hate crime, feeding off Duncan Morrow's review and Scottish social attitude survey. We are about to do one on participation, where we are again very interested in the Scottish Government's support to one in five and about how we get greater diversity, whether that be from a tenants association, to a community council, to elected office, and then attainment, where, whilst we support the aims of the Scottish Government in terms of the attainment challenge, we have a concern that issues of differences of attainment between boys and girls, disabled and non-disabled people, particularly gypsy travellers, may not always be being picked up in what is predominantly an anti-deprivation strategy. There are loads of things to talk about. I will be very brief on the other ones. A particular interest that my team is working on just now is looking at the opportunities that new investment brings to Scotland. Both the affordable housing programmes and the city deals to us represent major opportunities to take forward critical areas of policy. Taking perhaps the affordable housing one as an example, we are building 50,000 affordable houses. 17,500 wheelchair users in Scotland are inappropriately housed. Ethnic minorities are four times more likely to be overcrowded than anybody else in Scotland. We have a real opportunity here to build housing. We start to take some of that demand out of the system to accommodate people's needs, but then equally, we have a real opportunity to bring women, ethnic minorities and disabled people into the construction industry, where they are very, very lowly represented. We are looking at things such as city deals and investment programmes as opportunities, but we can change the physical infrastructure, the places that we live and the places that we work, and who has the opportunities to work in those places. We are in conversation with the Scottish Government and ministers just now about how we coordinate all of that, but there is a real sense that we want to go beyond simply helping to eliminate discrimination. We want to seize the opportunity that some of that stuff presents to Scotland and to help public bodies through procurement, planning or monitoring to get it right to really seize those opportunities. I could go on for ages, but I won't. There are lots of questions from committee members. There are two things that I would like to pick up with you on some of the work that the committee is doing. You mentioned some of your litigation work. Could you give us some examples of that? I don't know about the wheelchair versus the buggies one. We know that one quite well here. I think that Lothian Buses was one of the issues in that. Maybe if you give us some idea of the litigation work that you are doing, and maybe how the frequency of that compares over the past couple of years. Thank you. Chris has stolen my thunder by talking about the Doug Pauley case, which we were, of course, very pleased about. Other recent cases that we have been involved with have been involved, for example, what is known as the bedroom tax. We have been involved in a case that looked at the application of that in relation to families with disabled children and held that it was unlawful in relation to the impact on children in that place. We have also been involved in the last year in relation to various cases that impacted on gypsy, Roma and Traveller families. That included a case in relation to weather spoons for refusal of service on that basis. It also involved a case in relation, actually I think it was the other four, in relation to the, so I am looking for the word, the referral of planning applications in relation to gypsy and Traveller sites in the Greenbelt, where these were under a administrative arrangements, recovered centrally, as opposed to decided locally, and that was held to be a breach of the public sector equality duty. In relation to other cases, we have taken various cases in relation to immigration issues. We are currently in relation to a case in relation to the amount of welfare paid to child immigrants in relation to other cases recently. I think, generally speaking, in terms of the amount of cases that we take, we are looking at cases that are both at an intervention level and cases that we fully fund, because we are able to take cases, both where we intervene as a neutral party in relation to an expert body or cases where there is a breach of the equality act and we are able to fund them fully. If you look at those cases together, generally speaking, we are taking around about 30 cases a year at the moment. That is an area where we used to take more cases and where one of the issues for us is about how strategic cases are referred into the commission. We have done an awful lot of work trying to work with stakeholders to increase the number of cases that we take. One of the problems there is around where cases originate. We have struggled in the past to develop a full pipeline of cases coming through from the helpline, since that has been outsourced. There are also issues with capacity around the advice services where we work to try to encourage a pipeline of cases. Obviously, they are struggling with capacity in relation to cuts that they have been imposed with. We are currently running a pilot for January, February and March this year looking at a slightly different approach, particularly in relation to disability discrimination cases. There are two reasons for that. One is that we are obviously able to provide extra support in relation to disability. We know that there are particular issues there, and we think that taking on disability cases is going to help around various bits of work that we are doing, particularly in that field. For example, we have just launched a housing inquiry looking into disability access housing across GP, and we hope that more disability discrimination cases will help us to identify more contextual evidence around problems that people are experiencing in that place. We are also about to report in relation to the UK's compliance under the CRPD convention for the rights of people with disabilities. We also have a report coming out on disability in early March looking at disability across GP. That is the reason for looking at disability particularly. Coming back to the question that you asked, we hope that looking at disability discrimination cases in a slightly different way, where we are looking at taking cases at a less strategic level, not necessarily just looking at an appeal case but also at first instance cases, is going to help us to understand how a slightly different approach to litigation may help us to adopt a different way of taking cases on in the future, and maybe help to get in more cases going on further into the year. After that pilot is completed, we will be looking at identifying impact and seeing whether that helps us to increase the pipeline. I have a brief illustration of how it works practically in Scotland. A couple of years ago, we were approached by a profoundly deaf woman who required to use a signer. She told us that she had been rushed into hospital for an emergency operation. She was in hospital for seven days at no point did the hospital provide a signer. She left hospital having not consented to the operation and not knowing what procedure had been carried out on her. This is the second time that this had happened in two or three years. We felt the issue was so serious that we commenced litigation and issued a writ against the health board. The health board, as is very often our experience in Scotland, wanted to work with us. We agreed what is called a section 23 agreement, where the health board signs a legally binding agreement with us, which says that it will do a certain amount of things over a set period, which we can take back to court should that not happen. However, not just leaving it there, we had concerns that this was not unique to the health board, so we have looked across every health board in Scotland at their practices and policies around signing particularly. We are now working with the health department to try and get a common approach to providing basic levels of communication support to people who have no other option. Therefore, we tend to use litigation where we have to, where the respondent is willing, we will enter into agreements with them, but the aim is very much to then take that to scale so that we do not just have to keep on going through every health board every month. To operate as a strategic litigator obviously means to use our functions in a way that identifies the cases that are going to make a bigger impact. We have a strategic litigation policy that identifies what criteria we use to take on a case, and that will include whether there is an opportunity to clarify the law and what the impact of the issue is. However, it is also a practical issue because when you take on cases at first instance, they tend to settle, and therefore it is about the use of practical and purpose of use of our resources. However, it is absolutely the case that the majority of the work that we do is slightly subradar in the sense that it does lead to an impact that leads to settlement or addressing of the issues in the case. It does not lead to a case that goes to court. We might come back to capacity issues later, and we will certainly come back to the disability issues when one of my colleagues picks it up. One more thing that I want to pick up with you is in your strategic plan. It is about protecting and promoting the human rights of refugees. You will know that the committee has put out a call for evidence on destitution and asylum, and we are getting many replies, including from a family in a refugee camp in Turkey, on that. Given the backdrop, we are looking across the Atlantic with horror, when we should be looking at our own back door with horror when it comes to how refugees are treated in this country. We still are the only country in the EU, while we remain in the EU that has no limit of time on detention. We have the issue that you said with children of asylum seekers plunging deeper and deeper into poverty, which will probably feed into some of the evidence that we will receive on destitution and the impact that that has on vulnerable families. Can you give us a bit insight into the work that you would be doing to highlight that? My worry is that we are in a situation in which certain world leaders have given permission. For certain aspects of reactionary right-wing horrible treatment of people, especially refugees, it becomes normalised, and that is my worry. We still have serious issues in this country of how we treat people seeking sanctuary. I am wondering about any work that you are doing on that and how we can work alongside you or complement the work that we are doing on our inquiry in asylum and destitution? You have caught us at a point where we are in the middle of business planning, so it is something that we are looking particularly at. We have particular concerns, well-known concerns, about the housing of asylum seekers. In England, there is more of an issue perhaps about health and access to healthcare. We are developing plans at the moment, but they are very much shared concerns. As I am sure that you know, we have quite a strong history of looking at human trafficking in Scotland as well. We have shared this committee and ourselves have done inquiries and investigations into that. I cannot put my hand on my heart today. I am really sorry and say that this is exactly what we will be doing in two months' time, but very much the commitment is there. What we do not want to do is to replicate the same work that you are doing and the very strong focus. We share, I think, exactly the same concerns around destitution, around intolerable standards of housing and of the physical and mental harm that has been done to people seeking asylum in the UK. We also have a very strong concern about the public discourse around refugees and asylum seekers and minority groups generally. We have seen very strong responses in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, post-Brexit in terms of increased hate crime. We have not seen that to the same extent in Scotland. I am not saying that it did not happen, but I am assured that the police figures are accurate. Something different has happened in Scotland, which is fascinating in itself. We share exactly the same interests of you, and it is very much in our interests to have a further discussion as we work up our plans and you firm up your plans for your inquiry. Thank you, convener. Good morning to the panel. Thank you very much for coming to see us today. I have two areas that I would like to discuss. The first is quite a broad area. Rebecca, you have mentioned several times about the role of your organisation in treating monitoring. When we first formed as a committee or reformed as a committee in the summer, we were looking at the concluding observations of the various UN treaties as a weather vein as to where we should direct our work. Considering that there are some 900-plus concluding observations, it could be at times like drinking from a fire hose. I just wanted to ask how you triage those and how you use them to shape the work of your organisations, which are the low-hanging fruit, which are the absolute golden priorities, and how maybe you could help us in shaping our approach to the concluding obs. The treating monitoring work that we do does lie at the heart of our organisation. I am very proud of that particular function. It has quite a high regard within the country. There are lots of different ways of answering that question. I suppose that we start hearting structurally. One of the things that we have done recently is that we have allied the treating monitoring function with our research function, which has now been brought together within the same team. Part of what we are looking now is looking across the board in terms of what our evidence base is and what comes out of concluding observations, so that we can use that to inform our policy work much more clearly going forward. A lot of the work that we are doing in terms of our restructure is about the ability to look much more clearly across the organisation to ensure that the work that we do informs what the various different teams are working on instead of being back in the silo culture. I would say that internally for us it is about looking at the concluding observations and mapping them across the work that we do using our internal criteria that we use to prioritise work against what comes out. Because we work across all the international human rights treaties against which we report on the country's compliance, we are of course very keenly aware of what the overlaps are. We have that advantage of not being tied to one specific treaty, but just for example, because it is an obvious one, we look at issues around access to justice and the impact of legal aid reform and on employment tribunal fees on different groups. Because it is disproportionate in relation to women and because it has also been found to be disproportionate in relation to disabled people and ethnic minorities, that will come up in different treaties as a concluding observation and we can identify where the overlaps are and where the strength is in terms of an issue that we would want to look at as a priority. Another thing that we are doing is that we are talking to Westminster and it is a really helpful conversation to have with you about what our relationship is with Parliament in terms of taking forward those concluding observations. One of the things that my sense is that while it has been a really important piece of work for us, we have not perhaps been as strategic as we need to be in terms of finding a structure within which we can flag up those concluding observations and take them forward working closely with select committees to flag up our concerns around them. What you will find is that they are referred to in our case work, in the reports that we do and in the work that we do, but we would really welcome an opportunity to work with you, perhaps as a sort of regular report, perhaps as some sort of structure whereby we can flag up what we regard as the key concerns and the concluding observations and work with you to bring them to the attention of the Scottish Parliament. I do not know whether you want to add to that, Chris. Again, perhaps this is a very practical example of that. Again, both the committee and ourselves share significant concerns about identity-based bullying in schools. It is an issue that comes up across a number of treaties. It is an issue that we have done a lot of research on and worked very closely particularly with LGBT youth and others and respect me. We have recommendations that we are putting back to the education department about how we feel the relationship or the responsibilities of schools and education authorities could be adjusted to give greater information and greater protection to children experiencing that. Thank you both very much for that answer. I think that this is a subject that we will return to. Chris, I wanted to pick up something that you specifically mentioned in your opening remarks about maternity discrimination. I am really sorry, but I have a bit of a huge problem today, so thank you. I wanted to return to something that you said in your opening remarks specifically about maternity discrimination—the number of women who lose their jobs as a result of their pregnancy. I have been working with a constituent who has a blog called Stay at Home CEO who was an astonishing person who was largely managed out as a result of her maternity situation whilst being chief executive of an organisation by a very unprogressive board. I think that she really opened my eyes to the scale of the problem. What astonished me was the number of blue chip household name companies that do this as a kind of matter of systemic concern. What role do you have to call these companies out? I could name them right now, maybe be sued in the morning, but it strikes me that we really need to shine a light, because I was really astonished at just how prevalent it was. The fact that, in a lot of ways, the victims of this discrimination within these big companies are not even aware of each other. I think that one of the first steps to my mind in terms of ending those practices is to really shine a light on it and name them chain. Can you offer some reflections on that? Absolutely. We published extensive research on this last year. I think that it has been a major theme of our work going forward. There are two distinct groups of women being affected in quite distinct ways, so we have younger women often in low-skilled, un-unionised workplaces who are often disimplified. They are straightforward and really quite bald. We have another group of women who are perhaps more distinct in line with the situation that you are describing, where they are professional and find that they are being overlooked for promotion and being downgraded. They come back to work to find that somebody else is doing their job. Discrimination is different depending on the sector that you work on. We find leisure, caring—there are particular issues there—and then there are particular issues in finance, so we need to take slightly different approaches to those. There is not an issue that is devolved to the Scottish Government, but we have been working very closely with the Scottish Government on this. We are very pleased that Mr Hepburn has taken this issue up very strongly. The First Minister has made commitments. Inevitively, we have a working group, but it is a group of good people who are plugged in from the STUC from ACAS and other people. We are looking at how we let women know what their rights are. To me, it is unimaginable in 2017 that this is going on, but it is so ingrained in workplace culture that women keep their heads down. We know from our research that the more you know about your rights, the more likely you are to be able to negotiate with your employer and put them right. There is a big emphasis on our work with the Scottish Government on letting women know that this is wrong and letting women know that there are remedies. The tribunal situation is really problematic, because for many, particularly the younger, lower-paid women, going to tribunal on this issue is simply not an issue. We support the Scottish Government's move towards more arbitration-type measures, but we are also interested in positive incentives. We reckon that about 80 per cent of companies are doing the right thing. It is focusing on the 20 per cent who are doing the wrong thing and using things, levers, things like the Fair Work Convention, things like the business pledge, to encourage people to shift practice. Sometimes employers do this out of ignorance, sometimes they do it out of malice. Where it is ignorance, we want to try and help them to understand that we have done a whole pile of resources on our website, helpful things that they can look at and do, but, obviously, where the behaviour is so high-handed, we again resolve the right to take legal action should we need to. We are very much in persuasive mode in Scotland on this just now and we are very grateful for the support of the Government, who were the first in the UK to come out very clearly on this. It is very clearly a matter of principle in Scotland, which we are very heartened by. I suspect that it is going to take time to resolve, but we think that we are on the front foot with it. If I can just add to that and endorse what Chris said, we are working with business to identify what good practice looks like. There is some fantastic good practice out there. For us, it is really about helping people to learn from each other. It is definitely about identifying the carrots. We, for example, published a report on what the financial penalty was for maternity and pregnancy discrimination last year, because it is not inconsiderable. I do not just mean for the individuals but for the companies. It is another interesting reflection on the use of litigation, because when we did the research into pregnancy and maternity, we particularly focused on trying to pick up litigation in the area. We did pick up cases, but they all settled. Those are very rarely cases that you can take through, because by their nature employers will pay off the individuals. It is quite difficult to make a mark that way, which is one of the reasons why we are focusing on that key issue of making people aware of their rights. We have called again in this area for employment tribunal fees to be reduced and, in fact, for the deadline to be delayed in order to be able to allow women to take cases. We have also looked at measures to improve health and safety in business, because sometimes it is basic, because it is an awareness of people's physical environment and the importance of making them safe. Good morning and thank you very much for coming. I wonder if I can ask two questions at a reasonably high level and one of the issues that Chris has raised. If I can go to a high level issue, I am still fairly new to all of this, but I noticed that in your report there are some financial cutbacks coming. What effect will we have on Scotland? What relationship do you have with other organisations doing similar work in Scotland so that you are not duplicating each other's work? I talk about money and you talk about other people. We have had a cut of 25 per cent imposed on us under the latest spending review. We were asked to model cuts of 40 per cent and 25 per cent. We resisted it very fiercely, and we were hoping not to be cut or to be cut by less, but we were imposed with a 25 per cent cut. I am happy to talk about that as it affects the commission as a whole. In relation to Scotland particularly, which I think was where the direction of your question was, it is not impacted on Scotland in any negative way. There is a particular approach to remodelling of our organisation that strengthens the Scottish resource considerably. That is because one of the ways in which we are looking to remodel the organisation is to ensure that we have a more coherent approach to the devolved administrations, and we also have an office in Cardiff. One of the concerns that we always have is to ensure that the work that we do in Scotland is targeted and effective in relation to the Scottish-specific issues, but that, as a GB organisation, we operate effectively and Scotland is not the forgotten bit and Wales is not the forgotten bit, so we offer a coherent and effective whole. What we have done is that we have appointed an executive director, and the three executive directors are the highest officials in the commission reporting directly to me, each of whom has a specific responsibility for one of the countries for England and Scotland and Wales. Scotland benefits from having an executive director as well as a new individual who is coming in to lead the team, specifically at a Scottish level. I am happy to talk about the changes in the commission that affect the commission as a whole and how they impact on Scotland, but I think that that is probably the single biggest change that I regard as a big plus for Scotland. I am hoping that it will help us to work more effectively with Glasgow going forward. Chris, do you want to pick up? There are so many examples. The fundamental point is that we are a relatively small organisation in Scotland. As 17 or 18 of us, we are reliant on working with and through other people to achieve our aims, so stakeholders' relationships are enormously important to us, trying to use the influence and the levers that we have. To go back to the pregnancy maternity example, we have been engaging really closely not just with the Scottish Government in terms of the business pledge and the fair work convention. We have been working with some of the voluntary sector around working families, gender, maternity action and looking to the NHS in terms of other opportunities for health visitors or midwives to reinforce messages to mothers, inspected mothers or new mothers. It is really about trying to cut the cloth of what we are doing and mapping who else is doing what so we do not end up replicating work. Obviously, the most critical relationship I would say is with the Scottish Human Rights Commission, where we have the luring potentially of roles of the Scottish Human Rights Commission having primacy over devolved human rights matters, ourselves having primacy over resolved human rights matters. When we look at something like human trafficking, it is not as simple as that, it is not just an immigration issue, it is a policing and health issue in Scotland. Before we engage in any major piece of work, we have to look around and see who else is active in the area, who is doing what and how we can best use the resource that we have to work with the flow in Scotland rather than to take oppositional positions. We are very lucky in Scotland, the voluntary sector and the public sector, and other regulations are quite coherent. There is quite a strong sense of partnership, so it is not a difficulty. However, we are very conscious of the resource that we have and playing to the particular strengths that we can bring to a table, which might be a research strength, a particular legal perspective or a particular policy input that other people do not necessarily have. The second question was picking up your point, Chris, in 1 in 5 in regard to seeing disabled people. I am interested to know what work you are doing at the more grass-roots level, because we hear a lot about maybe Scottish Parliament local authorities. I was interested you were talking about community councils, tenants organisations and things like that. It may well be that you can maybe point my direction. Is there data around that in regard to what is the representation on community councils from different diversity groups and other areas like that? At council level, have you done any work in regard to scoping where councils across Scotland sit in regard to diversity? I would stress that we are not a community development organisation. The staff of 17 people, we simply cannot do that type of work, so we work very much through and with those organisations, like 1 in 5, who have that particular remit and interest. In terms of participation, it is an issue that we have picked up on in the Scotland fairer. We have pulled together the data that there is, and the data is not strong in Scotland. We do not know the composition of community councils. There is no requirement on community councils to collect monitoring data. I am very interested in things like tenants associations and that ladder of participation that you cut your teeth on something local and move through. After every local government election, COSLA does a diversity survey of elected members, but not of candidates. Again, it is interesting that we know who gets through, but we do not know who does not. It is not always very well completed, so there are issues about data gaps there. We work anecdotally. There is a clear gender imbalance that we can see at a local level in local authorities. There is a lack of ethnic minority candidates. There are a lack of people with declared disabilities, but we suspect that there are a number of people with hidden disabilities that they do not necessarily share with their colleagues. It is very interesting that, as we are moving into the public appointment system and the new regulations are coming in there, which we are working very closely with the Government on, it is about having better information to enable non-departmental public bodies to know what is the composition of our board. If we have nobody who is LGBT or under 30 or 40, what are we going to do to plan? There is emphasis on succession planning, which the Government published documentation about a couple of days ago. It is one of those things where the commission has a very strong interest, but it is not our sole responsibility. We work with the appointments commissioners. We are very interested to engage with the parties, with the Parliament, with other people doing the same work, but it is a collective effort, which is going to get us there. When COSLA completes and publishes its research, that will become an active thing that we will then start to use to say, well, this is the result. How do we improve this going forward, to have a more reflective form of local democracy than perhaps we do just now? Thank you, convener, and good morning. I wanted to ask you about strategic aim 2 and bullet point 2.2, developing levers for change. I wonder if you could possibly give us an update on where you are with the pilot programme. You talked about the two-year project to improve understanding of levers that are effective in reducing discrimination, and you said that you will use that research to help us pilot and evaluate the effectiveness of interventions. Can you update us on where you are? When will you be starting the actual practical work and when will you be ready to report back? That is a piece of work that we are looking at in terms of informing how we operate across the board. We commissioned a piece of work last year looking at what influences people's discriminatory behaviours, if you like, and what takes you from a prejudice mindset to unlawful acts. One of the interesting pieces of research that we produced was in relation to hate crime, and it takes us back to the question that was asked earlier about what we are doing in relation to the refugee crisis, because there has been quite a lot of work that we have done, not just in terms of looking at the spike in hate crime but at what works and trying to address it. What we discovered was quite complex in terms of causation. There are lots of different kinds of hate crime, depending on what the motivation is. There are four different kinds of motivation, and it depends on where the situation is in terms of where the locality of the hate crime is and what kind of victim of a hate crime might be in relation to perhaps being a disabled person or whether they are from an ethnic minority. All those things influence how the hate crime comes about and what the motivation is. One of the other things that we found out through that piece of work was that there has been very little done by way of intervention to try to understand what works. We know that there has been some successful work in relation to the identity bullying in schools. We also know that overall what tends to be effective in that place is bringing people together and that prejudice is often helped by being able to bring people face to face with people who look different or who are a bit different. Last year, that was an example of a piece of work where we looked at causation and what has been done across the piece. Generally speaking, we find that there is a very low level of understanding of this area, particularly in relation to very different protective characteristics. I am about to forget which one it is, but I think that most of them are clustered around gender and may have got that one wrong. In terms of understanding what prejudice looks like across the field, there has not been enough work undertaken in relation to what works. That was the first bit. In terms of looking at that going forward, as Chris said, we are in the middle of business planning at the moment. It is really looking at the areas of work that we are going to be engaged with and looking at working with other organisations and using the research that we have done to ensure that we identify the right levers going forward in order to ensure that we are approaching things from it as an effective place as possible. At this stage, I am not able to be more specific than that, but we are very happy to keep you up to date with our thinking. That would be very helpful. I will briefly ask you about strategic aim number one. You talk about stereotyped media reporting, and there is almost a link between what you have been saying and how you are going to look at stereotyped media reporting. You say that you are going to seek to build your understanding of factors contributing to environments where open expressions of prejudice against particular groups. It is something that has angered and perplexed me for a considerable length of time. Particularly in the print media, the language that they use to describe certain sectors of society—two that come to the front of my mind would be offenders in their families and Gypsy Travers—is used to describe those groupings of people. I certainly do nothing to quell discrimination or remove discrimination, and I have spoken to print media. Print media has told me that that is the language that the people who buy their newspapers want to read. I wonder how you will take that forward in conjunction with the rest of the work that you are doing. I think that you will know that we share a really strong concern about attitudes towards Gypsy Travers and behaviour towards Gypsy Travers, to the extent that we have published and republished guidance for editors in Scotland about how to report on Gypsy Travers issues without prejudice. It is unique that we have not felt the need to do that for any other group, but it signals the deep concern that we have, too. There was a fairly obscure European case emanating from Latvia, oddly, which has recently confirmed that print media and online media are responsible for hate speech, which is posted on their blogspaces. That has been useful because we have circulated that around editors. I have been involved in Gypsy Travers work for a very long time. There seems to be a tempering in the media now that some of the stuff that we saw maybe five, ten years ago, where newspapers were camping fake Gypsy Travers caravans outside council offices, some of that has seemed to dissipate. I do not know if this is a different cadre of editors that have come in. I notice particularly that, in a number of the previously worst offending newspapers, they no longer have bulletin board comments under these Gypsy Travers stories. I am not saying clearly that this stuff is still going on on social media, clearly it is still going on on Facebook, but I think that we have made some progress there. I am heartened to see that I do not see the same sort of stuff that perhaps you and I have viewed years ago. We are perhaps linking to your previous question as well. We are very interested in what works. One of the big problems around prejudice and hate crime is that we see a number of... Something bad happens. There is a community response where people set up a project and they do more contact work. Then it shuts down and nobody ever documents it. We found this very much with rehabilitation of hate crime offenders when we published on this a few years ago. Quite frankly, nobody knows what works. We have commissioned a body—you will all be familiar with Crier, a coalition against racism based on Glasgow—to help to design tools, to help the small types of projects to evaluate and document what they are doing. My concern is that everybody feels good when we are doing a demo or whatever, but is it having long-term impact? Are we going to have to go back three years down the line and fight the same problem just around the corner? We are really interested in what is practically going to work to reduce those types of prejudices, to reduce those types of tensions, so that we can recommend this type of thing. Again, hearteningly, most recently Scottish social attitudes survey which we co-funded and have co-funded all the way through, the attitudes towards LGBTI communities in Scotland negative attitudes have collapsed. It is quite remarkable. I think that that is to do with better media representation, it is to do with soap operas, it is to do with all these different things. However, some communities—Muslims, Gypsy travellers, people with mental health problems—these attitudes persist. I think that that is where we are really interested. Again, we are not the only players in this market. We do not have all of the solutions to it, but working with the Government, with the police, with local authorities who have a duty to promote good community relations, that is what we want to try and crack. However, it is very volatile. As the community says, sometimes it is subject to things that happen many thousands of miles away. If I can add to that briefly, some of that comes back to comments that we made earlier in relation to the political discourse and the work that we see coming out of the Brexit referendum. We are working with political parties across the piece and we have written to them to suggest that there needs to be some work done in relation to the impact of words that sometimes can be used quite casually on the political stage but have a magnifying impact. It is not just about what happens in the media because it is about looking at the whole piece and how that interrelates. We are hoping to persuade political parties to look at some sort of voluntary pledge or code of conduct, which is absolutely not about impinging on freedom of speech. It is not about the criminal space that is separately dealt with, but it is about recognising the impact of words. There is also something about the responsibility for websites for the material that they host. There have been questions about treaty monitoring. There have been recommendations by the UN on a more robust duty on internet service providers and website hosts to look at that material in terms of their responsibilities lawfully. Just coming back to what Chris was saying about making sure that we do what works and we identify the right levers, one of the changes that we are looking at as part of our restructuring is a more systematic and more robust look at measuring the impact of what we do, which is something that we are very conscious of. We have been looking at a theory of change across all our business planning and looking at the ways that we work in to ensure that we have a more unified and more effective framework within which we should be accountable for all the things that we do to ensure that it impacts. Obviously, that issue about discourse and impacts on the lives of disadvantaged communities such as gypsys and travellers is part of that. Thank you very much, convener, and hello to you. I just wanted to ask in general how you decide who does what pieces of work between Rebekah, your organisation and the Scottish organisation, how that kind of division of responsibility actually works. I am looking at the business plan in front of us, and I am looking specifically for Scottish programmes of work. There is a page in there out of 38 pages in the document, so I am just wondering if there is enough treatment of the Scottish programme of work in a document like this for members of the Scottish Parliament and indeed the Scottish public to get a grasp of. Thank you for that. I might answer very briefly from a sort of high level and then expect Chris to talk more about some sort of specifics. It is probably fair to say that the Scotland office has two roles. They are about supporting what the organisation does on a GB level, and then there are things that they do that are very much Scotland specific. That is about recognising that some of the issues that surface for us as a commission, we look at across the board, but they look different in Scotland. Then there are some things that the Scotland office does, which are only going to be domain to them or relevant to them. It is enormously important to me that the work that goes on in our office in Scotland is robust and effective and properly resourced in proportion to the rest of the office. As I have said earlier, much of what we have done recently in changing the way we work has been part of that and to ensure that we have proper results, but also proper communication across the board so that what happens in Scotland is tied in at a senior level to what the commission does. I think that has helped recently by the fact that we have a new commissioner here in Scotland and we are looking at new ways of working that involve a more coherent dialogue between her and the chair of the commission and me and the executive directors. I do not know whether you want to pick up on specific examples of that, Chris. I will give you an example where it is relatively easy and an example where it is becoming more complex. The work that we are doing around pregnancy and maternity is reserved legislation. HR practice north and south of the border is largely the same, so a lot of what we do, we can generate the same sorts of messages, the same sorts of tools and resources, and the responsibility in the Scottish team is who do we relate to in Scotland, in the Government, the following director, to move that message. That is probably one of the most coherent GB parts of what we do. If you take something like criminal justice, is Britain fairer, which is the overarching analysis of Britain which shows particularly from England that there is a huge overrepresentation of ethnic minority people being stopped and searched and that there is a worrying concentration of Afro-Carabin people inlocked towards under psychiatric detention. In Scotland, I am assured from looking at the stop and search figures and working with the police that there is no disproportionality in race in terms of stop and search, but as we all know, we have had a very worrying issue about a concentration on young people and the impact of relations between younger people and the police. In terms of psychiatric treatment, there is very strong evidence of an over-intervention in England that results in black people being sectioned. In Scotland, I would argue that what we see is almost an under-intervention that people from ethnic minorities experience mental distress without support at home. What we try to agree in our planning is that there are big themes and concerns such as health, criminal justice and stop and search, but that we leave sufficient room for England, Scotland and Wales to be able to deal with their own specific issues. Some of the issues that are in stop and search in England are predominantly urban issues, which affect London, Birmingham and Manchester and do not necessarily. It is being sensitive and responsive and flexible to what we are being presented with. I would come back to the point that Scotland is particularly about working in partnership with other agencies. It is absolutely critical. We are not. It is neither desirable for us to simply tell people that we must do this. We have to work through people to help them to understand and then for them. Ultimately, they run the housing department. They run the psychiatric ward. We do not. We can only advise on the quality and human rights principles. I hope that that is on some way to answer your question. It helps. I suppose that you were doing a piece of work that was on some reserved matter. How do people in Scotland or Wales know whether that message is applicable here or in Wales, or whether it is just applicable to England? Do you make that clear when you are reporting? It is a bit like the issue that is convened when you hear reports from the BBC, who tell a story about a particular issue and people are left wondering, is that NHS England that they are talking about or Scotland or Wales or so on and so forth? Do you make it clear who you are talking about when you are reporting the findings that you find? I am sure that Rebecca will remember many conversations that I also do in communications where I go back and say that press release is talking about England. We do not always get it right, and I accept that, but we try very hard. We are very, very precious in Scotland and in Wales of the distinctiveness of the need that we have to message. It is not a unique problem and, as you say, the BBC routinely uses which I think that that is not Scotland that you are talking about here. With the best will in the world, we are fighting against a small country attached to a much larger country and sometimes the nuance and the subtlety gets lost. We try and counter that by being communicative, by engaging with our stakeholders. Most of the people that we work with in Scotland get it. If you listen to the today's programme, you know when they are talking about England and you know when they are talking about Scotland. I think that people in Scotland and Wales often are more constitutionally literate in that sense than perhaps some of our colleagues down said. That is maybe not a fair question. I think that I should be quiet now. I really thank you for that response. I wonder if I could ask you another question and you might know where you will answer it. It is about one of your reports on your website. It was about disabled access to soccer grounds. It is an English issue because it was the English Premier League that was involved in it. It was not yourself that did the piece of work although you were involved in it. The frightening message that came from it is that a third of the clubs in the English Premier League are unlikely to comply with guidance for disabled access. That is astonishing because when you consider that there is a large number of them, there are huge amounts of money getting into those football clubs and they cannot comply with basic things like that. I wonder why organisations like yourself are not involved with those clubs when they are building these shiny, fancy new stadiums? The message is that you would deliver in commentary after the fact that, if they were delivered at the design stage, they would be so much more helpful. Are you ever invited to participate in that kind of process, whether it is football or designing new housing or new skills? Are you involved at the sharp end and the front end? If not, how do we achieve that? I completely agree with you that it is mind boggling that disabled access to Premier League clubs is not better than it is. In fact, it is not perfect given the resources that are available. That is an area that we are working closely with the Premier League. We are looking at information that we are gathering on that and we will look to enforce any gaps in compliance that we find. It is a very important area for a couple of reasons. I think that it is really important that, if you are a Premier League fan, you have just as many rights as anybody else does to go and watch your club perform. However, I also think that there is a very important message in terms of a very high-profile area of our life where, if the Premier League cannot get it right, there is a message that goes across to other people. If they can take it seriously, there are gains to be made outside the sphere itself. I mentioned our work into disabled housing. We just launched an inquiry in that space. That is precisely one of the things that we want to look at. We have identified the finance gap between adapting a house that has not been built to be compliant with disability access after the fact in comparison to building it from the get-go with that in mind. That is exactly the kind of issue that we want to flag off. We want to identify, again, as Chris was saying, and we always say, and it is a sad thing to come back to, that we are a limited number of people, so we have to act strategically. That ability to influence things at the start is always going to be far more effective than picking off enforcement bits after the fact across the piece. I do not know the specific Scottish angle that you want to add to that. Other than just to see—earlier on, I mentioned the opportunities of investment. We have 50,000 affordable houses being built in Scotland, we have 17,500 wheelchairs users who are inappropriately housed. We have a real opportunity to get this right. I have a real fear that we could get this wrong. I look at local housing plans and I see need being profiled quite well. What I do not see is resource being moved. It is not just a social issue, it is not just a moral issue, it is also an economic issue because what ends up is that we end up with people being inappropriately located in hospital beds. It is in everybody's interests to design 21st century towns and neighbourhoods, and we are really interested in looking at issues of spatial planning, of housing planning, of investment, so that we can squeeze every bit of a quality benefit out of that. As I said earlier, whether it is in terms of the house that people can live in or who builds the house and the economic opportunities that that brings, I am quite excited about it. There is a real opportunity here to do things right, but we will not do it right unless we pay attention to it, and that is why I think that it is issues of leadership from the committee, from politicians, from senior people in the professions. We have all got a shared common interest in getting this right. Can we just get it right this time? Can I pick up on that point? One of my bugbears is a quality impact assessment, and the quality of the information contained within it. You will realise last week that the Scottish Government put out a call for evidence or a consultation on a review of the planning system. It seems to me that those issues could be resolved at planning stage if an equality impact assessment is done properly with quality information. What I want to know is whether you will insert yourself into that process of the review for planning in order to ensure that that equality impact assessment and that building into the infrastructure of accessibility are there, whether you will do that. That is one question, but you will also see from your report that you are disbanding the disability committee. How can you realise the actions of the CRPD report without having a discreet committee who would undertake that work? I will do the first part. I completely agree with you. What we are putting to the Scottish Government in terms of a vision around particular city deals and investment is that there are three essential points. There is a point about planning, equality analysis and information, and procurement. We have real opportunities. My frustration in a lot of the equality impact assessments that I see is that people focus on the first part of the duty. Are we doing harm? Are we eliminating discrimination? Are we advancing equality of opportunity? Are we fostering good community relations? This is the opportunity part of it. It is not just about not doing bad things. It is about doing things better and including things. We are very much—this is the emphasis that we want to take with this work. I have seen the quality impact assessments from other Governments where they look at things such as city deals and they say that there is no equality impact. I find that almost impossible to understand how you have reached that conclusion because there must be opportunity here. We are very much talking about the same thing. Capacity capability sometimes is limited. I would like to see greater senior management scrutiny and member scrutiny of quality impact assessments. I would like to see them being used more actively in decision making. It is a process. It is better than it was when it was introduced that we are getting better at it. Part of what we want to do is to identify the good practice and to share that with people so that they understand that this is a really good way of approaching this. We came a bit late to the table with the Aberdeen city deal, but we were able to work with the Scottish Government to say that there are things that it can do here. We want to take that forward into the next city deals to drill home exactly those issues that you are raising. What about the review of planning? Was that something that you would be taking part in? I met planning aids Scotland on Monday to have a chat about what they are up to and what they are. We fully intend to engage in evidence and committee sessions on that and have some suggestions to make, some of which are around gypsy travel sites and how we might start to look at different ways of looking at those issues. I am sure that you are aware of the disability committee review and a decision by the Government to end its statutory footing. Rebecca, did you say that it was a decision by the Government to end its statutory footing? That is a statutory instrument that has now been passed. We are in the middle of looking at a transition model. The disability committee still exists in its statutory form until the end of this year, until 31 March. After that, we will be looking at a transition stage, which we are currently in the middle of modelling. I would say a couple of things. First of all, it is absolutely not the case that disability generally, as an issue, is not very important to the commission. Our chair, David Isaac, holds it as one of his key priorities. He has spoken to that theme on a number of occasions. We have committed that either he or I will attend every current meeting of the committee while it exists. In fact, I would be there now, but I chose to come here instead this morning. The opportunity of the change in status and the transition modelling has afforded us the ability to look at it and say, what works and what does not work. I should pay tribute to the disability committee members, because they are very much engaged with that. We had a long meeting with them just before Christmas to review that and to identify what the strengths and weaknesses were of the former current way of working. As a headline thing, I think that what we struggled with is a model that has separated out the disability arm of the commission into a separate place with a group of people who have looked at our work slightly outside what has happened historically in relation to other protected characteristics. To go back to new ways of working, one of the things that we are trying to do is embed much more joined up ways of working across the organisation. That goes to looking at every protected characteristic, what we want to do and what we are doing is identifying leads in the commission to look at how every single protected characteristic plays out in our work and to ensure that it is consistent and effective and robust where it needs to be. We think that that will embed disability as an area of key priority as a protected characteristic. Obviously, as you say, in relation to the work that needs to be taken forward, in relation to the CRPD, much more effectively than having it sit under a disability committee, which is probably fair to say, not necessarily being connected as effectively as it ought to have been to the leadership and the work of the commission as a whole. In addition to that, we are looking at upskilling, I do not like that word, developing and training staff as a whole, so that we will be able to look at people working in this area who I think are going to be able to take up the work, very effectively going forward. We are not obviously looking at moving away from that very important aspect of our work, which is about stakeholder engagement. The disability committee has been very important in doing that, but it is something that we will continue or look a bit different. Stakeholder engagement has been one of the key skills by which we have looked at identifying people who are moving into our new operating model, so that is an area that I would expect to be very much at the forefront of what is taken forward. Can you see why there would be a concern that something loses its statutory force? That would be a concern given the rollback in many of the rights that we currently enjoy. There is talk about withdrawal from the Council of Europe, repeal of the Human Rights Act, the trade union bill, all of those things that seem to undermine and weaken the current rights that we have. Can you see why there would be such a concern if something loses its statutory footing? I understand about it being placed within all the other protected characteristics, but if there is no statutory force behind that, how do we ensure that it maintains its importance and its drive? I completely understand where you are coming from. I am more than happy to talk about, since you mentioned it, the work that we are going to be doing in relation to the implications for Brexit on the lack of having that constitutional framework going forward, so I am absolutely on the same page as you. I entirely understand what it looks like, which is why I started off this session saying that it was fabulous to have an opportunity to come and talk and understand each other's perspectives better. I would say that I am stepping back a little bit and picking up on the questions that were asked earlier about gypsy and traveller disadvantage. That is relevant. I think that this is an area where the commission, perhaps fair to say four or five years ago, was not doing as much work as it could have done. We have done an enormous amount of work with the gypsy and traveller community. A large number of the cases that we have taken up over the past two or three years since I have been at the commission have been in that place. I think that our relationships with the community are very effective. The amount of information that is passed to us through our relationships with them is incredibly useful. It enables us to take both a strategic and impactful approach to disadvantage in what I think may be fair to say in some ways is the most disadvantaged ethnic group in Great Britain, but we do not have a statutory committee for race. That is work that we undertake by being an effective commission and we are networked. It is about our ways of taking forward something that we think is really important and having an impact. That is how I would see us working in relation to disability as well. Mary is going to come in, but I would rather have seen all those protected characteristics having a statutory force than a withdrawal from one. That is my point, Mary. Can I just ask a very brief supplementary in relation to the disability committee? Is my understanding that the Lord's committee made a recommendation to the commission that the disability committee be reconstituted and the decision was taken by the commission not to do that? The statutory instruments have already been passed. That is not in our gift. I move on to it because you have talked to me about some of the reorganisation that has gone on. You will imagine that there has been some discourse about the reorganisation and how that happened. You may not be able to answer that question, but one of the concerns that we have is the fact that the reorganisation and the changes that have came about from that, including possible compulsory redundancies, were not discussed with the devolved administrations. I do not know whether that is something that you can answer, Rebecca, but if you can give us any insight into why that decision was taken and not to discuss that with the devolved administrations, especially in Scotland, when we have just got new additional equality duties conferred on this Parliament? It is certainly not the case that we declined to discuss them with you. I am more than happy to come on and talk about them in more depth to identify where they were coming from and what that thinking looked like. To be honest, my position is that this is an internal restructuring. I think that it is right and appropriate that we make all our possible best efforts to engage and consult, particularly with devolved administrations. Our investments are obviously about, for example, our strategic plan and our work areas of priority—we have done that today and on other occasions—but we are independent by statute. It is quite important that we are seen to be independent and that our internal ways of working are about proper consultation internally and with trade unions. On an informal basis, I am always more than happy to talk about what we are doing. A key driver for our organisation was our strategic plan, which is a matter of what was publicly consulted on. We would say that, because of that, all our key stakeholders have fed indirectly into what we are doing, but we would not regard it as a proper thing to go out and consult externally about how we organise ourselves. Some of the claims that we have heard are the way that selections have been done, people being left in precarious employment situations and a number of them being basic grade members of staff. The claim that an equality impact assessment—I am playing devil's advocate here, of course—that an equality impact assessment was maybe not conducted to the depth that it should have been and certainly not shared, is that something that you could answer? I am more than happy to answer. Would it just help if I spend a couple of minutes talking about restructuring as a whole, just to put it in context? I should start off by saying that I entirely welcome the question. Having said that, I do not think that it is necessarily appropriate for an independent body to discuss with the Government how it organises itself, does not mean that I am not happy to answer questions. I do welcome the interest. What I start from is that it is quite important to understand that there were three drivers for the restructuring. It is not simply about a matter of shrinking the organisation. Two or three years ago, we undertook a survey of the commission internally and identified through that a keen interest on the part of our staff for a change, a cultural change and a change in the ways that we work. Shortly after that, because we were statutorily obliged to consult on and lay a strategic plan, we did so. It was time to do that. We laid a new strategic plan in April 2015, which identified new ways of working. Thirdly, as I have already said, we had a cut of 25 per cent imposed on us late 2015 in relation to the spending review. It has been sadly about having to reduce our headcount, but it has also been primarily due to looking at a new way of working. We have not just lost 25 per cent of our headcounts in the spending review. We have lost, in the totality, over the period of time that the commission has been in existence over the past 10 years, more like 70-75 per cent. It has never been the case since that opening in 2006 that someone sat down and said, well, this is how much money we have. What is the best way of spending it? What is the best way of having an impact? What is the best way of doing what we want to do? That was what our strategic plan was about. It was about saying, well, what is our role? It was very much about saying, well, we need to be a national voice. We need to be an independent expert body. We identified various roles for ourselves, which was around being an influencer, being an information provider and having that national voice. That was very much moving away from more front-line activities and more about saying, where is the real impact? Yes, we have moved. We have had to lose a small number of our roles, but it has also been about creating a whole new organisation. In close consultation with the unions and our staff, we came up with a new model. If you look at the roles that we looked to move staff into, we had higher-skill sets and different-skill sets. Some jobs were lost because in new-wear working, there were particular areas that we did not need to take forward. Some jobs looked different. I will give you a couple of examples of that. We have spoken a lot this morning about impact and strategic working, which plays into that. We have also spoken a lot, and some of your conversations with Chris have played into the importance of working in partnership. Every single person who works for the commission now has to pass a key competency and stakeholder management because of the importance that we attach to that particular way of working. Where once it was something that we did in one particular silo, it is an example of how we look at staff across the board to take on a bigger role. I have had to ask all my staff, I am afraid, to act a little bit outside their comfort zone. Everybody is doing a bit more. I do not mean that they are working longer hours. I do not want them to, but they are very much looking at taking on bigger roles, more strategic roles. I have mentioned just an example of how we are looking at responsibility for protected characteristics, which is about identifying a group of people for every single protected characteristic in the commission who will be leading work across the piece to ensure that we are joined up and effective in that place. We have never done that before. We have been much more ad hoc in terms of what we are doing on race, for example. That will not be the case going forward. All that adds up to our higher skills and more autonomy. We are looking at a smaller senior management team, a smaller number of directors, which means having to push down responsibility and autonomy for work, which, to be honest, escalated inappropriately so that too much responsibility sat at a higher level. We cannot do that any more and it would not be right to do it anyway. We are looking at staff at a lower level who are able to take on that work and take it forward. I say all that at some length, because I think that it is quite important to understand that it has not just been about losing people. It is about the need to adapt in an incredibly important area at a vital time. You mentioned some of the external drivers in the world today to be more effective. I think that it is important to say that at every single stage of the way, we have looked at the equality impact of what we have done. The senior members of staff, the executive directors and I, who sat down and looked at every single decision at every single moment on every single stage, have taken an enormous amount of time and agonised over what we could do. We have made all possible adjustments for our disabled members of staff above and beyond what compliance looked like. By way of an example, at the last round, we decided to create two completely new posts that had not formally been in the operating model in order to keep two profoundly disabled members of staff on the payroll. That was a very important thing for us to do. However, we looked at the equality impact assessment. I emphasised that it was shared, compiled, drawn up, updated and shared with staff in a timely manner. We first shared it and updated it in the autumn last year. That was because that was the first time that we were able to identify what the impact was because that was when we first undertook the first stage of the selection processes. Because we looked at it at every single stage, I am quite confident that the process that has been implemented has been fair, robust, transparent and evidence-based. However, I need to add two things to that. I think that the EHRC cannot be proud of a result that sees some numbers of BME staff and some numbers of disabled staff without a job at the end of the day. I am not standing here before you to say that I am proud of that or pleased about it. I am not. To be honest, anybody losing their job is a matter of great sorrow for me. It is an incredibly difficult decision to have had to make, perhaps the hardest thing any of us have ever had to do. However, particularly in that space, I believe that we need to do better, but I need to separate the present and the past and the future. I have talked about the present, and that has been about the model that we have adopted and the approach that we have taken. I am quite clear that it was lawful and compliant. It was undertaken with all possible reasonable adjustments, and it was fair. However, there are historical reasons for how we ended up where we did, which are hard to address now historically. However, they go back to what I am afraid of. I am coming into the commission a couple of years ago. There was no positive action going on. There was not any work going on, frankly, to mentor or develop anybody at a lower level, let alone people from particular ethnic groups or from disabled people. That is work that we should have been doing. It was because we were not doing it that we ended up where we are now. What is incredibly important and the most important thing is that we get that right going forward into the future. I have already asked my senior executive director to set up a group that has already started looking at positive action work in the commission. That is going to be about providing the appropriate amount of mentoring, of coaching, of succumbent opportunities, of shadowing opportunities, of development and learning. This is all very much at the heart of a new way of working, but it is particularly important that we see more diversity, particularly at the senior level in the commission, and that we see members of those ethnic communities and disabled staff coming up to share the work that we are taking forward with the commission. That is all very welcome indeed, but it gives no comfort to the people who are facing a redundancy situation. Do you know off the top of your head how many vacancies you are currently carrying? I think that we are currently carrying 25. The great work that you talked about there about developing staff, is there opportunities in there to develop the staff who are currently facing redundancy to fill those vacancies? I talked about looking at the equality impact at every single stage when we were looking at decisions in terms of selecting people for posts. One of the things that I talked about was identifying new posts for profoundly disabled members of staff. Another thing that we did in relation to every single member of staff and in relation to every single vacant post was looking at the issue of developability. Is that person not operating at that level? Is that person not currently doing that role? Could they be developed into it? That thinking has already been done. It is slightly on-going because the process has not come to an end yet, but that has been a very key part of our thinking. Would that be an olive branch for those people who are facing redundancy situations? It is all by the conversations that we have had. Any other questions from the committee this morning? Mary, do you want to come back on an employment question? It has been reported to us that the majority of people who are in danger of losing their job are clustered in the lower grades. Is that correct? I am sorry, I did not hear that. The majority of people who are at risk of losing their job are clustered in the lower pay grades? I am not all of them, but some of them are certainly yes. How many people in your organisation in higher grades are disabled or black and minority ethnic? I would have to check that for—I can only guess and I would rather check it and write to you. That would be helpful. What assessment has been made about how the new operating model will operate in practice? I appreciate that it is a new thing and it may be difficult to give me any kind of answer, but we have been told that there will be a domain model operating across Great Britain, which means that staff that are based in Scotland will not work on Scottish cases or Scottish issues. Do you see that as being a problem or a good way forward? I would say that it is a good way forward, but I know that I would say that it would not. I think that if I can talk about it a little bit and then perhaps leave it to Chris to talk about perhaps a specific answer from the coalface, if you like, we are very positive about working across domains. It is one answer, if you like, to the agile problem of how do you deal with the commission that has such a broad remit. It is this idea that we are looking at six particular domains and then across that we will be looking, as I have already made reference to, what protector characteristics look like across the piece. It is enabling us to carry out our own internal strap line, which is about doing fewer, bigger, better things and about identifying specific aims within each domain and ensuring that the work across GB is focused in that place. That comes back to some of the questions that we have had earlier about looking at our impact, and we are only going to be able to measure impact and have the impact that we want if it is focused. Within any one of those domains, the work that is done will be both GB-specific and Scotland-specific, depending on what the specific area is. I might ask Chris to give that answer. Before you come in, Chris, can I add something else that you will be able to answer? I take on board the answer that Rebekah said, but perhaps Chris, you could address that, but you could also address the issue of, if you take the new powers that are coming to Scotland, there will be a spike, I would imagine, in inquiries and queries and issues within Scotland because of the new powers. How will the domain model impact that and how will the staffing in Scotland be able to deal with that? That spike has already started. We are getting lots of calls about board appointments in areas such as that. For us, that is business as usual in Scotland. We have a group of people who have a specific role and responsibility around the public sector duty. Myself, a couple of my colleagues in policy, a couple of the lawyers, and we meet on a regular basis. In every two weeks, we look at issues around the public sector duty. This is just an ongoing issue. The law change is not just the new powers coming to Scotland, other changes come in. We have issues about private companies of more than 250 people having to report publicly. That is something that we have to absorb. We treat that as being core. It is just peaks and troughs. We just have to deal with that. In terms of the domains, I think there is always an anxiety when you shift a new way of working. To me, the issue is about how tightly defined the priority is. I go back to the example that I used earlier on. If, inside our health domain, we were to concentrate on an Anglo-specific issue, which would be about African-Arabian men in psychiatric detention, to the exclusion of all other things, I would have enormous difficulty contributing to that or people in Scotland benefiting from that. If we accept that there is a general issue about mental health, and ethnic minorities across Britain, but it impacts differently in Scotland, and the people in Scotland have the freedom, the resource and the autonomy to explore that and work on that, then that makes sense. Some issues, as I have mentioned earlier, such as pregnancy and employment, are very easy, because it is much more of just a marketing exercise. Other areas, and I think that the housing inquiry is a really interesting one, where we now have three sets of housing laws in England, Scotland and Wales. We have different forms of practice. We have different ways of funding and resources in social care. It is immensely complex, but the advantages of being GP is that there are three different ways of doing things. Just as we can draw from the work that we are doing in Scotland around dignity and respect in social security, we can draw from that to inform our practice elsewhere. It is never distinct or absolute. I think that it is about ensuring that we have the flexibility internally to work in a devolved manner. I think that we largely do that. I think that I agree with that. We think that we are horrendously complicated as an organisation. I am sure that other people also think that as themselves, because it is not just about, for us, the devolved administrations. It is about connecting up across the piece. We do think that having a networked organisation, which is what the new operating model is, is about connecting people better together. I say two things that have come out of the way of working. One is that we, in looking at the domains and business planning around the domains, we are connecting very fully up to Scotland, so that Scotland and Wales and other teams across the commission are very much part of that process in a way that I think has not really worked particularly well before. Leaving room for other staff is always important. It is not just about Scotland. It is a conversation that I have with the legal team. Of course, it is about wanting room to react responsibly and take a case that comes out, which you cannot possibly plan for. You need to be able to leave room to be agile. No business planning process is going to say that this is exactly what you are going to do and nothing else. That applies just as much to Scotland as anywhere else. We have dramatically ran out of time, as is usual, because we end up having really good discussions across the table and things that we are interested in. I thank you both for coming along to the committee and thank you for your current work and the on-going work that we will be hopefully working along with you closely. I reiterate that we would really appreciate the regular report on the concluding ops, because that is something that we have taken a keen interest in. Any aspect that helps us to understand some of that will be very welcome indeed. We have some other issues that we would like to have brought up with you this morning, but we have been unable to do that. With the support of the committee, we will maybe write to you on some of those to seek some clarification on other points. We would have been here until the afternoon if we had touched on them all. That might be a way to do things going forward, if you are happy with that. We are absolutely welcome hearing from you. We are welcome writing back to you to clarify. I welcome other invitations to my first visit here today. Thank you very much for having us. Excellent. Thank you so much. That concludes our business in public today, so I now move into private session and suspend for a comfort break.