 Ydw'n meddwl i'r blwyllfa am y cyfrifyr y cyfrifyr. Rwy'n meddwl i'r drefddol i'r lesio. Os i'r ffordd i'r leirio, efallai'r ddechrau yma o archwladau fy mod i'r rhaid i'r ffordd i'r leirio, yma i'r leirio. Felly, mae'r newid yma yn lleiol, mae'r newid yma, mae'r newid ei hwer o'i bai, o'r pleidio i'r lleidio yma i'r leirio, mae'r lleirio i'r leirio i'r leirio, mae'r lleirio i'r leirio porffin. Agenda item 2 is subordinate legislation, one negative Scottish statutory instrument, that is the SSI 2023-223, the act of sedent, summary applications, statutory applications and appeals etc, rules 1999 and taxation of judicial expenses, rules 2019, amendment telecommunication infrastructure 2023. I refer members to paper 1 and note that there is no accompanying policy note or impact assessment for this instrument. Do members have any comments to make on this instrument? No member has indicated that they have any comments to make, that being the case, are members content formally not to make any comment to the Parliament on this instrument? Thank you and that concludes the consideration of the instrument. Agenda item 3 is the pre-budget scrutiny 2024-25. This is an evidence session which will take place and this morning I would like to welcome Alexis Campbell, policy manager and Mirren Kelly, chief executive local government finance, both representing COSLA this morning and you are with us in the room. I would also like to welcome Alan Foles, senior policy officer, health and social care alliance Scotland, the alliance, who is joining us remotely, good morning, and Heather Williams, training lead Scottish women's budget group, who is also joining us this morning remotely. I should also note that Danny Boyle, senior parliamentary and policy officer at Bemis, was also due to attend but is now unable to do so. He has however indicated that he would look to provide evidence in writing. I would like to refer members to papers 2 and 3 and invite each of our witnesses to make a short brief opening statement starting with Alexis, please. I am going to hand over to Mirren, thank you. And just to know I am not the chief executive, I am the chief officer. First, thank you for inviting us to speak to the committee today. Local government is the anchor in our communities and for our most vulnerable groups, for children, young people and families, for the elderly and those needing extra support and the most marginalised communities within Scotland, also supporting businesses for those needing help with housing and for the services that protect and improve our physical and emotional wellbeing and the environment. Local government works with diverse communities and local organisations every day to bring about change, to respect human rights inequalities, to embed local democracy and enable the voices of people to be heard. Local authorities run budget consultations ahead of decisions being made that feed into the budget process and local authorities regularly engage with marginalised groups to inform that decision making. Local government is indeed the key partner to achieving rights realisation across Scotland and that is why local government requires a fair budget settlement. While local government has itself protected areas of the budget, such as social work and education, as much as possible, that means that cuts to other areas such as culture and leisure have been higher and that has an impact on rights realisation and the wellbeing of our communities. Understanding the lived experiences within those communities that we serve is a key element of what local government does. We need a holistic approach to the services delivered by local government, social care, education, housing, employability, leisure, transport and the local environment as together they support the rights of the individual. The Verity House agreement provides a platform to achieve that, setting out a clear focus on three key areas of tackling poverty, particularly child poverty, achieving a just transition and having sustainable person-centred public services. Local by default and national by agreement is a key element from a rights perspective. There can sometimes be tension created by local decision making and prioritisation, leading to perceived inconsistencies in service. This is not a postcard lottery, it is a democratic decision making informed by local voice needs and rights. In addition to a fair settlement, the Scottish Government should empower local government to raise revenue to ensure that the maximum available resources can be used to support our communities. Positive steps have been taken in this direction with the continuing development of the fiscal framework and we look forward to continuing to work on that with the Scottish Government. The Scottish Government should therefore be using the opportunities of human rights budgeting to enable and empower the public sector to support rights realisation and to avoid the regression of rights. I am a senior policy officer of the Health and Social Care Alliance Scotland. The Alliance is a national third sector intermediary for a range of health and social care organisations. We have a membership over 3,300, which includes third sector organisations, private and statutory sector bodies and individuals with lived experience, both of receiving and delivering, providing health and social care services, working towards our vision of a Scotland where everyone has a strong voice and enjoys their right to live well with victory and respect. I am sure that the committee is quite familiar with the Alliance by this point and on the specific subject of the budget. We have been quite active in discussing a range of alternative approaches to budgeting and the economy, most notably on human rights budgeting, which I will admit is the one that we have a bit more. I am sorry to interrupt you there. We seem to be getting a bit of feedback at our end. I think that our technicians are just saying if we can hear your voice a little bit clearer. See any improvement there at all? A bit of an echo there. If you could try again and just slow down just a little bit, see if that makes the difference. Apologies. Yes, I have been told that I have got the glass region thing of talking just a touch too fast. I am aware that technical issues are a long-standing problem by this point. Just to pick up on my second paragraph, though I can see the convener perhaps, is it still a bit the sound a bit odd? Sorry, I can't hear the room sound at the moment. Alan, do you want to try again just now, please? Yes. Is that any better at all? That's fantastic. Thank you. I will just start from the beginning to pick things up. The Alliance, national third sector, and we do it for a range of health and social care organisations. We have membership for over 3,000. That is third sector organisations, private and statutory sector, and crucially, individuals with lived experience, both of receiving and providing health and social care. The Alliance, we have quite significant work around the area of alternative approach to budgeting and the economy, most notably on human rights budgeting, which I will admit today is the area that we have probably the most to say on. We have also touched on areas such as gender budgeting, the caring economy and the wellbeing economy, both through our general policy work and through our health and social care academy programme, which has a specific focus on transformational approaches to health and social care. One of the points that we have been making ahead of pre-budget scrutiny for the past few years is the importance of recognising not just spend as part of a human rights budgeting approach, but also how we have approached revenue raising to deliver on human rights. I thank you for your patience as well. I would like to move on to Heather Williams, please. Thank you, convener. I am Heather Williams. I am the training lead for the Scottish Women's Budget Group. Scottish Women's Budget Group is a third sector organisation that is missionist to promote equality through the use of gender budgeting. Gender budgeting is about asking who benefits and who does not, from how we raise money and how we spend money. It is not just about what is allocated, but about the impact of how money is spent or how it is raised, how it is raised has on individuals within society. The aim of gender budgeting is to make the process and outcomes of policy making and gender and budget setting more transparent, equitable and participatory. Often we get into debate that gender budgeting and human rights budgeting are two different things. They are complementary of each other. We would argue that, when we take a human rights budgeting approach, it is still essential to understand how gender stereotypes, norms and expectations impact the quality of women and ensure that they are taken into account. Without the end, we can fail to see how long-standing cultural norms and societal choices have created systemic barriers that shape decision-making and how those embed and trench inequalities, particularly on things such as vans against women and girls and carers and whether that is paid and unpaid and how we value that. In the areas that are mentioned in the programme for government and the very house agreement in relation to poverty, climate change, equality and opportunity and the public sector, all of those have gender dimensions. We would argue that that is not an either of human rights budgeting or gender budgeting but that both approaches need to be considered and decision-making if we achieve a more fairer and equitable Scotland. Thank you to all our witnesses this morning to the 18th meeting of 2023 in session 6 of the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee. Those of you who have eagle eyes may have noticed that I remiss to say that at the top of the meeting but now it is on record which meeting this is. We will move on to questioning and I would like to kick us off with Maggie, the vice-conviner, please. Thanks very much. Good morning to the panel and thank you for joining us this morning and for putting up with the tech issues that we have. Thank you for your opening statements. I think that it is quite clear that there are connections between gender budgeting and human rights budgeting. Across the committee we are interested in the human rights budgeting approach that takes account of transparency, accountability and participation as tools for scrutiny but also tools for those points that I think you all mentioned, how we raise, how we allocate, how we spend and therefore what the impacts of our budgeting decisions are. So could I ask and maybe Heather, I'll come to you first if that's okay. You talked about gender budgeting and human rights budgeting being complementary. I'm wondering if you could say whether the principles that we're applying in human rights budgeting, do they capture what we need to be capturing when we're thinking about gender budgeting? Thank you. So there are lots of similarities between human rights budgeting and gender budgeting in terms of human rights budgeting, transparency, accountability and participation are key principles. These are also key principles of gender budgeting and are really important in terms of how we go about making the decisions about how we raise money and how we spend money. Another important principle that I think is important for us to talk about when we're thinking about budgeting and which is key to gender budgeting is that its performance and results are orientated. So gender budgeting helps bring strategic planning and public finances closer together by linking policy targets and objectives more closely with budgets and that promotes the most effective and efficient allocation and resources and implementation of policies. I think it's really important that we're able to see through the budget decisions what are we aiming to do when we raise this money or when we spend this money and how actually does that happen in practice. So implementation and following the money is a really important principle of gender budgeting. I think another couple of principles which we would argue are really important and that is that in gender budgeting we argue that we need to take a lifetime perspective wherever possible. So about recognising the decisions that we may take now may impact negatively particularly on women at retirement age. So making sure that we're taking that lifetime approach and also that we really consider what are the decisions that we take mean for care and particular unpaid care. So for instance local authority level at this year's budget a few decisions have been taken around cuts to transport and community transport and we would argue that we would need to see what impact that has on care because often that is carried out by women, it impacts on their ability to work, it impacts on their income and their level of poverty that they're living in or not. So we need to take that into account and the other principle within gender budgeting that's really important is that often when we see impact assessments as we get told that there is no difference or we aren't aware of any difference in terms of the different protected characteristics and that's often because there's no data or because we've not analysed the data. We would argue that when we are making decisions because of the differences in how men and women often live their lives particularly around those responsibilities for care is that actually we should be starting from the position that there will be a different impact until we have the evidence to show that there's not rather than starting off the other way round where we say there's no evidence to show that there will be a different impact we should actually be assuming that there likely is because of the impact that those norms and stereotypes have on how people live their lives. If that answers your question. That's really helpful Heather and it gives us quite a few different angles and perspectives to think about but your point I think about data there is well made and I know others will probably want to pick up on that so I won't drill down too much into that but I know Alan wants to come in on this as well. Yes thank you just sort of a very brief addition because I think Heather Scott significantly more sort of expertise in this area than myself but one thing that stands out in terms of the gendered budgeting approach that's a really useful principle is the intersectional nature of it so looking not just at the fact you know how women are affected but how women are in different with different characteristics are affected so whether that's ethnic minority whether they're LGBTI plus age whether they're working class more affluent these kind of things also have significant sort of impacts on how budget decisions impact women so taking that intersectional approach has been quite a sort of important aspect of it as well I would say. Thanks Alan could you un-pick that a little bit and I suppose one of the one of the challenges or one of the questions we have is around where where different intersectional categories might be perceived to come into conflict with each other and how how what would be the alliance's approach to to teasing those out in terms of the broader human rights budgeting approach. Oh so that's an easy question. I suppose like general terms we would sort of tend to say that we don't see sort of human rights as being sort of in conflict they're complementary in terms of how we sort of tease some of these things out. If you give me a second just to think about it I suppose it's a bit early in the morning and come back to me in a second. Okay no no that's fine sorry that I realise that is quite a big question. Whilst you're thinking Mirren and Alexis if I can come to you Mirren in your opening remarks you talked about that balance well that agreement and I think as somebody who who believes in subsidiarity local by default national by agreement how do you how do you deal then with a rights-based approach where there's hopefully a universal application a universal experience and or at least a universal intent how do you balance that kind of universality with with the need for local decision making. I think that does boil down to one of the key challenges and it's almost it's not that it's how do you balance rights rather than have them compete or conflict with each other and how do you enable the public sector and everyone else to get together to build that rights realisation because realistically the challenge is that different parts of the country different places different individuals have different needs but that doesn't mean that they have different rights but in in a time of limited resources which we're all in there are really difficult decisions on which rights you might have to focus on building that realisation towards so that the real challenge from a local authority perspective given you know the the plethora of services and that we're involved in delivering how do you balance that and that that's genuinely a you know like that that's a difficult question that councils have to wrestle with when it comes to deciding on budgets kind of throughout the process and I think one of the key things for achieving that is to enable everyone to have that increased kind of training capacity building which I'll let my colleague Alex to speak to in a bit more detail so that people understand the the decisions that they're making the evidence as is used as best as possible and that people don't perceive it as conflicting like so so they're getting that which means I'm not getting this that that's one of the real tension and you get that you know you can get you see that in an individual level community level regional and so it is a challenge and how we work our way through that because we don't have unlimited resources and we're not you know not everyone has their rights realised in the way that we we would like but that is different in different places so okay Alexis did you want to come in on the training? Yes thank you so I just wanted to pick up on what Miriam was saying about the about the need for capacity building within across the local government sector to ensure that you know rights are being respected and the decisions that are being made take into account the the needs of the of the local community whilst taking into account obviously the overarching frameworks that exist. I think this this very clearly links back or links to the human rights bill that's currently out for consultation so because there's responses being or hopefully approved by convention this week but something that our politicians have been very clear about in looking at the proposed the proposed new framework for human rights in scotland is the the real need for capacity building across local authorities to support staff to understand what rights are and how to balance rights and have those you know those conversations that Miriam was talking about where you might need to prioritise particular services and you might need to have have those difficult conversations but and in you know constrained financial times you might not be surprised to hear me say that you know a lot of this will come down to funding in the you know local authorities do an awful lot with you know increase under increasingly constrained circumstances and there's a real willingness within the sector to to get this right in terms of human rights budgeting and taking a rights-based approach but particularly with the bill you know sort of coming down the line there are massive resource and workforce implications for for councils that you know we'd like to highlight and one other thing I suppose I'd like to mention and to build on what Miriam said about having those difficult decisions and sort of balancing rights and linking to the question that you asked Alan is about the opportunities for greater alignment of services so that intersecting sort of identities intersecting needs can can be addressed you know with with particular services so for example my policy area that I focus on is an employability and it's that's a policy area that obviously cuts across an awful lot of of local government work and there's I think more that can be done to explore the way that services can have a wider impact than just you know essentially what it says what it does on the tin and you know particularly with the Verity house agreement and the focus on child poverty that's meant there have been lots of discussions with COSLA with local authorities and with Scottish Government colleagues about how services such as such as employability can have an impact in tackling child poverty and how that work can be more widely spread amongst local government colleagues to ensure that the right people are getting the support okay thanks Alexis if I can come back to to Alan briefly then just on on that question around intersectionality and I suppose maybe to to to focus it back to to the budgeting question that that we're asking what are your thoughts about those teasing out both the differences and the distinctions but also ensuring that it's a balance rather than putting putting different communities or individuals against each other in terms of rights thanks Alan so I think the point that myrin made earlier about about resources sort of sparked something in me which is about sort of offering choice to people so something we've kind of heard repeated like at the alliance is about for example something that's really basic a basic human right to access to food and particularly food through social care which is that are we making sure that there is the choice there in the budget therefore sort of culturally appropriate foods to be offered so you've heard your people being offered just sandwiches is a thing but is that culturally appropriate for every group is that what they're expecting to receive so sort of building that kind of choice into into budget processes is not just the case of can we get sort of the cheapest thing available and giving the same thing to everyone and similarly how do we deliver things like social care in a way that sort of respects the differing cultural norms in the provision of care and how do we do that in a way that sort of both ensures that the person who's accessing that care gets the support they deserve to participate in society you know to say people have a right to to equal participation in society and to independent living how do we deliver that whilst also at the same time sort of respecting what might be different cultural norms around the provision of care through extended families so I suppose that's maybe not like the most detailed example but was kind of just something that's sort of briefly sparked in terms of these sort of differences that you know that there are might be have different cultural groups you know different age groups who might approach delivery of care slightly differently in Scotland okay thanks there's quite a lot in all of those answers but there is Maggie thank you I think we've had a good shot at that one I know that Heather wanted to come in just very briefly Heather just to finish off Maggie's line of questioning please sorry apologies my IT is about glitchy so in terms of that question about how we how we balance those different rights I think part of it is about what are priorities you know gender budgeting is very much about using data and about thinking about who is it that's most disadvantaged in our communities and what does that look like and who is it that we're trying to best support and best you know who needs the support I suppose using the data to identify what are priorities what are targets what are we trying to achieve and that should then be driving the budget rather than what we often have at the moment which is we have budgets and we have equalities and for me equal impact assessments which often sit out there and very rarely do the two ever really meet properly and we would argue that if we are taking a gender budgeting approach or even a human rights budget and approach then we use the data to identify who are the most disadvantaged within our communities and what do we need to do to make sure that those human rights are met because if we're doing that then we're probably willing all accounts almost like the design services and deliver services that meet the needs of majority of people but I think we have things a little bit back to front at the moment and that we don't take into account the use equalities data and think set targets and think about what is it we're actually trying to achieve and what budget decisions need to follow through to enable that to happen and that's sometimes where that lack of transparency comes in as well whether that be at national or local level in terms of the decision they can. Thank you for that Heather. Moving on to myself and I'll be followed by Annie will come in after me. The Scottish Government has said that the committee scrutiny process is key to providing accountability in the budget process and with that in mind can the panellists comment on whether they feel that this is the most effective approach to ensure that the Scottish Government's human rights obligations are met. So I'll go with Myrin first and then I'll go to Alan and then Heather it'd be good to hear your comments as well so Myrin please what's your perspective on whether this is the most effective way? I think it's a tricky one isn't it because I think it's a question to everyone on how much opportunity does the committee approach give you to influence the budget because that's the key bit if it's successful in terms of the scrutiny then you've had the ability to influence and make changes so certainly Cosler we put evidence into most committees during the pre-budget and we've come to participate when we're invited and we hope that that leads to the discussion and decisions and information that does make changes and does take into account the issues that are raised within that but it can be potentially difficult to see where the change in decision is just because of the way it is like we're talking about the pre-budget scrutiny evidence we don't have you know a draft budget that we're trying to influence where which and actually I think it's it's really positive to have that these conversations before decisions are taken but they need to then actually feed in and influence influence the change before that comes in thank you thank you for that um allen yeah so I think that committee scrutiny is obviously valuable and it's it's got a kind of institutional support in terms of clerking and reporting which has sort of been valuable but it might be quite narrow in scope you know I'm sure that obviously the committee does aim to hear from a broad range of voices the reality of committee evidence is probably that it's always going to come from sort of the expert or voluntary sector contributors rather than hearing about those on-the-ground impacts of the budget and I think one of the things that we know about sort of humans in general is sort of the power of stories and it can still be relatively easy to dismiss sort of the negative human rights impacts of budget decisions when it's kind of seen as statistical or anecdotal like we've seen for example that the very significant negative impacts of the UK government's welfare reforms and those have been catastrophic on your women children and disabled people but if you're only hearing about that in a kind of anecdotal and statistical way it's not necessarily as powerful as having someone come in and hear directly from them individually about how they have been impacted and I suppose the question is you know can you get that kind of evidence in the kind of formal and sometimes slightly intimidating setting of a committee evidence session and it's not that you know MSPs are intimidating to me and I think you'll be relieved to hear that I don't think the general public are frightened of you either but it is that kind of like it is this kind of formal setting where you might be feeling you need to talk or dress in a way that's different to how you normally do so it might be quite sort of put you in a way that is not necessarily comfortable or natural for you to communicate and so you know is there perhaps a way for you know more targeted engagement that's in a less formal way so I'm very much not offering the alliance to service here I don't think I've been sent with the right to do that but we do often do engagement work on behalf of the Scottish government to hear directly from directly from people with lived experience you know is that the kind of thing that perhaps through other organisations that the committee could push could go through to you know hear these sort of in a smaller way direct stories from people perhaps you know pre taking pre-recorded video evidence the kind of thing that people might be able to do at home on their smartphone to hear directly from those people you know just some of the things I've been thinking about in terms of committee scrutiny is useful and it's good but it is very formal and how do we hear about that more sort of direct lived experience yeah thank you for that Alan I do take your point on widening our sort of inclusion of voices that we hear and just for your interest we are trialling a model of citizens participation panel which we've started that process and that is going well at the moment and we're getting some good feedback from citizens sort of directly from their communities so that is in the offing but we will take note of some of your suggestions very helpful thank you can I bring Heather in please thank you so in terms of from agenda budget and approach there are we see kind of three stages to the the budget process and how scrutiny can happen so there's the ex ante phase which is prior to the budget setting there's that concurrent phase we'll draft and then deciding on and executing the budget and then there's the ex post which is when we're auditing and reporting on the budget and I suppose for us the the community similar to Alan we would say committee scrutiny is important but we would ask questions about what happens with that scrutiny how does that make its way into the budget process and as Marilyn says it is really important that people who participate in given information actually find out what you're doing with it what have I said what difference has it made or we end up thinking well there's no point in me taking part in it so there's that bit I think one of the bits that we would really focus on that we think is missing is that ex post is what happens after the budget set so actually you know so the budget budget process happens and then what happens next there's very little we would say it's very difficult to follow the money and so what happens when money is provided for an area such as social care to health to for public transport where does it go what outcomes do we get from it and how do we know that it's been spent in the way that it was intended and that's one of the bits that we would say is missing and it's an important part of that kind of gender budget and process and in terms of following that money seen it as a circular process that we use the data we set our targets what we're trying to do we set our budgets and we then follow the money to see what happens and then we then use the data that we're capturing to set other targets and to try and achieve better outcomes and efficiencies basically and I think in terms of the way in which our budget processes work both at national and at local government level there are real difficulties in being able to do that because of that often that conveyor belt and the short timescales and things like that we're on so I think we need to make our processes rather than one of consultations it needs to be made more of a regular ongoing basis where rather than going out with a budget consultation it's actually what is it about those priorities and targets and what is it we're trying to do which then feeds into the the budget again I think we're suggesting that sort of like a cycle a continuous sort of scrutiny cycle yeah that's interesting thank you for that I think some of the points that the panellists have mentioned I think lead very well on to my colleague Annie's line of questioning Annie please thank you convener good morning panel and I think Heather and the convener knocked the nail on the head there when they said it's got to be a continuous cycle because my question is going to be when do you feel that your participation is of most value during the budget setting during the budget scrutiny or indeed the outcomes of past decisions so I think you've kind of answered that that question I think all members have answered that question for us so I'll just pop on to my second part of my question basically where should the responsibility lie for enabling participation and ensuring that the process is accessible and meaningful and I think this probably goes back to Alan's point here as well this might include education around the budget process and finding data to support people engaging so again let the citizens participation how do we encourage more people with lived experience to come and give evidence and I know you give us a bit of an example Alan so I'll pop back to yourself if you don't mind yeah so I think that there's a bit of a role for both the Scottish Government and for the Parliament its committees in terms of sort of enabling participation I don't think there's a sort of responsibility lies with one side or the other I think in our evidence last year in pre-budget scrutiny that one of the points we kind of made was around about what kind of resources the government could make available in terms of budget you know it's not just publishing the budget and going here you go here's a you know a 90 page long pdf have that but instead perhaps you know can they do sort of a multimedia engagement so can they get for example cabinet secretary so I know are very very busy people but can they do you know sell cut a short five minute video on you know here are the things that the budget is going to achieve within my portfolio area and here's the kind of policies it's going to sort of deliver and live up to can we do that kind of thing that sort of puts more sort of easy to access bite size information about what the budget is and how it's going to impact people's lives how it intends to impact people's lives out there and I suppose Parliament can do a sort of similar thing and I kind of touched on that idea of you know can we get as parliamentary evidence can we get sort of short videos perhaps from individuals can people you know be asked to sort of fill out surveys that are perhaps less formal and I would actually know that the pre-budget scrutiny survey this year was actually quite I could see was sort of there was an attempt there to direct that at sort of kind of all levels like the questions were sort of a bit sort of understanding and sort of phrased in quite a simple way so I think there has been sort of progress there and sort of trying to make the the sort of pre-budget scrutiny survey at least a bit less sort of formal and sort of less verbose so yeah just just a suppose some quick thoughts there I don't know if anyone else wants to to come in on that Alexis yeah sorry I wasn't sure if I need to press the thing thank you I just I suppose just very briefly I wanted to reflect on the fact that as Alan said you know there's certainly a role for Scottish Government and for Scottish Parliament in enabling participation but there's a lot of really good work going on at a local level both from local authorities but also within within the third sector around participation be it participatory budgeting or lived experience panels feeding into local employability partnerships or all of the all of the other things that will you know be happening in your in your constituencies I suppose it's really just to make the point about coming back to the principles of the Verity House agreement and that sort of placing the decisions around local need and sort of really within the hands of people within that area I think there's a lot of learning to be had the learning to be taken from what's already ongoing but actually existing networks that could already be tapped into and I don't necessarily mean the same people because we don't want to have you know consultation fatigue in the same faces you know always asked but particularly on you know on participatory budgeting there's been you know such good work that's been happening you know in local authorities there could there be work that could be models of that that could be applied you know for the budget process but again I'd like to come back to the fact that that would also require you know resourcing and capacity building also actually a bit of investment in in workforce in staff to actually support people so my concern would be if this were done without any sort of additional resourcing and that capacity building be that training or extra staff that people might feel that they weren't fully supported to participate and you know could potentially be put off and so it does come down to you know tapping into what's happening locally but also thinking about whether additional funding additional resources are needed to support that to expand thank you thank you very much I think that heather would like to come in and followed by allen if I could encourage people to be as succinct as possible because I have colleagues that have arranged your questions and you might be covering some of those already but nevertheless heather please okay just very quickly exposed in terms of participation one of the things that's really important is that we know who we're hearing from and who we're not often particularly the long online consultations that we've seen around budget processes is that there's no demographic data to ask and we do know that there is a you know for women in particular for minor ethnic groups that the word budget can put people off you know often it's that thing of that idea that women don't do numbers how often you know in terms of those kind of stereotypes that are out there it's nonsense obviously but it is a stereotype that's out there and it can impact on people thinking is this something that's for me or is this not that's or not something that's for me and I think we need to be really when we're talking about participation and hearing from different groups is that we need to make sure we are doing that and that we know who we're hearing from and who we're not having online consultations that don't ask demographic details because you know that that should be a basic consultation if that's the limit of what we're doing we need to know who we're hearing from and who we're not we would obviously argue that we would need wider consultation similar to Alan but that would be a minimum that we ask that question who whose voices are we hearing and whose voices aren't we hearing Alan please yes just very briefly on a point Alexis made about participatory budgeting it sort of sparked a quick thought me which is that but it's just to re-emphasise a point the committee may have heard before but if we're inviting people to participate in the budget process in particular in budget setting they need to be given meaningful options and control and not just like for example handed a list of cuts and asked to pick between them you know participation has to be meaningful and it's not about passing perhaps difficult decisions on to the public and going well cuts have to be made but we'll let you guys decide you know it has to be more meaningful than that. Thank you Alan I just have a quick supplementary for our COSLA representatives I'm glad that you mentioned the good practice that is going on especially around participatory budgeting and I know that that has benefited many constituencies including my own could you give the committee some examples of how you capture how effective that has been how meaningful local constituents the people who are part of that process how do you gather that feedback so the the best person to answer that is the policy manager who leads on the participatory budgeting within within COSLA. Councils themselves will be will be collecting that and collating that and I believe there's an annual report on that and so what I can do is is go and find where that is and share that with the committee after. That would be brilliant thank you thank you so much I'd like to move on to my colleague Fulton who would be followed by Karen Fulton. Thanks, convener and my question I suppose follows on from where we were there particularly heather's remarks that we just heard there because we do know that in this committee has heard a lot of times that there are particular groups who are most impacted by budgeting decisions and who also most rely on public services so disabled people, BMA people and women what more do you think the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament can do to make sure that their voices are heard and I know I've talked to wee bit about this and you've heard from the convener about something that committees trial in which so far looks to be looks to be doing well but have you got any other ideas about how both the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament as a whole can make sure that all voices are heard in the process? I'm quite happy with it and you all don't maybe start with those in the room. I think some of this has been touched on it is one of the things that Heather said is key is identifying the voices that you're not hearing some of the time because there are there are lots of lots of people who are articulate and motivated and you know maybe shout the loudest so having the information that helps you identify who you haven't heard from is a really key one and then there are local authorities have a lot of experience of going into quite difficult to reach communities the third sector has a lot of experience of doing that and I think quite often it's about enabling the conversation to be brought to them rather than expecting them to bring it to you so that we can all then benefit and have have a conversation as equals as well. Heather would like to come in. Thank you. I suppose it's that old community development worker approach isn't it in terms of you know we talk about hard to reach communities but is it that the communities are hard to reach or hard to reach groups or actually is it that we don't listen well enough in terms of how we actually gather our information and who we gather information from and how we disseminate that so I think it is about you know using those community development worker approaches for instance we've been working with a women's group in the Fosside area I saw then and we had a room in the toon so we set up a gazebo and some chairs and we've got folks come and talk to us about cost of living and how that's impacting on them. We've been working with Glasgow Disability Alliance, we've got group disabled women together again to talk to us about their experiences and it is that sometimes you know expecting people to come to us to give us their information as you know for some people their lives are they are so difficult and hard enough they're barely surviving particularly at the moment with the impact of the cost of living crisis on the back of the Covid pandemic and things like that so it's about tailoring your approaches to those different groups but I think also you know lived experience is a big buzzword at the moment but it's if you're going to do it properly it's difficult to do and it has to be resourced both for the people doing it but also for the people taking part as well and there needs to be that feedback loop there's no point in asking people if we're not going to tell them what we're doing even if it's to go back to them to say actually you know what good suggestion but we're not able to do that at the moment because of A, B and C or we've decided we're not going to do that at the moment because at A, B and C we need to make it a communication a conversation rather than extractive basically it would be some of the things that I would say. Thanks for that Heather and I suppose that brings me on to my kind of follow-up question. You've had a good way of predicting where I'm going today Heather but I think that a lot of times I think the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government is kind of high level stuff and even the engagement that we do in here is talking about national scales. I think that's a really good example there but I wanted to ask how can the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government get more right into the actual decisions that affects people so for example in North Lancer my local area just now there's a lot to talk about shutting down of libraries and swimming pools and stuff like that and there's going to be big debates over that over the next few weeks is a kind of errors a bit more but how do we get people that we've spoken about there to hear their views on these things the actual impact what more can the Scottish Government's Scottish back because even today's discussion up until probably the Fault House example there has been quite a high level discussion it's been it's been up here it's been at Scottish Parliament Scottish Government level what about the stuff that's actually impacting people on the ground is empty get any ideas of what we can do more on that to let people's voice be heard here I'm happy if they're happy to come in here. I think of that though it's really important that we respect the joint spheres of government between local government and Scottish Government and it is really challenging to make to consider some of these things and the challenging budgets that we have I do very much hope that the very House agreement will enable a greater kind of mutual understanding and a greater mutual process and kind of you know and seeing where everyone is there and that assurance and accountability again a mutual assurance and accountability so that everyone does understand the consequences of budgetary decisions and actually how they then filter down and what that means at a locker level and at a minute level as well. Thank you, thank you for that. I'd like to bring in Karen and Karen will be followed by Paul. Thank you convener just to try and pull some examples if you can and that's possible just to paint a picture really and where you feel that mainstreaming hasn't worked. To tackle inequalities and reach human rights aspirations and if you think that participation in those particular areas would have helped to gain a better understanding of the impacts of policy making and would have made a difference. I'm happy to take you ever once again. Heather for that one please. It's indicated she wants to speak. Thank you Karen. I suppose one of the ones for us that's really clear in terms of where we are failing to address inequalities or human rights aspirations is around care. Care provision has been affected by Covid but we haven't to need care but it also impacts on those who are having to pick up those unmet care needs, which is primarily women. The surveys that we've ran this year, both the national survey. Apologies, Heather. You're breaking up a wee bit there. Heather, we're not able to hear you just now. I'll come back to you and I'll bring in Alan. I think I'm potentially going to make perhaps one of the points that Heather might have gone on to make if tech wasn't a remedy this morning but just to say that in social care there are first significant inequalities that haven't yet been fully addressed. A particular issue recently has been the ongoing issue of non-residential care charging. The Scottish Government has committed to abolish those charges but progress on that has been slow and they have increased significantly in recent months. I think a figure of 60 per cent in Glasgow and these kind of increases for care charging are having a serious impact on people's ability to access their right to independent living and to equal participation in society. Another area where I think there's perhaps a useful interplay between human rights budgeting and gender budgeting would be issues around social security. There's a human right to social security and the universal decoration of human rights itself and we know that women are more likely to have somewhere all over their income coming from social security system. That can be due to inequality from lower rates of pay because as Heather was saying that the responsibility for care, whether social care or childcare continues to fall mostly on women which can reduce earning potential. The Scottish Government has a lot of welcome investments in both social care and social security. That is really good and it is genuinely making a significant difference but there are still areas where it hasn't gone far enough where there needs to be more work to do this. I suppose it's an easy thing for the third sector to say that it's not constrained by just going all while financial situation is tough. You will recognise that the financial situation is tough but these are essential services delivering on human rights and addressing inequalities. What is the approach that you take to revenue raising and how do you raise the revenues to deliver those essential services? That goes perhaps all the way back to the very start when Myrnair Alex was saying that ensuring that local government, for example, has a fair funding settlement because so many of those services are delivered by local councils. Thank you for that, Alan. We're going to try with Heather again. Heather, you're going to switch your camera off to see if we can hear you more effectively. We'll have a go. Yeah, apologies about that. So hopefully you can hear me okay. We can, thank you. Wonderful, brilliant. Yeah, Alan's made a lot of points that I was going to make in relation to an area where I think that there are still huge issues and that is around care. All of the surveys that we've done this year has raised issues in relation to decisions that have been taken either by health and social care partnerships, by local authorities and by health boards in relation to social care and childcare, whether that be in early years, that have had a negative impact on primarily the women that we have surveyed. We know that in relation to social care, and Alan's mentioned it, in relation to charging, that has a real negative impact on those who are disabled people. One of the things that we carried out earlier this year was that we looked at the budget papers available for local authorities and the publicly available information. There were not all local authorities published either impact, equal impact assessments or integrated impact assessments of the decisions that they were taking in relation to cuts to either early years or raising charges. Similarly, in relation to decisions taken by the Scottish Government, it's not always clear to be able to see about the equalities considerations that have been taken around decisions. While we talk about mainstreaming and the practice of thinking about the impact to either specific groups or the impact that it will have on other service areas, we're not as good as we think we are at doing that in practice. When we're in the particular financial situation that we're at at the moment, both at the Scottish Government and at a local Government level, it's even more important that we are doing that and are really clear about the impact of decisions to either raise charges or to cut costs and the impact that that's going to have so that mitigations can be put in place if required. I've got the last few questions, so I'm keen to try and pull together the themes that we've been discussing. A lot of this has come up already, but transparency is obviously a key issue in terms of people being able to make an informed contribution to budget consultation processes. I'm particularly interested in the way that the committee wants to look at transparency in more detail in the next budget process, but I'm keen to understand to what extent a lack of data or a lack of accessible data hinders people's participation. I think that we've heard that kind of woven throughout the answers this morning, but is any particular data that's missing or could we make data more accessible for people? It's not always that the data isn't available, but there isn't necessarily the capacity and time to do the analysis and then apply that in the decision process in the most meaningful way. Local authorities have been making difficult decisions about budget for a lot of time, and sometimes questions are thrown a bit disparagingly about back-office staff and what they're doing. That's where the deepest cuts have been. There's been huge reduction over the last decade of what's viewed as back-office staff, but a lot of those are people who, maybe 10, 15 years ago, might have been the ones who had the time to analyse some of the data and to provide a more comprehensive view of some of that, so that there's a capacity issue around that. Certainly, local authorities have a lot of data. We generate a lot of data, we report into Scottish Government in hundreds of different ways, but there is absolutely, and these discussions come up around the national performance framework and how you measure that and how you measure outcomes is always a tricky bit. I don't think that there's necessarily a lack of data, but there's maybe a lack of the ability to utilise that data in a meaningful way that allows all of us to make informed decisions and then scrutinise the success of what we do with resources. One of the points that the Alliance has repeatedly made in a number of consultations in a lot of areas is about the importance of collecting comprehensive, intersectional and disaggregated data. I'm possibly going to do very slightly contradicting that in the sense that for particular groups, for minorities of the population, that might be where we don't currently have data. I'm thinking about social care, which is one of the key areas for the Alliance. We have a lot of data on social care more generally, but as we discovered through my support, my choice research about self-directed support that we did with self-directed support Scotland a number of years ago, there's a particular posity of data around people from minority ethnic backgrounds and from the LGBTI plus community, what their experiences of social care are and whether or not social care was meeting their needs. That's the kind of thing where if we don't have that data, then we don't know what's happening in terms of delivery, service delivery for those groups, and that's there for somewhere where being able to get more participation from those groups might help in the understanding. I think that, especially when we're talking about those particular groups of highlighted, minority ethnic groups and LGBTI plus people, those can be seen as such small minorities of the population that when it comes to statistics and gathering information, it's easy to brush it off as, oh, these findings aren't statistically significant, which then compounds that difficulty in understanding how minority groups are being affected. We need to take a more serious and more comprehensive approach to gathering that data and not just brush it off with, while it's small minority, so it's hard to do. There may be a small minority, but they matter. Thank you. I think that both exchanges were helpful in terms of understanding the importance of that. My next question is about barriers. I suppose that many of the groups that we spoke about this morning are represented by organisations in a broader sense, but often there can be barriers to getting to everyone's point of view. As a committee, we're keen to understand what you feel those barriers are to people feeling they're part of a representative voice, essentially, and how might we address that better and how might we get to the root of people's issues? I think that one of the things for me in this is that we talk about transparency, but I think that there's a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation at times about how money is raised and what money is used for and about taxation and benefits. By benefits, the services of the public service deliver and provide to society generally. That can be coloured by lots of different things in terms of how people perceive that, but in terms of that conversation, we probably need to be able to have a clear conversation at whatever level about that, because at the moment, in the UK and Scotland, we have this expectation of scandinavian level services, but at US levels, we have taxation. Those two don't mix. There are issues, but when we think about how we measure success in terms of our economy, we talk about carers as being economically inactive. Nobody is economically inactive. If we are buying things, we are contributing to the economy. There are lots of different things in terms of how we have that conversation and the things that we need to be able to talk about with people about what the budget process is, because it's not just about spending money, it's about how we raise money. In terms of the impact to that on different groups, we need to be considering that as well. On the citizens participation stuff that you have talked about, part of that is how we have those conversations with groups and how we make it relevant to different groups is really important in terms of equalising that in sharing that these are the decisions that we are having to make. That is why we are having to make them but doing that in an easily accessible and understandable way so that we are taking people with us as much as possible. If decisions are made that people don't agree with, they at least understand why that is being taken. I think that sometimes those decisions and the reasons for them at local and national levels can get lost in the hubbub of politics at times and the hot air that can sometimes be generated through that adversarial approach that there sometimes is. We need to get better at communicating about this whole process and make it more easily accessible for people because it impacts on them and we need to take them with us. I suppose, Kenny. I want to pick up on something that Heather mentioned in an answer to a previous question about the importance of a community development approach and I think that this is something that is particularly pertinent to this question. If we are asking people to share their experience and to grapple with potentially tricky or complicated issues and the potential impact of funding decisions, I think that you really need to have really trusted relationships. You need to have staff—I would say this from a local Government perspective—who have the resourcing for staff who are trained. You can support people to meaningfully participate and actually are able to engage in appropriate ways with communities that maybe have felt that there are barriers to them participating or have felt excluded because it really is a process that is really built on trust, particularly if we are asking people to share their lived experience, to share their opinion, to share something that has happened to them and thinking back to the feedback that ties into having the resourcing for that to be properly supported. I think that in terms of barriers to organisations representing groups, I think that fundamentally it comes down to time and resource. Obviously, people need time to participate and they need the resources to do so and that includes, for example, being able to pay staff to enable that participation and also funding for any sort of access needs. For example, if it is in person, you will perhaps travel expenses for people to come along and participate in assistive technologies that they might require, particularly for third sector organisations who are supporting these groups for disabled people's organisations or citizens advice bureaus. The situation right now is just so tough in terms of stretched finances for the third sector that they might just not have the capacity at all to enable that kind of participation. They do not have the funds to do support for people beyond their core service delivery and perhaps engaging in participative budgeting processes would be an additional area of work. They just do not have the time, the capacity and the money to engage in, so I think that that is really quite key. That concludes the formal part of the business this morning. Can I take the opportunity to thank all my colleagues for their patience and our panellists with regards to the tech issues, but I think that we managed very well. I would also like to thank you for your contributions. They were extremely helpful as part of our scrutiny process and I wish you well and good morning. We will now move into private session to consider the remaining items on our agenda.