 Welcome to the fifth meeting of session six of the Qualities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee. We have no apologies today. Agenda item one is to take items three and four in private, which is consideration of today's evidence and our approach to longer-term development work on pre-budget scrutiny. Are we all agreed? That is agreed. Next agenda item is to begin our evidence taking on pre-budget scrutiny. We'll hear from two panels of witnesses today. So I welcome our first panel of witnesses, Dr Alison Hosey, Research Officer, Scottish Human Rights Commission, SHRC and Dr Angela O'Hagan, chair of the Quality Budget Advisory Group, EBAG, who both join us virtually. You're very welcome. And to Emma Congrive, Knowledge Exchange Fellow at the Fraser of Allander Institute, and Chris Burt, Associate Director for Scotland of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, who both join us in person today. You're all very welcome. So I thank witnesses, first of all, for your helpful written submissions, and I will invite each of you to make short opening statements starting with Dr Alison Hosey, please. Dr Hosey. Good morning. Thanks very much for the invitation to join you today. From the commission's perspective, we just want to reiterate that the resources are absolutely critical to ensuring that the funding for policies, plans and programmes that the Government needs to set out and need to protect our rights from the impact of the pandemic now, and to build a fairer and more resilient economy as we move forward. The Government has an obligation to maximise its available resources to guarantee those rights, and that means that how you raise, allocate and spend money must be done in a way that targets inequalities, and we've seen these amplified by the pandemic, and we need to tailor the responses to people's lived realities. As a response to the pandemic, we've seen agreement for the need for a massive mobilisation of resources in order to protect people's health and to prevent huge economic devastation. Many countries, including the UK and Scotland, have been pretty radical on the spending side, but what we're still left with is the question of how we go about raising the necessary funds to pay for that recovery and to ensure that that's done fairly. A lot of our submission, we looked at the issues of taxation as the most sustainable and effective and accountable way for Governments to raise money, but we've seen a growing inequality of wealth over the past 40 years and, in part, how and what we tax is the reason for that. We treat earned and unearned income differently. We tax wealth at very low rates compared to earned income, allowing money to be hidden overseas, which has resulted in an unprecedented level of wealth inequality, wealth concentration and soaring inequality. The pandemic has dramatically amplified the stark inequalities of all sorts, so economic disadvantage has translated into a key underlying precondition for the worst impacts of Covid-19. We've seen the death rate for people on low wages be three times that of those on higher wages in the UK. How Governments now finance their Covid response has the ability to affect those inequalities, and we must ensure that the minimum levels of rights are enjoyed in that recovery process. It's really encouraging to see the Scottish Government's current work on the Scottish Taxation Framework that's currently under review. We would like to encourage more of an explicit recognition of the Government's human rights obligations to maximise its available resources in that framework. We welcome the focus of the committee in this particular session from an explicit human rights perspective. The new forthcoming human rights legislation brings those obligations closer to home, but there are obligations that already exist. Embedding those obligations explicitly in the budget process will help to implement the new legislation that will be forthcoming. We welcome the focus of the committee's questions, and we look forward to engaging further on that today and in the future. Good morning, convener. Thank you very much to you and your colleagues for the invitation to come along this morning. I would like to echo Dr Hose's comments in welcoming the committee's approach here that you are embarking on a human rights approach to budget scrutiny. It is very welcome and it is essential, as Allie has just set out. Within that, however, it is, of course, necessary to maintain an equality's focus, and some of your questions in the call for views reflect that understanding that policy decisions affect people differently. The structural inequalities that Covid has laid bare—Covid didn't create them, they were there before the pandemic hit, but Covid has massively exposed the trenchant inequalities in Scotland that have to be addressed. I think that my comments in my written contribution and probably my contribution this morning, I want to focus on the need for scrutiny from an equality's and human rights perspective. You've asked about the size of the pie, as it were, the range of the extent of resource available, but it's about the efficiency and effectiveness of that spend. That is improved when it is better directed, and it's better directed when there's an understanding of the status quo through generating and using good equality's data as a starting point to understand the status quo and moving on from there. That means having equalities in human rights, goals and ambitions as the starting point for remedial and progressive action that is transformational in terms of the outcomes. To do that, there needs to be effective and consistent scrutiny not just by this committee but across the parliamentary committees. EBAG is working with officials across the Scottish Government to try and improve the processes, building inequalities analysis, building competence, building the knowledge there. However, as I said in my submission, some of the recommendations to improve the work within government also apply within Parliament in terms of building knowledge, building that confidence and today's session embarking on a human rights approach to budget scrutiny is one of those very welcome steps. Thank you again for the opportunity. Thank you. I'm just going to make three points that just draw on the written submission that we gave at the Fraser Valander. There are three key areas that I would like to highlight that are causing problems in terms of being able to do effective analysis of quality in human rights in relation to the budget. The first of those things relates to data. There are two areas. Firstly, it's upon how different taxation or expenditure policies impact on different groups of the population. We do not have very good data that disaggregates by groups of interest for this committee and for many others. Often, we just use these headline aggregations of disability or minority when that gives very little insight into the reality that people with different characteristics in their population are facing. For somebody with a physical disability, its experience is life very different from somebody with a learning disability, but we do not have the ability and the data that we have often to disaggregate that. The second is understanding the wealth and the income distribution in Scotland, but also how those two relate. We know about the income distribution, we know about the wealth distribution, and we know things about the value of property in Scotland, but there is no capability to tie those things together. If we are looking to do analysis of replacing council tax, for example, of a property tax, it is very difficult to understand how that would impact on different groups of the population in terms of income and indeed protected characteristics. The second area that I would like to focus on is the linking up of the policy cycle and how that can help with scrutiny from committees like this. It is an area that the Scottish Government would admit that it is quite weak on, particularly in terms of evaluation of policies and whether they have met their aims, but there is also the appraisal process, which we would expect policies to go through in order to establish the costs and benefits of different options. It would go through implementation and there should be a clear line to the budget in order to see what has been allocated and what has been spent and then indeed the number should be an evaluation following that looks at the impact of that spend and whether it has achieved its aims, as I said. That process is lacking in the work of the Scottish Government and, as my colleague Angela said, a lot more scrutiny of that would be beneficial. Lastly, it is the transparency of the actual budget process and documentation itself. Myself and my colleagues at Fraser Vallander spend many hours trying to sift through budget documents to try to understand what is in the figures. It is not easy and it is incredibly difficult to look across years to look at how spending has changed in different areas over years. That is something that we believe could be improved and the Scottish Government would have the capability of improving that. It also feeds through areas of spend in the year and local government allocations. There are quite good statistical publications that document local government spend, but it can be impossible to link those up year by year and to look at trends over time. You need a forensic eye in order to do that. It is not accessible to the general public or to many parliamentarians. Those are the three things that I wanted to highlight. I will concentrate on poverty, perhaps. We have child poverty targets, which every party in the Parliament is signed up to, which are very challenging, rightly so. By 2030-31, the main target is that relative child poverty should be below 10 per cent. It is worth just pausing for a moment and reflecting just how different a Scotland that would be to the Scotland that we see today. It is around 25 per cent at the moment. The things that Emma has just talked about—the distribution of income, wealth and power within our society—would have to significantly change to meet that. That is obviously a goal that we would support and would urge everyone in the Parliament to push towards. I would encourage a committee to focus on that. The Scottish Government rightly identified priority groups when they were setting their tackling child poverty delivery plan. Around 80 per cent of all the children who live in poverty are in one of those groups. As Emma has highlighted, while that is a large group of people, none of them are the same. At the moment, we have a lot of policy that focuses on general support to people and misses the individual impacts that that will have on individuals. I would encourage the committee to think about that through that lens. We will not meet our child poverty targets if we do not do better in the support that we provide for anyone in those priority group families, so I encourage you to focus on that. The other thing is that we have an interim child poverty target that has to be met by the end of financial year 2023-24—Sapro 2024—and we are some way off it at the moment, so we need urgency and pace to get there. Just finally, on some of the questions that the committee has raised, there has been a perhaps understandable focus on raising revenue and how we might raise more revenue. That may very well be part of the story of how we meet those long-term targets, but we already spend a lot of money and we do not know particularly well how that is impacting on poverty or, frankly, much else. While our debate sometimes comes down to what can we raise through extra tax and what Barnett consequentials are coming, that is obviously an important part of the discussion. However, how we are spending current funds—30-odd billion pounds—is a lot of money, so that could have—it is having positive impacts, of course it is, but are there ways in which we could target that more to head towards those targets, which are rightly challenging and we need to strive to get towards them? I think that a couple of the panellists had mentioned that this is the first time that this committee, or any committee of the Parliament, has tried to take a human rights approach to our budget scrutiny. Obviously, we are in a bit of a learning process too. I guess it would be helpful if the panellists wanted to give us any particular pointers into areas where we need to make sure that we get things right. Emma, you mentioned data, so maybe you want to start by pointing out some of the areas of data that we need to push the Government or other agencies in terms of clarifying to help us to do our job in terms of making sure that we are taking a human rights approach. Emma? It is a big topic. At the moment, for a lot of the analysis that the Government produces—for example, on the impact of taxation on different groups—it will come from existing surveys, usually UK-wide surveys. It is the survey of personal incomes, which is very good for income tax. The family resources survey that looks at incomes and characteristics of family, which is where the poverty statistics are derived from. The living cost and food survey is another one that is used. There are existing surveys, and it is right to say that the Scottish Government pays for a boost to at least a couple of those surveys in order to increase the sample size for Scotland. Still, the sample size is relatively low. It is quite difficult for the Scottish Government to get changes made to those surveys, either ONS or DWP or HMIC data sets. There could really be a shift in thinking about investment in data in Scotland, but it is a big investment. That is very clear. However, it would allow potentially for the to be boost to samples for particular groups, such as ethnic minority groups, and to understand some of those characteristics in terms of different disabilities, as I mentioned. Perhaps there are not on the radar so much of the DWP or the ONS as much as they are in Scotland. It is something that has not really been grasped as it could be. It would have benefits both for things like budget scrutiny and for planning and operation of the social security system in terms of looking at changes that might be made there. Understanding who would benefit from that would be something that I would like it to be considered a lot more. Alison Orangela, do you have any further comments around scrutiny? I was letting Ally come in there. One of the things that we have recommended within e-bag is looking at the Scottish Government, but it also applies to the Parliament and in conversations with Spice. We have talked about this. I think that there is a need—I say this entirely respectfully—but a need for building knowledge on human rights, the human rights instruments and obligations, understanding minimum core and interpreting and applying data in the equalities data that colleagues have been talking about in the scrutiny of the budget and outcomes. Picking up on Chris's point, that scrutiny of outcomes from spending requires an improvement in the quality of human rights and equalities analysis within the Government and within the Parliament. I also think that it is about members being perhaps a bit more demanding in terms of requesting the quality of human rights and equalities analysis that is brought forward to you for scrutiny. There needs to be a greater challenge function around the extent to which proposals coming before committees will or are focused on transforming the status quo in relation to equalities and the realisation of rights. I do not have too much to add to all of the points that have already been made, but I reiterate the difficulty that we have had in doing some of this in being able to access the right data so that the right data is not there. Financial data, as Emma said before, over time, being able to look at the changes and patterns and how that relates to realisation of rights is just not possible to do at the moment. We are aware that the Exchequer is doing a good programme of work over fiscal transparency, which will help with, hopefully, over the next few years with that data, but at the moment there are limitations to what we can do. However, understanding, as Angela said, the degree to which the Government is realising rights, whether it is meeting the minimum core obligations, is indeed progressively realising rights. We cannot make those assessments just now, and we need better data to be able to do that. Back to one of the points that Angela made. The committee has written to other committees to make the point that our human rights approach is not just for this committee, and it is something that we are asking all committees of the Parliament to look at as they do their budget scrutiny. Thank you so much. That has been fascinating. There are Governments around the world that are experimenting with constructing their budget processes around wellbeing. Scotland is learning from those experiments and looking at how that will help us to formulate those budgetary processes, particularly in relation to children and to child poverty. Do you feel that there is often a trap within a service mindset? Is the process easy enough to understand and influence for those who are seeking to influence it? Could you give us some examples of where that has been done successfully in other countries? I suppose that an honest answer to that final point is that this is groundbreaking work. Taking a rights-based approach to budget analysis and to budgeting is not done in a lot of places, especially at a national level. There are some good examples of work that the committee could look to, particularly produced by the Centre of Economic and Social Rights in New York. They have done some really good work with the Spanish civil society in preparing their submissions and their shadow reports on the review of the Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Treaty, but they were able to use a lot of budgetary data to highlight where there were alternatives to austerity that the Government had not considered before cutting budgets and where money and resources could have been taken from in terms of tax evasion, avoidance and debt that would have superseded the need to have the austerity cuts that they did. There are ways of doing that scrutiny and there are good examples of that, but taking a rights-based approach to the budget would be very novel and groundbreaking in terms of a national government. I think that there is a lot of support that we can offer and there is a lot of capacity building that is required in relation to understanding what the minimum core obligations are, what progressive realisation means and enabling Government departments to be able to think in that way when they are developing their budgets. However, it would be a new process and there is no denying that. In terms of wellbeing, there is a danger that the wellbeing focus is the next new shiny thing. I do not mean that with any disrespect, but we have a tendency to focus on one way of doing things and then another way of doing things and then another way. Instead of looking at it, a lot of those ways have all that is similar underpinnings and they are all linked and wellbeing and human rights are inextricably linked. However, I do not think that the Government has done sufficiently yet is to find what it means by wellbeing and look at the human rights underpinnings to that wellbeing process that could enable better definitions of what you are trying to achieve and how we will know if we have reached those outcomes and how the budget fits into that. Angela Constance I thank you very much, Ms Adams, for your question. I will pick up where Ali left off there, which is to say that we can see around the world and we can see in Scotland an appetite for different approaches to budgeting and whether that is on the more technical side of performance-based or outcomes budgeting. We are also trying to use the budget and use public finance processes as a means to deliver some of the social policy and economic policy outcomes. New Zealand has attempted wellbeing budgeting, but the critique there is that it was not very strongly gendered. There was not very strong intersectional analysis in their approach. Similarly, in Bhutan, we are focused on wellbeing, but we do not understand what we have already been talking about and that Chris talked about in terms of generalised support-missing priority groups. Iceland has committed to gender budgeting, but, in common with many other countries, it has found that process to be quite challenging in terms of turning around some very well-established processes within Government. Ireland and the Republic of Ireland are learning from Scotland, so we need to start running back again to catch back up with our neighbours. They have taken an approach that is approximating a layering where they started on gender budgeting, now they have added some equalities budgeting, now they are looking to add environmental budgeting. We need to maybe guard against that, and that is a conversation that we have already had within eBag. We need to firstly guard against those different approaches that are being seen as competitive or alternatives, but rather we should look at them as layered, as contributing to one another, and that inequalities in human rights lens takes us into children's rights, takes us into the environmental policies and the climate crisis, takes us into the advancement of social care and ultimately wellbeing in social and economic terms. I would encourage us to explore those options to take the lessons that we can, but really to not see them as alternatives, but as part of a whole and a whole systems change, because that is ultimately what we are trying to effect. Chris Bort. One thing to just keep in mind is that there is a certain kind of mysticism about this, that there is human rights budgeting and wellbeing budgeting, all these kinds of things. Maybe I overly simplify things, but what we are really talking about here is having a really good understanding of what we want to do, then looking at how we think we are going to get there, looking carefully at the impacts that our approach will have on different people, not just on everyone, and then working out whether or not that is happening. If we get it wrong, starting again and doing it a different way. Politics does not always lend itself to a Government saying, sorry, I have got this wrong, could we do it another way please, but I would perhaps encourage a bit more of that thinking, but that is really difficult to do when you do not have the data to underlie it. It is perfectly reasonable for ministers to stand up and say, I want to achieve this thing, I want to spend X on doing it and have these policies, and then after a year say, look, we looked at the data and it is not having the impact we expected, so we are going to do something different. That is good policy making. At the minute, it is kind of considered bad politics, but we do not have some of the data to underlie that, so I would really encourage that. That is where the scrutiny role of committees like your own can be really important, but to come back to Gavina's, some of the original questions, is it easy to cut through this? Is it easy to understand this? Not at all, so I would encourage simplicity in how we break down these issues into little bits of logic, which makes it far easier than trying to look at a £35 billion budget and thinking, are we doing human rights? Just to add a couple of points to your question, in terms of the international approach, so we have looked a little bit at New Zealand and written a bit about this, and I guess there were two things that stand out from their approach. It was their approach, I am not sure quite how things have developed since, but one was about the collaboration between departments and ministers when they proposed a new spend, that it was very much encouraged and would be scored more highly in terms of the budget process if there were two ministers agreeing on it, so it was dual aims, I suppose, and it would take into account different opinions and different objectives of different departments, but working together in order to achieve that. The second was about looking at where things are working, which builds on Chris's point, so as well as looking at where new spend should be, looking at where should we be reducing spend because it is not working. I agree that it is very rare to see that in Scotland, but that is crucial in looking at what works and what does not work. They should be hand in hand. In terms of being able to understand the budget process and the figures, it is very difficult from the budget documents and at budget time, it is for many reasons with the control of the Scottish Government, but it is very rushed and it is very hard to understand what has gone into the budget, why, what the impacts are thought to be, all of those kinds of things. We are not an organisation that tries to influence or recommend policy, but we are very interested in understanding the data. We find that civil servants are very happy to explain and talk us through things in the months following. It is not that they are necessarily secretive about it, it is at that official level. It is more that at the actual time that the budget is being produced and put out there and being scrutinised by Parliament, there is not the time then and there is not the transparency then when it would be really critically needed because of the timings. I think that is a big part of it. Subsequently, we are able to, over the course of a year, be able to get heads around with the help of officials to do that, but it can be a bit of a struggle. Welcome to everybody who has joined us this morning and thank you for your comments so far. It has been really interesting. I want to pick up and maybe try to tease out some of the connections and issues that we have. We have talked about a problem of data. We have talked about the shiny new thing and being cautious around that. I totally get that. One of the things that Chris Hew talked about is where we want to get to and having that vision as being really clear. Do you all think that we understand if we talk about some of the technical language in this around a minimum call or what it means to live in dignity? Do we have a shared understanding of that? If not, what is the work that we need to do to ensure that we do across the different sectors and different priority groups or other demographics? How do we ensure that we have that understanding so that we can then make sure that we are collecting the right data, delivering the right kind of vision and not being sidetracked into the mysticism of it all? Which of you wants to go first on that one, Chris? I will defer to Ali on definitions around minimum core and things like that. I think that it is a really important question. It is why the work that the Scottish Government has started on things like a minimum income guarantee is really important. That should not be a single policy solution of, well, let us just talk about social security. Once we have talked about social security, we will fix that and everything is fixed. That should be a fundamental statement of the basic level of support that our state will provide to everyone and for some people that will be through social security. For others that will be how they work and we can look at the role of unpaid care and all of those kind of things. It is vital as we progress policies like that, which are long-term, which cannot happen overnight and should not, because they need to be designed with the people that they are designed to help. I think that that is absolutely crucial. I am sorry, I missed the earlier part of Karen's question about how easy it is for us to influence the budget. For an organisation like JRF, it is reasonably easy because we have access, we have power which we hold and we try to give that over to the people that we are trying to represent. However, if you are George Ayn public, it is impossible, literally impossible. How would you be able to piece together? As Emma says, it takes people like us a year to work it out, because it is so complex. The complexity is built in and it is part of that power dynamic, so how we unpick that is really important. I would just say, in terms of do we have that shared knowledge and understanding, I think we think we do. I think it is something that is sometimes assumed, but it is not borne out in terms of that kind, when you dig under a little bit, and then actually very simple questions that you would hope you would be able to ask and get an answer to. How much are you spending on tackling child poverty? What impact do you expect it to have? You cannot, at the moment, ask those questions and get an answer that is robust and rigorous, because there is not that infrastructure behind those decisions at the moment that enables ministers or the civil service to be able to fully answer that. I think that it is that kind of integrity of the analysis that underpins many of those statements, and that comes back to the capacity of the civil service. The priority is given within decision making and what those signals are in terms of what priority should be given to this type of analysis. I think that a lot of the skills are there to do it. It is sometimes not given the right focus, and we have already talked about data, but I think that is part of it as well. Alison Johnstone would like to come in as well. I suppose that the demystifying element around human rights language that Chris said before about keeping things simple. The minimum core is simple. It is red lines below which we do not accept a society that we should fall. The minimum core is a global thing. Of course, there are debates and there are philosophical debates on whether there is a relative or an absolute. For a country such as Scotland and the wealth that Scotland has, our minimum should not be as low as it is in other countries. We look at our levels of food poverty, the use of food banks and the amount of homelessness. We are not meeting the minimum core at a global level under those rights. There is a need to have a national discussion around what the minimum core is and what it should be for Scotland. For me, that is an integral part of the development of a new legislation. What are those red lines going to be within that legislation? How do people understand what a life of dignity means to them? That is a conversation that needs the participation of everybody, and particularly vulnerable groups and those who are least heard from. That right to participate in those discussions around what will impact in your life is critical to a shared understanding of what is more complex but not very difficult when we translate concepts. A way of people understanding that those rights are relevant to them will help across the public and public sector to understand what bringing rights home means and what realising rights and what progressively realising rights means. I think that that can all be part of a conversation that is a critical conversation in the development of that new legislation. I want to ask Pam to come in first and then we will go to Angela. Thank you for your submissions and for the discussion this morning. It is really helpful, as my colleagues have said. I want to dig a little bit more into the minimum core for some specific groups of people, notwithstanding the significant gaps in data that you have all highlighted and that we need to address. I hope that that is something that we can do. There are clear, from the data that exists, some problems with the minimum core, particularly around disabled people. For example, the SHRC's paper during the summer around the impact of Covid restrictions and social care on disabled people's rights, and some people who live in entire days and weeks and months in one chair. We have heard about Fraser of Allander. You have done some really good research recently on the minimum core of rights of people with a learning disability, and of course, there is the significant work that is going on around child poverty. The fact that so many children are living in poverty is not getting an adequate standard of living in that respect. What are the panels' views? Could you say a little bit more about the detail of those minimum core and what data you have used to tell that story and how important it is? Could you talk a little bit about what it means for addressing some of those gaps, particularly in relation to how we use our public spend, social security, the way that we see the care service working, particularly for women or disabled people? It would be really good just to hear a bit about that, if that is okay. Okay, thanks very much, convener. Thank you very much. I think that Pam Duncan-Glancy raised hugely important issues, and they reflect the comments that Chris made earlier on about understanding through data, but more than the data, through services having a relationship with people and communities and understanding what lived experience means for different people. That is absolutely about the point that Chris has made. Focusing on the objectives, what is it that we want to see as a country, as a society and make decisions and then formulate processes around them that will deliver that? It also means that we have been talking about this since the inception of the Parliament to move policy away from a siloed approach to thinking and to seeing, for example, social care as a human rights issue, as a social policy issue, as an economic policy issue. If we invest in social care, we are investing in quality of life, we are investing in active citizenship, we are investing in the workforce, we are investing in growing an economy, that for 2 per cent of GDP invested in care creates three times as many jobs as are created in construction. The Feeley review of adult social care suggested that we need an increase in investment of 0.4 per cent. That would only take us up to 2.66 per cent of GDP, in contrast to Sweden's level of 4.81 in terms of spending on social care. That example illustrates a point that those considerations around the realisation of rights and the advancement of equality are not the focus of the committee but have to be solely the focus of every other committee in the Parliament. That is also about coherence. To relate that back to Ms Chapman's question about, is there a shared understanding? No, there is not. Is there a shared understanding? Do we all actually have a shared understanding or the same level of knowledge about the budget process? Who among us can talk fluently, apart maybe from Chris, about the fiscal framework? That means an investment of time and an investment of resource in building that knowledge amongst our policy makers and amongst the public. One of the things that we have suggested in eBag and that echoes some of the calls from the Citizens Assembly is for a citizen's budget. That is in relation firstly to the documentation and the process. We could of course go further and think about that in terms of co-production and participation in national budget processes, but I will stop there and let others come in. I am just conscious of where we are in terms of times. We are all going to have to members and the panel will just be a little bit tighter in terms of making sure that we are sharp with answers. We do not have to hear from everyone, but Chris, I am sure that the questions that we have just heard from Pam, you would be keen to comment on. I will keep it brief. Pam, you are absolutely right. The experience of disabled people in Scotland is far more likely to be in poverty. If you are a child in a family where somebody is disabled, you are again far more likely to be in poverty. We can see that there is a different experience within housing. If you are in a family where somebody is disabled, you are far more likely to be in poverty purely because of your housing costs alone. We are starting to see in Scotland that we now have powers over things such as disability assistance payments, where we need to take a more fundamental look at what the purpose of those payments is and what role they can play in lifting people out of poverty, because they do not at the moment. I think that the way in which they have been designed with people who are going to be eligible to those payments at their core, so that the process should be a far more dignified process than you would get at the moment from the DWP, is exactly the same process that we should be going through and how we design the policy as they change as we go forward and reform them. That is a vital lever that we have to improve lives of disabled people in Scotland. Emma, there was a reference to yourself. In terms of learning disabilities, we have done quite a lot of work. I have actually been shocked at the state of the understanding and the data and the knowledge of pretty much all aspects of public and civil society in terms of understanding the issues around learning disability. We have stated that we believe that its population is pretty much invisible because there has been so little investment in data or understanding about the issues that are faced. One thing that we have looked at is trying to understand where there is data and actually producing our own data. There is a lot of analysis that we have done on that, but just coming back to that about disability and poverty and carers and poverty, something that we put out last week, looked at unpaid carers, a person with learning disability, and over half of those households that we surveyed were living in poverty because of the fact that they cannot take up paid employment as well as being a full-time unpaid carer. Carers allowance does not touch the side, so that is something in terms of how the budget could operate in terms of alleviating that. There is a lot that is going on. It is not well appreciated by ministers and the core civil service in terms of what learning disability is and what can be done to help under investment in social care and money disappearing in the social care system. People are having to fight tooth and nail to get any support. We hear that time and time again. We believe that it needs more visibility. It is core to what we are talking about in terms of understanding what human rights approach is and who it is that we are talking about in terms of groups of protected characteristics. We are really bad at it. Alison Johnstone, you are wanting to comment as well. A couple of very brief points. Pam mentioned the care report that the commission had produced in the summer and, for the most part, some abject failures in realising the rights of people's with disabilities in terms of care provision that was found. I think that self-directed support and the provision of personal care and support are a really good example of where you can have good policy. It is important when we are reviewing the development of a new national care service. What is policy failure and what is failure to fund the right policy and to make sure that we are not throwing out good ideas by not realising that those ideas have not been resourced properly in the first place? You can have the best law and policy, but if you do not resource it properly, you will not get the outcomes that you are looking for. In relation to digging a bit deeper in terms of minimum core at the international level, there is a wealth of guidance around what minimum core could and should mean in different national contexts without prescribing but with giving ideas. That is a good place to start, looking at the general comments that are produced by the different treaty bodies and looking elsewhere to see what other countries are also doing. That is where you will find some really useful guidance as a starting point to then have that national discussion around what we consider is appropriate for Scotland. I welcome and good morning to the panel. Thank you for the opening discussion. It was really helpful. With human rights budgeting being so new, do you know of any lessons learned from international competitors on the equalities in human rights budgeting and which countries or regions can Scotland learn from? Okay, who would like to go first? Anyone now? We have lost Angela. Anyone in the room wanting to go first? Right, okay, so we have lost both of them. Angela, are you able to come in? Angela? I do not think they can hear us. Alison? That is us back. I am sorry. I think Angela and I both lost the reception at the same time when we did not hear the question. Do you want to quickly go in? With human rights budgeting being so new, do you know of any of the lessons learned from international competitors on equalities in human rights budgeting and which countries and regions can Scotland learn from? Angela, do you want to go first? I think you mentioned some of this earlier, didn't you? Maybe you can expand a little. I did, and I won't necessarily take a lot of time to recap. I think that there are different things to learn from different countries. The constitutional requirement within Austria, so gender budgeting is built into those requirements similarly in Iceland. Human rights budgeting, as Allie has said, is newer, but we have opportunity in Scotland to learn from those other countries who have ensured that budgets and public finance processes are part of incorporation. There is a job for this committee and other committees as the incorporation agenda moves forward in Scotland. How are we tying in everything that we are saying about financial scrutiny, Emma's points on the policy cycle, tying in appraisal, implementation and evaluation, and doing that from a human rights-based approach? What is it? How are things experienced currently? What do we need to change? How are we going to get there? That is the most straightforward way. For committees, one of the things that Scotland is different from is that we have much more contact with the committee. Even though it is incredibly difficult to follow the budget process and the budget documentation, we have a more open budget than in many other countries. However, it still has the status of being hidden in plain sight in a sense. Opening up greater participation, taking some of the lessons from participatory budgeting in Scotland and internationally around participation and engaging beyond consultation, but I see that Allie is going to come in, so I will stop talking and I will let Allie come in. In relation to that point, the open budget survey is a useful place to go to in terms of the index that they produce is a global index of the level of participation, accountability and scrutiny that the Governments are under in terms of their budget process. That is where we had originally gone when we could not interrogate the budget ourselves when we were trying to do some human rights analysis of the budget. We thought, let us look to the process first. Improving our process, improving participation in the budget, improving the accountability and transparency of data, there are 177 countries involved in that index and looking globally, therefore, to their experience of who has the higher indexes than Scotland's comparative scores will be a good place to start in terms of improving our processes. To be fair, the budget review that Angela was part of in 2017 and the committee's subsequent inquiry which has looked at issues of process, we know what we need to do and I think that it is just a case of ensuring that those processes are improved. I think that that takes us to Alexander. Thank you, convener, and I welcome everyone to the panel in the discussion that we have had. I want to tease out slightly more when it comes to the idea of engagement and participation. Each one of you and your organisations are actively involved and you are supporting us in this Parliament and government and MSPs on how you progress. We can learn a lot from what you say in your participation, but it is how we expand that participation and ensure that we get the accountability and transparency, because you have mentioned specific locations in other countries and other areas that have actively engaged. Some of those have the citizen budget and some of those develop some of that role to ensure that there is much more of an inclusion, but there are also barriers that we find and you have identified today that it is a complex process and you need to be quite forensic as to how you manage that. Things can be misrepresented or they can be hidden in the process of trying to see how it all works. I would like to tease out from your or whoever wishes to answer about how you feel we can stop the barriers, how you feel that we can actually engage, because we think that we are engaging, but obviously that is not everyone's opinion. Our engagement is slightly less than other countries and other regions engagement, but at the same time we are all trying to get as much information out that is possible, so it would be good to hear what you have used on what we need to do more and what we need to do to engage and ensure that we get that transparency, that we get that participation and we get that scrutiny. I think, from our perspective, a good place to start is looking at what we mean by participation and meaningful participation. When we look at a lot of Government and Parliament consultations, the time that is not given for responses, I was really pleased to see the human rights focus within this call for evidence, but a very short timeframe for people to respond meaningfully. Those who we are trying to engage with, those who are least engaged with these processes, are probably the most time. Not just in terms of time resource, but monetary resource for bringing together people. Resources were taken on board that people's working patterns if they are trying to engage childcare responsibilities and other care responsibilities, if they want to bring people physically together. I think that there is a lot of talk. The programme for government, I think that I mentioned 67 times, is the word consultation or consult, and the need to consult with people's lived experience, which is great to see, but I think that there is consultation and consultation does not always mean participative engagement. Having a set of standards for participation, what people can expect from the process, to be defined and to be across all the different types of consultations and engagements that Government and Parliament have, would be useful. The right to participate, there is a lot of information internationally around what makes for good participation and democratic participation. Having a set of standards for Scotland would be a good idea for people to know what to expect, and it will help parliamentarians and public bodies to know what they should be doing to better engage with people. Both Emma and Pam touched on some people fighting tooth and nail to get things to change. I am sure that almost all of us will have had examples particularly over the pandemic of family members of friends who have had to fight with public services or fight with other people to feel like they are vindicating their rights. I think that we might feel that in the policy development process as well. Having people's experience of engagement participation is vital, but what do you do with it? For example, we did a report with single parents earlier in the year. One of the main findings from them was that we are sick of telling you the same thing over and over again. I do not want to participate. I do not want to hear my story. I want you to fix it. People are speaking. Are we really listening? Yes, there are many different processes and tools to get people's participation, and the more of those we use, the better. Across the political spectrum, there is a lot of support for that, which is great, but we really need to listen. That fighting tooth and nail thing is something that we hear all the time. It is not necessarily to do with budgets, although budgets for advocacy groups, advice groups and rights groups are vital in that, but it is about listening. Very briefly, from the perspective of an organisation like ours, in terms of being able to have more meaningful dialogue with ministers in terms of parliamentary scrutiny, I think that thinking about the questions that are being asked of ministers in terms of understanding the underpinning of policies that are being made. There are a lot of announcements made. There are a lot of different times in the year when announcements are made, but that is scrutiny of why that decision is being made. What is the evidence that underpins that? What is the expectation that this will achieve? How are you going to measure it? Getting that kind of thing more routinely discussed and on the public record would be a good step forward. In terms of the scrutiny of that type of thing, there are not that many organisations in Scotland. We do not have a big legacy of think tanks. There are relatively few organisations that can do that kind of scrutiny of the budget. It is difficult to think about how you support that, but it is something that the Parliament could think about. Angela Constance Very briefly, I would absolutely endorse everything that has been said. I think that one thing to add is spice. Doing a good job in terms of making some of the budget information a bit more accessible, but there is an awful lot more to be done by both the Parliament and the Government in terms of public information, transparency and simplicity in the budget documents. There is nothing more to add to the comments that colleagues have made about meaningful and inclusive participation, and there are some really important lessons to learn from our own experience in Scotland about where participatory budgeting has not been inclusive and fully participatory. There are some positive actions happening within the Scottish Exchequer linked to the open government action plan around making the budget more accessible, around opening up some of the data and documentation, and that might be something that the committee would like to keep an eye on the progress of those positive projects. Fulton MacGregor Thank you, convener, and good morning to the panel from Merritt, my office, and Sunnycote bridge. I think that this has been a really useful and interesting discussion today, and I think that the panel members will be glad to hear that my questions are really quite general, a lot of it has already been touched on, but I suppose that it will give the panel members a chance to home in any points that they wish to make. One of the areas that we hear often quite a lot about is MSPs on committees, but even just in our daily work, is that gap between what is being referred to already, between what is agreed or said at policy level and how it is implemented. I am wondering if, and I am quite easy with whatever order the convener chooses, if there is anything that we can do there to improve that, to improve what the policy intention is and how that is enacted on the ground. Fulton MacGregor Okay, we will start with Chris, because I think that it is an area that you mentioned earlier on your contribution, Chris. Yeah, I mean, I am not a great one for process, so sometimes I am not the best place to answer these things, but I think that I have written down here, I was hoping that the cameras couldn't see it, but there is a certain amount of me which just thinks that we need to get on with stuff, and we need to get on with looking at how it is working and trying to under that gap Fulton has mentioned about here is our policy and here is the implementation of it. We just let the implementation happen, however it happens, without really knowing what is going on and what the outcomes are. Therefore, if we don't see much change in very high-level poverty stats, we just kind of go, well, we need to do more, maybe we need to tax more, maybe we need to spend more, but we are kind of missing the obvious question that is sitting in front of us, so I think that it is really vital. I maybe encourage the committee to break this down a bit, focus on a particular group, really put your efforts into it. As you say, make it relevant, because sometimes these discussions that we have in Parliament are quite distant to the experience that people are having out in communities across Scotland, so pick something that feels really relevant and put a microscope on it and say, look, how is this working? Not to set a political trap, but to improve the lives of the people that we are all trying to improve the lives of. It would be remiss of me not to mention this, so I will do it now. I will go back to the experience of reform of council tax in Scotland and how the ambitions of subsequent Governments to change the system entirely have not really happened on the ground. Despite many commissions, I was on the secretariat for one looking at ways in which to do that, so I think that in terms of the work of the committee and the Parliament in general, I think that when there are these really difficult decisions to be made and council tax is one of the most incredibly difficult to reform it, we all know why and we know why it has not been done, but if we look at examples from, for example, Northern Ireland who did bring through a change in their rate system in the not too distant past, it was a joint effort from the parties to realise how difficult it was to reform it and to basically join hands and just be a united force in saying we have to do this, we have to push it through because otherwise the inequalities that it is causing are just going to get worse and worse and worse, so there are lessons to be learned from experiences of reforming, things like property taxation that might be relevant to the work of this committee in actually making progress. Okay, thank you. Fulton, do you want to come back in before we move to Alison Angela? Yeah, thanks, thanks, because I had a wee specific question for Emma, if that's okay, because she's an order, I didn't know when people were coming in. I apologise to people who are on the chat, I put a wee note on the chat that I had to come back in and it did not mean for the second half of that sentence to be in capital, so there you go. I just wanted to ask you, will you summing up as well about your views on the national care service, because I know that you did write something recently that was talking about the national care service being unlikely to do any better if someone needs it, potentially, than the system that seeks to replace it? I wonder if you're able to comment a wee bit on that in the grander scheme of things that we're talking about just now. So, yes, it's ought to be mentioned by a colleague in terms of you can't expect different results. You might have the right policy, but if you don't fund them properly, the policy is likely to fall over and not be an improvement on what's come before, and it's again another area where it's extremely complicated to understand the funding that's going into this, and also even government announcements in terms of increases in funding, it's actually very difficult to understand exactly what that means, and it sounds ridiculous that that is the case, but that kind of clarity in terms of understanding the full extent of spending on adult social care is the thing that we specifically talk about, what's being spent, why, what needs to change, and actually to have that really good shared understanding of the cost of the system and what is needed in order to improve it. That was in the independent review, looked at some of those issues, but actually again it wasn't particularly clear in some of its analysis, which I think speaks for the complexity of these issues. If we don't have that transparency that helps us understand exactly what's going on in the system, then it would be really hard to understand what's working and what's not working, and so it's something we're really keen to really hone in on is that understanding of such an important issue and such a massive reform, actually understanding where the money is and following it. In response to Fulton's questions, I think that my one word answer would be coherence, and that sometimes there is a lack of coherence across policy initiatives, policies and spending. I think that in an environment where we collectively can experience and maybe contribute to initiative overload, we need to encourage a bit of a step back. For example, in recent recommendations, the calls to actions from the social renewal advisory board have touched on many of the issues that we've talked about today. How is Government going to report on those actions in terms of how they map on to the range of actions that Government is funding, but how is Parliament going to scrutinise the outcomes from those actions? And maybe rather than layering additional processes and actions, we need to remember that the national performance framework exists to monitor and to measure some of those outcomes and to see consistently what the relationship is between policy and spending announcements new or cumulative, new or revised, as the budget review group and colleagues today have encouraged, and what outcomes are being achieved. Where the outcomes are not being achieved, what is the issue there? Is it spending or is it some other issue? The example that I want to use to illustrate that is a survey recently by Glasgow University for Food Train, which identified among the older adults in receipt of domiciliary social care that, among older adults in receipt of social care in the survey, 31 per cent were malnourished, 31 per cent were experiencing malnutrition. That's over and above the usual, and I can't believe that we have a usual measure of older adults who are at home on their own, experiencing malnutrition of about around 12 per cent. Is the problem there one of funding or is the problem there one of the instrument, the time-limited provision that there is for supporting adults in receipt of domiciliary care? The legislative instrument, rather than the budget, may be the two combined. Having that coherence when we come to the policy evaluation stage and to be looking at outcomes and what is producing certain outcomes that are realising the policy objectives or are creating other problems. Picking up on three points from the previous speakers. In relation to Chris's point, I agree, picking a group, picking a particular issue and looking at it in depth, really understand how you work through that process. If you are focusing on a particularly vulnerable group, if you are going to get it right for them, chances are that you are going to get it right for others. It is difficult sometimes to think about human rights budgeting on a global issue. They hone down on to a particular point and work out how to do that processing and scrutinising and then build out from there. In relation to Emma's point, I fully support the need to look at taxation and local taxation. We have talked a lot about taxation and the value that brings to maximising resources. In Scotland, we have limitations, but we also hide behind those limitations, and we do not necessarily look at what is fully possible within devolved competencies. There are some good examples looking to Switzerland around local wealth taxation that are possible for us to look at. There are people working on that in the UK. I know that some submissions into the Government's taxation framework are going to focus on that, so it is worth the committee looking at those issues. Lastly, going back to Angela's point, I think that the domiciliary care issue brings it back also to data, the point that we started the session on, where when we look at the types of provision of social care that people receive, we look at how many hours or how many minutes people are receiving, how many times they are seen per day, whether they are given whatever services. We do not ask people and measure in whether they are not and to the extent to which they are able to live independently because of the social care that they receive. We do not ask the right questions in terms of the outcomes that we are trying to achieve. In terms of the data that we look to collect, we also need to think about what we are asking and why we are asking it, and are there better questions to get to the crux of whether or not people are able to live with dignity? Thank you very much. Unfortunately, time is against us in terms of this panel. We probably could have gone on all day. We are at this as a committee, we are at the start of a process, so thank you all so much for the evidence that you have given today, and I will suspend it briefly to change witnesses. We are now going to hear from our second panel of witnesses, and again one of our witnesses is joining us remotely, and we still have Fulton MacGregor joining us remotely. I welcome to the meeting Adam Stachara, head of policy and communications at Age Scotland, Jatina Haria, executive director of CRER, Ailey Dixon policy and parliament manager in gender, and Rob Gowens policy and public affairs manager, health and social care alliance. Again, I thank the witnesses for their written evidence, which has been really helpful in our deliberations, and we will invite each member to give short opening statements starting with Adam, please. Thanks very much on behalf of Age Scotland for the invitation. Reflections of the work that you are actually doing is not straightforward. I think that particularly getting to grips with the information from that first panel as well, but it is incredibly vital in terms of scrutiny and supporting people to realise the rights across the wider work of government and public services. On older people, we know that that realisation of rights can be a challenge even when interacting with public services. In the events of the last 18 months, we have drawn in sharp focus many ways on which older people have faced barriers to services, whether by pausing them or removing them entirely, or primarily digital-only access towards them, which discounts at least half a million over 60s in Scotland from accessing the rights or information or any kind of services that they require. Indeed, health and social care are the challenges that people have faced there in doing so. Looking ahead, we think that it is vital that the budget and future budgets support national recovery, of course, and meet the needs of an ageing population that Scotland has. It is a population ageing fast in the rest of the UK, but we often feel that we have not really got to grips with that. It is not a problem, it is not a challenge, it is something that we have and we must embrace and support. Older people in Scotland can enjoy a dignified later life and ensure that Scotland is the best place in the world to grow older. Kate, thank you very much and Chattin. Thank you. I think what I want to say is that a lot of the issues on equalities and budgeting has already been said over many years and many, many times. I am not sure that there is a lot new to be said. The more recent report from the Equality Budget Advisory Group was useful, but it was saying things that have been said before. The new ask to make the recommendations into a prioritised and resourced action plan is useful and we should push the Government to make sure that it is done as a matter of great urgency. Having said that and you touched on this in the earlier session, we should not be interested too much in processes and actions, but outcomes are what really makes a difference. Even in the eBag report for one example on EQIAs, it talked about having to publish them and mandatory training. The publication requirement has been a legal duty for many, many years now and the training in itself will not necessarily make them any better. There is a question on joined up Government as well, I think I was touched on that as well. In terms of that EQIA recommendation, the current Public Security and Quality duty consultation that the Government is running at the moment does not even mention EQIAs, so that there is a problem there. A lot of people have already said things about data, which we should totally agree with, especially in the context of race, but it is not just about collecting better data or more data, it is about analysing that. Again, a quick example, I was looking at the Social Security child benefit take-up data, which shows for Black minority ethnic families the take-up or the application rate was around 7 per cent in Scotland, which does not really tell us anything. We know the 4 per cent BME population figure, but that was from the 2011 census. That is probably meaningless now, and we know that the BME population has a much younger profile, so there is probably a lot more families with young children who are from Black minority ethnic communities. We need to know what that figure is, so we can see whether the 7 per cent is a true reflection of what it should be or not. Just to close up then, maybe surprisingly, I am not going to come here and ask for more money for anything necessarily. The child benefit payment might be a separate issue, but in the main, certainly for racial equality, it is not about more money, it is about better mainstreaming of race equality and elimination of discrimination. That is back to outcomes. We need to see a change in people's lives from the work that we are doing. Thank you very much. Thank you, convener, and to the committee for inviting engender to participate in this meeting. As we have outlined in the written submission that we have sent, we are really pleased to welcome the committee's focus on human rights budgeting and human rights-based approaches to budgeting. That being said, we have previously outlined our concerns this year that to the committee about the lack of attention in the existing Scottish budget process is paying to structural inequality between women and men. In Scotland, we have numerous rhetorical commitments to an expanded and a solidified approach to gender budgeting in Scotland. However, the existing mechanisms and processes that we have to deliver that remain largely descriptive and are undermined, as Gathen alluded to there, by a lack of data but also by capacity and prioritisation issues. Our written submission also outlines the critical role of the budget as a tool to respond to a widely recognised role back in women's rights as a direct result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Through a spotlight on social care, which we have covered in our submission, social care has been seriously destabilised by interventions such as social distancing and isolation, offsetting care back from the state into the household largely to be delivered by women, which impacts obviously their own ability to stay in paid work, plunging them into poverty or often further poverty, and also their ability to undertake activities central to their own health and wellbeing. When it comes to human rights, women encounter different barriers to adequate housing, good health and income and other human rights because of unequal access to resources to safety and to power. However, there appears to be limited detailed descriptions of how gender budgeting and human rights budgeting processes sit side by side and can mutually reinforce one another. We do site work by the economist Diane Ellison, which outlines the critical role of gender budgeting to the realisation of seadull, the women's bill of rights. The forthcoming human rights bill and the Scottish Government's planned equality and human rights mainstreaming strategy might offer some opportunities to further embed these analysis in a complementary way. However, without the cumulative analysis of the budget up front, it's extremely difficult for engender and other organisations to describe how that might be realised. I'll leave that there. Thank you for the invitation to give evidence to the committee this morning. The significant impact of Covid-19 and the response has taken to be felt for many years to come, including on the economy. The Alliance believes that it's possible to embed equality, transparency in people's participation in Scotland's economy in order to achieve transformational and positive change that works for everyone. Under international human rights law, Governments are obliged to respect, protect and fulfil human rights and the way that public money is raised, allocated and spent is central to that. Adopting a human rights-based approach to Scotland's budget would embed human rights-based values like equality, transparency and participation in financial decision making. To facilitate a shift towards equality in the Scottish budget process, Governments should explicitly recognise rights and their budgetary decisions. They should identify economic, social and cultural rights, as well as rights for disabled people, women and minoritised communities, all of them have been disproportionately affected by Covid-19. The budget is one of the main ways that national Governments show their priorities. If Scotland values and prioritises equalities in human rights, that should be reflected in the budget process. Human rights budgeting and the use of equalities in human rights impact assessments support prioritisation. They are for a common language and philosophy, as well as the framework and tools to balance competing interests and make fair judgments. Finally, the Alliance believes that more sustainable resources are needed in Scotland's third sector and in the social care sector. The contribution of the third sector to Scotland's people, society and economy remains unrecognised and undervalued. Similarly, there have been long been calls for greater investment in social care as part of the shift from acute services towards preventative community-based support and more recently to fulfil the recommendations of the independent review of adult social care. Thank you very much. Obviously, I don't know if you managed to see the last panel, but we mentioned that this is the first time that the committee has taken a look to take a human rights approach. Clearly, in the past, we have looked at gender and equality budgeting. Maybe it is starting with Ellie just to talk about how we make sure that those things do not end up conflicting and that they all add value. I want to restress about our written submission and the evidence that I am giving today is that we are not saying that human rights budgeting is in any way oppositional to gender budgeting. We are saying that we have had this focus on gender budget analysis and gender budgeting processes for a really long time, and yet we still have not delivered the transformational change that we want to see in gender's experience. That might be reflected by other qualities organisations. When we look across the board at mainstreaming GTs and obligations in Scotland, the experience of layering more and more and more requirements on public bodies, including Scottish Parliament, has not necessarily led to greater outcomes or the intersectionality that you might hope. It is not to say that we do not want to focus on all of the characteristics, but we have not yet found a way to do that without diminishing the focus on one. I think that our concern about adding more into the budget process is that there is that risk, that we continue with the rhetorical commitments that we have to gender budgeting without actually seeing some of the process changes that we need to see. I am by no means an expert in human rights budgeting. I think that human rights budgeting, as we allude to in the written evidence, has to include gender budgeting because of gender, because women fit into every single group and women have human rights, but also because of the planned human rights incorporation agenda's focus on sedol and women's rights within that framework. There will have to be some kind of complementary process. It is just how we figure out how to do that in a technical way as we move forward through that incorporation agenda. Thanks. I think that that point of intersectionality is actually really important. Justin, do you want to make a quick comment then I will bring in Pam? Yes, I agree with what Ailey was saying there. A long time ago we argued against having this committee looking at equalities and human rights together. We argued that there should be two separate committees that would have solved your problem because you would have had two committees looking at two different things, but that was just to add to what Ailey was saying. We need to just be careful that it is not used as an excuse by people saying that human rights is a brand new thing and that we need to take another couple of years to get our head round it, whereas we have been looking at gender budgeting for so many years. We still haven't got that right. This might just give people an excuse to say, we've got something new to look at now. We believe that greater weight should be given to progressive economic systems like human rights and gender budgeting, as well as the wellbeing and caring economy. Earlier this year, we organised a panel discussion with expert speakers to try and unpick the differences between some of those. That event demonstrated that, rather than being competing agendas, those systems have a lot in common and are complementaries. They put people at the centre of the economy and they share core values like equality and justice. I think that they can live together and will complement each other rather than conflicting. Good morning to the panel. Thank you so much for your submissions that were characteristically excellent from all of you and really helpful in informing our work. I have a particular question around human rights budgeting and specifically around the idea of a minimum core, which we heard a bit about this morning. There are a number of groups in society that are notwithstanding the data gaps that you have mentioned yet and others have noted. There are a number of groups in society that it appears that the minimum cores are not being met for, for example, women, disabled people, unpaid carers and children, particularly the level of child poverty. Could you say a bit about how you think a human rights-based approach to budgeting and where the budget lines could go to start to address some of that and, in particular, some of the bigger spend around social security or a national care service, for example, might be quite interesting? I know that all of your submissions have pointed to particularly the national care service as something that could make an impact to women's and disabled people's equality, if that is okay. Adam, do you want to kick off? It's quite hard, especially as a child, to think of going across all the budget lines to work out where something could be spent less and something more in action. The previous panel, Chris Burr, made a really good point about outcomes and outcomes that have been talked to here as well. I think that that's the core part of this, is the outcomes of previous actions and to see what's working or not and really properly evaluating that. Your point about the people who are missed in terms of realisation of rights is absolutely spot-on. I think there are crisis that we've faced that has drawn these things into sharper focus. Whether or not there is doing enough people care about that, I think, is also a challenge to take quick, big action to redress that, and people should be. I think that it's a difficult one for charities to go where else without looking across all of the money spent, but the people who are mentioned are places where the focus needs to go. Looking for these outcomes, looking for these proper big intervention, the national care service would be a great example of looking at a system just now that is okay for lots of people, but doesn't work for lots of people. The idea behind it to try and create something new which will have more accountability and better equity of access. All those things as part of a structure will be as an important big step to trying to redress that. It won't necessarily, by virtue of having an institution fixed overnight, will be about all the actions that are taken and that kind of scrutiny of them. Again, it's a very difficult one, but those are the fact that these things need to happen, that people need to be, need to go beyond the minimum, don't we, you know, a society in terms of our aspirations, and the fact that if we're not achieving that at all, it's quite scandalous. Okay, Rob, were you looking to come in? Yeah, I think the social care's sort of rightly been highlighted as part of this. In particular, self-directed support is an example of where some of the implementation gap between policy and the reality of our research has suggested that people's experiences of self-directed support on the ground don't match up to what should be in legislation and finance in the budget has a huge part to play in that. I think that human rights budgeting, for me, gives a sort of framework to make some of these decisions and to identify what isn't being met, what is required to meet the minimum core and achieve it. It pointed out, I think, in the earlier panel, that the estimates from the independent review of adult social care were that the additional expenditure of around £660 million per year on social care was required to meet its recommendations, which would be about 0.4 per cent of Scottish GDP, but it was pointed out in the earlier panel that there are other countries where there's far more to be spent on on these areas. I think that when it comes to defining the content of individual rights and looking for that minimum core, obviously we have frameworks like the AAAQ and we have general recommendations and general comments from international committees that we can look to as a starting point when it comes to each sort of human rights that might be relevant in an issue like social care, which will not just be one right. However, when it comes to, as part of defining that content, we need to have a really good eye for what that means for different groups and go beyond a kind of formal non-discrimination approach and actually CEDO and other conventions talk about this principle of substantive equality and what it actually will take for women and other groups to have a material improvement in their conditions. I think that one of the key issues will be capacity and the skill and expertise that will be needed to sort of build a general awareness of what the content of human rights means and is and looks like across not only public bodies but civil society as well to really engage in that. I think there's a capacity question. I think there's also a prioritisation question that's relevant perhaps to what you're asking Pam is what we saw during the pandemic was you can't talk about the minimum core of a human right and not talk about principles like non-retrogression and non-derogation and we saw a retrogression in women's rights. We saw social care packages cut and removed and we saw schools closed and women not being able to undertake paid work and having to give up paid work entirely so we did see a rollback in women's rights. I don't really know how to answer that problem but I think prioritisation is going to have to come into it and we need to have an agenda that's funded to avoid some of the decisions that were made in the context where we have mainstreaming obligations which are meant to avoid these things happening we're supposed to have impact assessments that mean that we don't unwittingly if further embed inequality and it just didn't happen. I'm going to stick to what I asked the first panel which was very much about the participation, the engagement and it would be very useful to hear from all of you about what degree of engagement and participation you have experienced for your organisation and for those that you represent and has there been a good exchange with the Scottish Government about what their intentions are and the attempts that they have to progress things? We've talked about barriers already today in the sector so have you experienced barriers within your own organisation? Do your client base and your service users experience that? It would be good to get a flavour of what you believe and what you think can be done to improve that transparency and the scrutiny that we're taking place when we're looking at this whole budget process. Thank you. Thank you. Chathen, do you want to? Yeah, I mean, from my organisation, College of Federational Equality and Rights, we don't have service users as such, we're more of a strategic organisation but even then I found it quite difficult to get my head down a lot of these things. It's the first time we've really had a discussion about budget thing with this committee so I don't want to stereotype anything but if we found it difficult I can imagine and it takes time as well. Luckily, we have time to invest in this. Other groups that have service users don't just have the time to even reading some of the spice reports and things. It takes hours sometimes so I don't think I don't think people are really interested in the overall budget as such. They're interested in outcomes for their own lives. Again, personally, I have no interest in the fisheries budget whatsoever so that's just a silly example but I think it's going back to outcomes. I think that's what people will be interested in and even I was going to say this in the opening statement but I didn't get to it. We're not really good at evaluating what the money is spent on just now and I think people will be far more invested in getting involved in that and that might be a better way to involve them. The other thing, somebody on the earlier panel said of just looking at one particular aspect, I think that would be another good option because that's again back to what people's interests are. They're interesting things that have impact on their own lives and that's a good starting point so that's the way to get them invested I would say. Okay, thank you. Rob Hank, sorry. Rob, will you try again? Yeah, I think that participation is a key human rights principle but there's raised concerns about the level of public participation in the budget process and as we heard earlier on the Scottish Human Rights Commission has published research that shows that Scotland falls below the globally recommended standards in relation to public participation in the budget process. For ourselves as an organisation and national third sector intermediary, we have lived experience and professionals including those who are focused on economic-related activity. We've participated in more of the engagement sessions by the national task force for human rights leadership as well as holding our own events but there's a lot more that can and should be done to improve participation and I think that that probably needs to be built into the budget process in terms of the timescales to allow meaningful participation before the budget is published and to really have a genuine impact on the budget that the engagement and the participation activity is linked to the decisions that are made as part of the budget process. Thanks to the question, it's not easy at all. I don't think that anyone in the auditor panel said it would be the case and I think that if you look at the time frame that's involved in such a thing it's incredibly short and if you look at this budget we're now looking at governing parties commitments in their manifestos from election through to programmes for government, through to considering how to do the budget, draft budget, going through this whole process and actually the opportunity in that kind of a bigger sense is pretty hard to influence at a time. We've got good relationships and ways in with the minister for equality and older people and across government but actually looking at the budget as a whole actually from age scotland's point of view we might over the course of a year or two or more talk about bigger themes you know whether it is more investment is required in social care and what the outcomes that we require as a result of that will have to happen so people can have better equity of access that staff can have better paying conditions, unpaid carers are better supported all of these types of things and sometimes the question will come back well what will that cost exactly look really difficult question and actually you're coming back with a bare minimum that's required you know talk about earlier on whether it's 600 odd million pounds extra required for social care actually why wouldn't that be a billion to be more than it's expected so for a charity like age scotland we're looking at the information and the challenges that come in and try and look at that very long-term time effort now i've been age scotland for about three and a half years and I think in all of that time we've been talking about more and before that more investment social care what's required and in seeing that realise won't be as a result of one week's bit of work it'll be over the course of many many years there'll be other organisations all their issues all their charities that will have maybe a better way in and that might meet government priorities at the time but you know we can certainly look to influence initiatives around things but on the broader budget on the broader departmental spending I think it's very hard and for individuals even harder still you know trying to navigate a budget document when it comes out you know how you know how much screen time have you got how many bits of paper you have to print off you're hoping not to but you might need to but for an individual who isn't online who's maybe in some community somewhere might have disabilities might have language barriers um you know are not connected they might have great ideas might have a big big and helpful ways to do things but are just so disengaged by virtue of the entity that it is thank you and it's nice to see all today I'd like to ask a question really in regards to gender budgeting and you know providing that gender equality within services is often seen as an additional cost it's something additional within social security within health women's refuse services they're not really built around the the needs of women so the resources for gender equality is often seen as an extra almost like an extension on policy rather than part of the foundation of which policy is built and we can see this clearly highlighted to us as alluded to earlier you know the the disproportional impact that the pandemic has had on women I think that it was really clear to us through that time so where do you see there is progress being made and what is still missing in regards to this gendered budgeting and just to add on to that sorry to ask extra um what lessons do you think we can learn from this gendered budgeting in regards to our human rights budgeting is there lessons to be learned there okay Ellie we'll start with you I think I can probably answer both questions by saying I think the the big lesson for me is that there is a huge gap between rhetoric and national commitment and national ambition I think there was a joint understanding of things like a few years ago the First Minister began talking about childcare with infrastructure which is something women's organisations have been talking about for decades and we now understand the pivotal role that childcare and social care play in allowing women to stay in paid work to progress in paid work and take on more paid work and also have better leisure and well-being activities that then mean that their general health is better so you have a cost saving there so we we see that there are headline ambitions around gender equality the the lesson is maybe that the processes and the data that we have to actually measure the success or how we're progressing towards those those ambitions is missing and I think human rights budgeting processes need to avoid that I think that also plays into what I was saying in the opening statement I made about we need to find and I don't have the answers for this in a neat package but a way to integrate these two different different analysis one of one is very person centred and at core you know focused on individual needs and that's really important but there is also a kind of structural component and women and other groups will face structural barriers the other groups will not so we need to find a way of looking at kind of individual ways of doing things or individual considerations and applying that structural lens to remove some of those barriers so that we see equality within our human rights approach you're right that gender equality is sometimes seen as a cost I think we have enough data now even patchy although it is to show that when we invest in social care for example we create jobs and I do refer I think to the women budget groups recent report on care on the care economy which found that the same investment in social care and in construction would create more jobs and they would largely be women's jobs at national level so I think we do see gender equality saves money it doesn't can always cost money but I also wanted to just comment I think the last thing I would say there is that we do sometimes see a bit of a national and local disconnect so at national level we have these big commitments we have a big ambition about where we want to go but the funding for local services the funding for local authorities to then deliver to those local services doesn't necessarily match up okay um Jatin or Raddam do you want to come in just now or um well just briefly um agree with what Eileen's saying now I mean there's what I said earlier about you know certainly from a race point but probably from a lot of other characteristics about eliminate discrimination we need to make that cost more if people discriminate it needs to cost them and we're not really good at that because we're not really good at um challenging discrimination when it's happening and from a budgeting point of view um we're not really good at supporting advocacy to support people's rights to equality and human rights so that there's another angle there of no point talking about human rights if you can't um insist on them uh applying to you okay thank you so I'm going to take Maggie and then Pam Gossel thanks very much Joe thank you to the panel for joining us today and for your contribution so far I suppose extending a little bit of of some of what was underlying in in Karen's question I'm interested in and you've all picked up in in different ways on on how we look at different rights as they apply to or should apply to to different groups when given we know we lack some of the data we need and we know we lack maybe common understanding how can we as we as we develop this work because we are only starting this how can we over the next few years as we see in the incorporation of other human rights obligations the other international conventions and treaties that um it is our desire to incorporate into scots law how can we use those as ways to um give us better frameworks or better tools for analysis and for delivery because because I understand there's there's that mismatch as as you've all said in different ways around rhetoric and ambition and and implementation so what what does what does the incorporation of of additional human rights frameworks allow us to do and allows to do differently okay who'd like to come in sorry thank you it's a really good and complicated question I think um some some of what I said previously about we're going to just need to accept that there's going to need to be some capacity building that needs to be done around understanding what the human rights frameworks mean we will have access to kind of the international jurisprudence but also we can learn from other countries around how they've interpreted the different rights and a lot of that will depend on what incorporation looks like in the bill the extent to which it's a direct and full incorporation from the international source um so I think some of those things like the general recommendations I mean no one has read every single general comment or general recommendation certainly that I've ever met but um we will probably find a lot of answers in some of the ways in which other people have thought about these questions um general there's general recommendations from my sescar which talk about human rights budgeting or at least elements of human rights budgeting um but hopefully um we we can take different bits from different treaties I think it's going to have to be the the big answer to that okay we'll hear from Rob and then we'll hear from Pam Rob yeah thank you um I suppose given that um the sort of Scotland is planning to incorporate international human rights into domestic law it's um in many ways it's an ideal time for the Scottish Government to applying a human rights based approach to the budgetary decisions and processes um but in particular um sort of one of the one of the sort of the core standards is is sort of maximum available resources um so for instance that would require the sort of Scottish Government to raise as much income as it can for the national budget and prioritise the effective realisation of economic social and cultural rights um as well as sort of ensuring that that sort of all budgets allocated to right suspends not um and sort of not wasted um that's um I think it's there's there's kind of a sort of open opportunity there I think um I would sort of certainly sort of agree with um sort of value digsons points and the points made made earlier that there there is a sort of a lack of of sort of knowledge and understanding um around sort of human rights and how it can how it can be sort of practically used um but um what's um one of the hopes is that um as part of incorporating um sort of human rights instruments into scots law that that's used as a as a stimulus to um to increase sort of understanding and and awareness um and that will be sort of one of the I think one of the key advantage of of sort of incorporating um human rights um instruments into into into law is that um it um it leads to that greater understanding and has it has an impact on things like the national budget thank you Pam Gossel thank you can be on a welcome panel we've all heard about how the pandemic has had a devastating impact on gender equality and it's been stated that it would set boon back decades so today I'd like to ask the question round the risk that boomin's unfair responsibility for unpaid care and domestic work might get worse and then reduce their ability to find paid work and income so firstly are we looking at it a prospect of two-tier workplace where men go back and yet women stay home secondly according to a survey for the BBC released this morning just over half 56 percent women said they thought working from home would help them progress at work as childcare and caring duties become less of a hindrance to working full time so do you think a shift to flexible work patterns would create a more eco playing field for some women okay thank you who wants to Adam thank you um you're right to say in everybody's right to say that women have been extraordinarily impacted and disproportionately impacted by this impact for their own lives for their care responsibilities for their work opportunities chances and and having to redress i'll start reflecting on my own position of going to the pandemic and we're expected we're respecting a baby had a baby last july and able to work from home and actually being around present more whereas a kind of a culture which wasn't nothing interesting that was a thing at age scotland very much embrace flex will working might have not allowed me to be around every single day but just seeing the kind of the challenges that people will face to kind of meet the childcare responsibilities meet the caring responsibilities at different age spectrums and and ailey talked earlier on i think it was about in social care and women then having to pick up all of these responsibilities you know the pandemic really has been impacted and we're not through it yet i think there's a huge amount of culture change required in the workplace and i think there is still in lots of employers that urge and demand to get people back to the office in some way but it doesn't have to be if they've been able to kind of fulfil what they do externally what is that why is that there some people might want to go back at times but at the same point this is really more pointed by the kind of childcare element not talking about a man's point if you didn't mean to do that but it was you know the challenges faced in terms of getting childcare to go back to work in the first year hugely expensive i mean it is it's hugely expensive i know there are commitments made in year two and year three before so to bring that down but in that first year you know kind of going back to work if you've had a child or have it is is is very very difficult indeed unless you have support network in place unless you're pretty well paid you know all of these types of types of things but on the care itself and the the role it's had in the more and more unpaid carers who've had to then step away because of the removal and reduction of social care packages has been has been wild you know had people about last march 2020 whose social care packages returned off overnight you know we then saw a knock on impact in the excess death levels of people living with dementia you know pretty sure the two are to our link because the social care packages at home but people haven't to step in and do a huge amount of work which they might not be as able or feel as able to do as he possibly can be their commitment to do it is it is huge and you know this will be something which we'll be living now with for for many many years but making sure that can public services support people to either go back into work and the Scottish government influence employers in the workplace to have better and more flexible arrangements I think this is part of it having a we work on age inclusive workplaces to really look at the flexibilities required caring responsibilities everywhere for career progression to make sure you're not kind of left out of work by not being present and the present is in that that's required so I think there's going to be huge huge chances ahead and I think leadership will be required in terms of showing the best practice showing what people want and supporting them to do what they need to fulfil their job but also for the rest of their life as well okay thanks Adam I'm going to go to Fulton McGregor who wants to come in on this question first before we go to the other panelist thanks good dinner I appreciate you bringing me in I feel almost a moral duty to come in at this point because as my members will be aware but not perhaps panellists I'm actually coming in remotely today which was primarily to allow me to help with healthcare issues this morning after our original plans fell through and had I not been able to do this which would have been the case prior to the pandemic the care of three young children one at school one at nursery and one a nine-week old baby would have fallen to my partner a woman and before the pandemic we would have just gone with it we didn't know that that was wrong but we would have just gone with it and you know it struck me last night when I was chatting with the convener who I have to say has been absolutely excellent with chatting with him over text it struck me that that's absolutely unacceptable and the pandemic should have taught us all that now I'm fortunate enough to work in you know the the Scottish Parliament which is a democratic modern you know that that sort of thing but there'll be a lot of other situations out there for that's not the case so I suppose my question I felt a duty to come in on that given my situation relates directly to that today and how it's highlighted it to me but I wonder maybe if Ailey could comment how we can make sure of that aim or any of the panels how we can make sure that that notion that it's you know it's unacceptable that this childcare responsibility just naturally falls back to the woman it is now no longer acceptable because of the pandemic and all workplaces you know need to to respond to that and I wonder Ailey perhaps you might be best placed to comment on that I know came to a question eventually yeah right thanks thanks for tonight that kind of follows on actually from some of the points you made earlier on Ailey about you know when schools are closed it's generally women that are impacted and Pam's point about flexibility you know come a look some of that in yeah there's so much I could say here and apologies if this is a little bit of a scatter gun thought dump but in last year in gender published a report looking at the effects of unpaid care by we defined that quite broadly so the sort of women's unpaid work on as the effect of the pandemic on women's unpaid work and what we found was that women and men all of the studies at that point we were sort of halfway through the first lockdown all of the studies that were coming out were showing that yes mums and dads were doing more childcare that was inevitable schools were closed and that was across lots of different countries when we looked at the time use data but inevitably mothers were doing more even when both parents were at home mothers were interrupted more and when we had somebody do we had an economist do some like calculations for us and we estimated that the cost of the women's inability to continue with unpaid work whether that was because they couldn't go into the office or because they were being interrupted or because it was just impossible to combine the kind of homeschooling expectations with the paid work that they could do at home that amounted to £15 million a day in Scotland so I suppose that comes back to Karen's earlier question about the costs of not intervening sometimes are enormous obviously that was during the first lockdown when we had the greatest restrictions but even as we moved through the pandemic and schools reopened we still saw that the contingency planning assumed that at a moment's notice one of the parents could take time off work to pick up a child who had been in a close contact with somebody else and that to some extent has continued for over a year now and to some extent still does. The question about a two-tiered workplace I think if I understand you correctly I think you're entirely right to be concerned about it and we are concerned about it too. The sectors that have been most disrupted by the pandemic are those where women particularly young women and women of colour see their employment concentrated and because young women are more likely to have have small children again they're doubly impacted by school closures and other measures so the sectors that have seen the most disruption are those that employ women women have been more likely to be furloughed unless they've asked to be furloughed in which case men who have asked to be furloughed for childcare reasons have been more likely to receive furlough than women have so there's a lot one could say I highly recommend close the gaps report disproportionate disruption which does look in more detail at some of the specific sectors that have been affected by the pandemic. I also think it's now time we have to get serious about childcare and we've seen commitments most recently in the manifestos but in the national advisory council women and girls reports that the Scottish Government has responded to calling for 50 hours a week of wraparound flexible fully funded and culturally competent childcare we have to kind of expand the roll out and of free childcare and the pause to the 1140 hours was during a time of significant crisis for women's unpaid work did not help matters in any way so there's a lot more I could say and I'm happy to come back in if there's anything else that you would like specifically to comment on but I will leave it there otherwise. Okay thanks for that and Pam Duncan-Glancy wants to come in now. Thank you convener for allowing this I just I felt also that while we were having that discussion I think it's the other the other aspect that women I think have ended up having to pick up his unpaid care and so for example it all through the pandemic a lot of people lost the social care that they absolutely relied on and it was assumed that somebody would just step in and do it and we've heard in other committees and in Parliament and also in all of our own engagement I'm sure that carers in the last year have been literally working their fingernails to the bone without a break and a lot of them will be women and is there anything that we can do or that we can suggest through our committee in the budget that could begin to redress that and the £15 million a day figure is staggering and I'm assuming that includes having to stop and pick up unpaid care as well as childcare if it doesn't then it's going to be more and so yeah it'd be really really interested to hear if you can you can think of any ways that we can begin to try and redress that balance and in particular stop the regression of women's rights that we've seen and heard about today. Yeah and thank you I mean you're absolutely right and there's nothing I would disagree with in that. We as as we're talking about expanding provision of child care we need to prevent expand the provision of social care and that means different types of social care including respite care for unpaid carers so that would be one thing. We've also had quite a significant delay to the roll-out of carers assistance or the Scottish carers assistance and the development of that so I think that might be an opportunity to start thinking can we do more, can we expand eligibility, can we increase the kind of seriously insufficient rate of carers allowance in this country that plunges I mean women provide more unpaid care than men but of the unpaid carers that are women they tend to be the ones who are reliant on carers allowance and who are surviving on poverty wages where they are working. I would maybe ask the committee to take a look last year alongside the paper on unpaid care that we produced in conjunction with close the gap and in supported by other women's organisations and gender produced nine principles for an economic recovery and if we're going to talk about an economic recovery that centres women I think some of those principles might be a useful place to start and they do talk about unpaid care they do talk about investing in local communities where women are more likely to spend their paychecks so I would highly recommend that that paper be somewhere that you start. Okay thanks I'm going to ask Adam to come in. It's just very quickly I thought it was an excellent question and Ailey's answered a lot of what I was going to say but there was two extra parts that I thought was in terms of strictly budgeting was that big long-term approach to what we require to build massive resilience. The impact of Covid-19 is zero resilience in the social care sector notwithstanding the hardest work possible that people working in social care were doing if they're getting ill with Covid or had to isolate in all decisions they couldn't undertake their work but there was no one to pick up the slack we're seeing NHS boards declaring essentially states of emergency in Scotland where they can particularly Lanarkshire thing was one of the first ones where they couldn't deliver as much social care as they planned and also either hospital admission or access to GPs because there was enough resilience in it. The point about the money a bigger spends is building this for the future so if you double the social care budget today you won't have enough people tomorrow to fill that it will be years to get that so require that long-term investment and with regard to women and unpaid care one of the big problems we're not looking at again in the future is the massive gap in pension wealth and living better in later life. Currently I think as I recall the gap between men and women is 10 times in terms of pension wealth now of all that unpaid care unplanned unpaid care less pension contribution less Ni contribution that people when they have to retire or have to retire early and draw down pension pots before they need to and before they should they'll find themselves living longer unless income and equally then in poorer health so we're going to have big impact on the Scottish budget in the result of not kind of fixing this it's quite a complex matter but we have a real real concern about this pension wealth gap between between men and women and actually the unpaid care is a real big part of this which will see the challenge in many decades to come but the the start of it was sort of now or has been out for a few years. Okay thanks, thanks very much. Rob? Yes, just briefly and there's sort of not a sort of great deal I would add to Ailey's points but just to sort of briefly emphasise that sort of unpaid carers should be should be a priority and I think we've sort of seen the the impact of of the pandemic on unpaid carers has been has been stark the sort of research from from the carers trust that's illustrated that a sort of wide range of sort of areas that the unpaid carers have been particularly affected I think the particular one that prioritises around is around respite and that's sort of a large number of unpaid carers that haven't had a sort of break from caring for for over a year sort of something reported that that since the since the pandemic began they haven't had a break from caring so I think that would be yes sort of to unpaid carers being being a priority as part of the budget process and I think particularly around breaks and respite would be would be key. Okay, Pam are you wanting to come back in? Okay, unless him he's got any burning questions I think he's got to wrap the session up there there's lots more questions we would have for you and again you've got us thinking about lots of other things so thank you all very much it's been a really really useful session the committee will now move into private session thank you