Hansard

I am happy to contribute to the debate as convener of the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee.

I take this opportunity to remind members of the three principles of human rights budgeting, which are participation, transparency and accountability. As members may recall, our 2024-25 pre-budget scrutiny saw us set out a three-year plan to look at each of those principles in turn. We started with participation in 2024-25, under the convenership of our now Minister for Equalities. For our 2026-27 pre-budget scrutiny, we will look at the principle of accountability. This year, however, we focused our work on the principle of transparency.

We were particularly interested in transparency in the context of human rights budgeting and the role of national outcomes in supporting transparent and data-driven decision making and mainstreaming equalities across portfolios. Alongside that, we explored the Scottish Government’s progress in implementing the recommendations that the equality and human rights budget advisory group made in 2021. The minister will recall that the committee adopted that approach for our 2024-25 pre-budget scrutiny during her time as convener. We worked with the whole family equality project, which is supported by the Capital City Partnership, to learn how people view and understand the budget process and how it impacts their lives. That allowed citizens the opportunity to express to us and the Government the areas that they felt should be prioritised and how they could feed into the process to help them to understand the rationale behind spending decisions.

We hoped to expand on that approach for the 2025-26 scrutiny process through an equalities mainstreaming workshop involving stakeholders, a citizens group and representatives from the Scottish Government. However, due to the UK election, the programme for government timetable and the changes that have taken place, we have reconsidered our timetable for that work, although we hope to return to it this year.

I referred to the role of national outcomes in supporting transparent and data-driven decision making and mainstreaming equalities across portfolios. Several areas of interest and relevance to the committee came out of responses to the Finance and Public Administration Committee’s call for views on the proposed revisions to national outcomes. Those included gender equality as a link to gender budgeting and understanding the impact of spending decisions on women and girls; the importance of continued monitoring and data collection to track trends in inequalities; challenges in defining and measuring inequality, which can impact the evaluation of any budget decision aimed at tackling inequality; and efforts focused towards reducing specific inequalities, including in rural healthcare and housing policy. Throughout our work in several areas, the issue of rurality as an additional barrier to equality has been raised with us, and we will look to do further work and investigation in that regard.

We look forward to welcoming the Minister for Equalities to the committee next month, when we will explore further how work on areas that are identified for improvement is progressing. One such area is policy coherence. In evidence, stakeholders highlighted that the national performance framework’s effectiveness could be undermined by a lack of coherence with other initiatives, particularly the equally safe strategy. For example, greater integration of primary prevention of violence against women and girls across relevant outcomes, such as those on communities and education, was seen as essential.

Alison Hosie of the Scottish Human Rights Commission addressed the issue of policy coherence in her oral evidence. She welcomed significant improvements in the equality and fairer Scotland budget statement and said that a lot of work had been done to make it more coherent with policy decisions. However, she told us that there remains an issue with the EFSBS being published at the same time as the budget, as that does not support the public in knowing what discussions have happened and what has fed into decision making. She suggested that capacity building is needed across all policy areas to ensure that all departments in the Government are consistently practising human rights-based approaches.

Our predecessor committees have encouraged more mainstreaming of equalities and human rights throughout the scrutiny of the budget by all the Parliament’s committees. We reiterate the point today and will continue to do so. That was driven home to us through our work with the whole family equality project, which gave us the added impetus that it would improve cross-portfolio working.

There are opportunities to be creative and innovative. For example, there are opportunities for joint committee working to ensure that the fullest scrutiny is applied. We can make recommendations to the Scottish Government or we can ask what it is going to do, but there is nothing to stop us coming up with solutions, especially if we work in partnership with real people in citizens panels.

Looking ahead, as I touched on earlier, our focus next year will be on the third principle of human rights budgeting, which is accountability. We will then aim to have a review of our session-long focus on human rights budgeting, during which we anticipate taking a look back at progress towards the Scottish Government’s commitments to move towards a human rights budget.