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Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee 13 January 2026

13 Jan 2026 · S6 · Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee

Item of business

Public Sector Equality Duty

John Wilkes Watch on SPTV

On your question about what we are doing, we recognise that many stakeholders think that we are not doing enough, but a lot of what we do is done behind the scenes. We get regular inquiries from members of the public or organisations about local authority X, health board Y or the police not having followed the guidance—a lot of that goes on—which says to me that there is increasing awareness about the role of the public sector equality duty. We follow up on those cases.A good example of our work is the work that we have done with the Scottish Funding Council, which is the funder and part regulator of the higher and further education sector in Scotland. The Scottish Funding Council’s response to our inquiry in 2020-21 on racial harassment in universities was to ask what it could do to combat that. We entered into a formal memorandum of understanding, whereby we work with the Funding Council and, through it, the higher and further education sector to develop appropriate national equality outcomes for the sector. That does not prevent individual universities and further education institutions from developing other equality outcomes, but we think that a sectoral approach to some of the issues is a good one.We have recently reviewed that approach. We have been through one cycle and have just started the second cycle, which involved setting equality outcomes for the 2025 period. I might get the numbers wrong, but something like 40 out of the 42 institutions involved have adopted the national equality outcomes. We are currently doing a bit of evaluation research, which we hope to publish later, about the effectiveness and impact of the equality outcomes in the first cycle. That is an example of our work with a specific sector in the public sector.Another example is from, I think, 2022. We were drawn to the clear fact that integration joint boards, which commission social care in Scotland, did not understand that they have responsibilities under the PSED. We found that something like 30 out of 31 of them were not meeting their PSED obligations, so we approached the sector and worked with chief executives, boards and staff for a year to help them to understand their obligations and how to meet them. When we revisited the issue last year, I think that all the integration joint boards were compliant with the basic PSED standards. Those are examples of our targeted work.If public bodies are failing to a greater extent, we can use our enforcement powers, which Jennifer can talk about. In the past few years, there have been examples of organisations that we have worked with—the Scottish Qualifications Authority and the Scottish Legal Aid Board spring to mind—because, for different reasons, they were failing in their PSED responsibilities. In such cases, we set up a section 23 agreement, whereby an organisation agrees to work with us on an agreed plan.Those are some examples of how we approach such situations. There is an on-going issue about the production and updating of guidance and the various things that go along with that.10:15On the second part of your question, I refer to the comments that I made in my opening statement. There is still a lot of work to do to help public bodies to understand why the duties are important and what their obligations are. However, we are fortunate in Scotland that we have the secondary duties, because that has helped public bodies to better understand the requirements. If we compare that with the work of our EHRC colleagues in England, where there is not the same landscape of secondary duties, we can see some of the differences and some of the advantages that we have, but there is still a long way to go.There is still very much a focus on process in relation to the PSED. Public bodies are very used to processes, so they see the duty as another process that they have to follow, rather than seeing it as a tool to help them to address certain equality or discrimination issues over longer periods.I do not know whether—

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Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee 13 January 2026

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