Welcome to the sixth meeting of session six of the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee. We have no apologies today. We are joined remotely by Pam Goswell and Fulton MacGregor, and Fulton will be joining us in person shortly. The first agenda item is to agree whether to take items 4 and 5 in private, which is consideration of today's evidence and consideration of our work programme. Are we all agreed? That is agreed. Moving on to agenda item 2, which is the proposed right to food Scotland bill evidence session. I welcome to the meeting Rhoda Grant, MSP, and Nick Hawthorne, senior assistant clerk from the Scottish Parliament's non-government bills unit. You are both very welcome. I refer members to papers 1 and 2. We also have correspondence from four individuals asking that the draft proposal be allowed to proceed to the next stage and a letter from the Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Housing and Local Government, which sets out the Scottish Government's position. I therefore invite Rhoda to make a short opening statement before we move to questions. Thank you for inviting me to appear before the committee today to discuss the statement of reasons accompanying my draft proposal for a right to food Scotland bill. It is quite fitting that we are talking about this in challenge poverty week. The committee is being asked to determine whether it is content with the statement of reasons, which sets out why I consider it unnecessary to carry out a consultation on my proposal. My proposal is effectively the same proposal that was lodged by Elaine Smith in the last session to incorporate a right to food into Scotland's law. Elaine Smith obtained the right to introduce a bill, but there was not enough time left in the last session for her to do so. The consultation on her proposal ran for 12 weeks and received responses from a wide range of individuals and organisations from different sectors and backgrounds. The individual responses and a summary of responses is available publicly online. That is available to the committee and I believe that they have probably seen that. I believe that the variety of responses to the consultation from the public and other stakeholders across Scotland remain relevant to my proposal, as do the many other studies and papers on the right to food that has been published. Repeating the consultation process for what is in effect the same proposal for legislation that was consulted on by Elaine Smith, I believe would be an unnecessary duplication of work, particularly given that consultation only closed a little over a year ago. I think that timescale fits with other bills as well. Therefore, I hope that the committee agrees that a further consultation would not be required in this instance, and I am happy to answer any questions that the committee may have. That is great. Thank you very much. The committee will be aware that our role today is not to say whether we agree with the proposal or not—it is about the statement of reasons. For me, there are two things that I think we have to be satisfied before agreeing to set aside the normal process that a member would follow in terms of consulting prior to bringing forward a bill. Two things would be that, for me, the previous consultation was robust and, secondly, that the previous consultation remains relevant. I am going to ask some questions, Rhoda, in relation to the robustness of the consultation. I have seen lots of stuff flying around in terms of percentages, but the actual number of responses is quite low. In terms of your statement of reasons, it talks about June 25 organisations contacted. I wonder if you could give us a bit of a breakdown about what those organisations were. Any thoughts on why the number was so low, comparative to other consultations, is certainly an issue that seems really relevant. It seems like a low number to me and a breakdown on the organisations that were proactively contacted by the previous member. I would not suggest that the number of responses is particularly low. 71 people on behalf of organisations and 181 individuals responded. I would say that that was reasonable, but you also need to bear in mind that the consultation followed on from the Good Food Nation consultation, in which a number of the people who responded to that talked about the proposal and, indeed, recommended it. Around a third of them did that. Once people have responded to one and made their points very clear, if you are looking at a member's bill or a Government bill, people expect the Government to bring forward legislation, whereas members' legislation is not so sure of something that would account for that. My understanding is that Elaine Smith put her consultation around a number of public bodies, such as local authorities, health boards, as well as the trade union movement and stakeholders who are very interested in the proposal. She made sure that it was out there and well received, but not everybody, not every health board, not every local council would respond to such a consultation, but some did and responded very positively. In fact, two thirds of those who were specifically targeted did not respond. That seems like a particular given that you are highlighting organisations who you think might be particularly interested. Two thirds did not respond. As I said, a number of those health boards were statutory bodies who possibly were not seen as the number one priority given the times that they would not have responded and would have maybe expected others to do that on their behalf. You do not think that the pandemic, given that the consultation was carried out in the middle of the pandemic, at the height of the pandemic, in fact, would have made it difficult for some of those organisations to respond because they were working in a different way? Not necessarily. I think that policy people would have been working from home, like many of us were, and possibly would have had more time to look at this, but given that the consultation to the Good Food Nation Bill had happened as well, they had maybe put that in, and that is on the record, so why repeat a process? Okay, thank you. We will move around the table. Maggie, do you want to pick off? Thanks very much. Rhodo, thank you for coming along this morning to talk to this. I am interested just to explore, following on from Joe's questions, just the relationship between your proposed bill and the other things that we know are happening either in this coming year, so that there is commitment to introduce the Good Food Nation Bill this year, but also the incorporation of other treaties that include the right to food into Scots law as part of the human rights bill later on in the session. I just wondered if you had any thoughts or comments on that. Yes, I am aware that those pieces of legislation have been promised. The Good Food Nation Bill was promised last session and has been held across to this session. The Government has said that it would not be incorporating that into the Good Food Nation Bill, but I think that it has made that quite clear. It is looking at it more in terms of its human rights bill, but it is not clear to me whether, as part of the human rights bill, it would have the vehicle for delivery, which is part of the bill. What will happen if the committee decides that I can proceed with a bill based on the previous consultation, is that, once I table a bill, the Government has the opportunity, if they are going to legislate in that way, to take over the bill. There is nothing lost, so they can go ahead and do that. However, if they were not looking to have a vehicle for implementation, the bill would go forward and, obviously, the Government could comment on it at that stage. Pam Gossel, can you hear us? We will go to Karen, and then we will come back to Pam. I would like to ask that you touched upon the intention of the Scottish Government, and I was wondering if you have had any discussions with the Scottish Government in regards to its intentions around any of the policy. I have had discussions with the previous Cabinet Secretary for Rural about the Good Food Nation Bill, because I was very interested in that bill and whether it would bring forward those commitments within it. I have had those discussions in the last session. I have not had any formal discussions in this session, but I have been putting down questions and trying to get more information. However, I am happy to work with the Government, and I would look forward to working with the Government on that proposal, seeing what it is doing and how we can work together. I think that most people agree that, in a country as rich as ours, food supplies are so proud of our food and what we deliver that nobody should be going hungry and no one should be going without food. I think that we can all sign up to that aim, and I would be very happy to work with the Government to try and realise those aims. My question follows on from yours. Good morning, Voda. It is in relation to the fact that we are hoping that we are getting over Covid, so we are in a very different place now. You have talked about that you do not need no further consultation, but do not you think that it would benefit talking to those organisations again because that was over a year ago? I do not think so. Given the Government's consultation, given Elaine Smith's consultation and the statement of reasons, it goes over a fair amount of ground where that has been discussed before. Legislation has come forward with much less consultation and many fewer responses to consultation, and that has been good legislation as well. It has been well consulted on. To have another consultation simply would delay action. If the pandemic has shown us anything, it is the need for a right to food in Scotland because we saw people going hungry. Even when people were isolating due to Covid, just having those things in place that made sure they were able to eat in the last fortnight, we have heard of the very sad case of a pensioner starving to death in Scotland. I do not think that we can afford to delay. This is costing lives and life chances, because we know that young people growing up without an adequate diet end up with huge health issues that we all pay for down the line. We see malnutrition, we see obesity making huge problems facing us right here, right now, that we should be dealing with. If anything, the pandemic has delayed legislation in this area. I do not think that we can afford to delay it any further. Thank you, convener, and good morning, Rhoda. The statement of reasons highlights the extensive consultation that was carried out in the last session through official consultation and the co-operative party's email and targeted campaign, and 93 per cent of responses were in favour. Do you think that the majority support during the last consultation would still be reflective of public opinion? If you think that there is a change, what would it be and what would the effect of a delay be on the legislation? I should refer members to my register of interests and a member of the co-op party who are very keen on the proposal. Indeed, I am not only working with the co-op party but with stakeholders who have been consulted on it. I have had meetings with and invited those who responded to the bill previously and met them on a reasonably regular basis. Of those people, there was a number who wanted to become much more involved, so we have a steering committee set up with organisations and individuals who are very keen to see this proposal go forward. I am working very closely with them, so I have been in touch with those who have responded to the consultation, and they are still incredibly keen. There was one of them, and I should remember this. A consultant recently took some polling, and the overwhelming support in the public of the bill coming forward was there for all to see, so I think that it is public opinion. If anything, the pandemic showed people that food was not something that we all take for granted in a way as food. Many people during the pandemic realised that that could not be taken for granted. We had times when people were afraid to be tested because they were afraid that they were going to have to isolate and they would not have food, so suddenly people began to realise that—I suppose that other people's day-to-day experience of where am I getting my next meal? If anything, that has moved up in the public consciousness, the right to food. I think that it is still as important, if not more important now, to have that right to food. The effect of consulting again is just the effect of delaying. We should have done this in the last session of Parliament. That is what people expected, but the pandemic slowed that down and stopped that happening. I think that if we owe anything to those who were hungry during the pandemic, it is to make sure that we now have the right processes in place to make sure that people are fed. Thank you for coming today and I think that we need to pay tribute to Elaine Smith for what she did in the past and I want to make that on the record today. Thank you for taking on the role that you are now doing. When it comes to the consultation, I have already heard today that, in your opinion, you believe that that is enough and that it has gone out to a large number of individuals and organisations. We have also heard about the human rights bill that is coming forward and the good food nation bill, but where do you see the whole process moving? Do you see there being resource implications depending on how things develop because there are now going to be other organisations and other bills and things taking part in all of this and where do you see that fitting in the process? I am not entirely clear how the Scottish Government intends to bring forward their human rights bill. It is not clear if it will have a vehicle within that bill for delivery. People could argue that human rights are already there, but we still have people who do not have a right to food in our country. The bill is designed not only to enshrine the human right of the right food in the Scottish legislation, but it is there to provide a vehicle for the delivery because it is the delivery that is hugely important. I am not very clear. I suppose if you were to push me and why I was speaking to the Scottish Government in the last session, I would have liked to have seen this at the heart of a good food nation bill because we invested £100 million in our food system. Already huge amounts of public money are going into the food system, and what I am hearing from organisations that represent food workers and within that system is that the people who produce, and usually the front line producers of food, are the people who are going hungry. You are producing the food, but you still do not have a right to food. I would have wanted to see that in the heart of the good food nation bill, but I believe that this bill, with a vehicle for delivery, would work alongside, because it is not one thing, it is not a tick box. This is going to take some time to implement and to change because our food system is so disjointed. I think that that is why everyone has been calling out for a good food nation bill, not only to show our natural resource and to highlight what we have, but to also make sure that the way we produce food does not leave people behind. I think that it is very much part of that. That would be my preference, but that does not look like it is possible. I would hope that, if we have that, that would work alongside a good food nation bill and the changes to our food system to make sure that everybody has a right to food. I am sorry, that was maybe a bit a long way round to a short answer. I apologise. Just following on from the points that you are making there, we have received a letter from the cabinet secretary making very clear that it is her view that this would be very central to the wider human rights work. I note from the consultation that a number of the respondents to Elaine Smith's consultation made the point that they felt that, rather than this being taken forward in isolation, it should be part of a wider human rights approach in terms of that wider legislation. Does that make a huge difference now that we have a manifesto commitment, which is then in an agreement between the Scottish Government and the Green Party and now re-emphasised by the cabinet secretary in the letter that we have received, that that makes a significant difference to what was consulted on over a year ago when none of those things were in place, but we have now got certainty that this is something that the Government will be taking forward? I have come to just about the process points. I do not think anything that I am proposing today if the Government is wishing to bring forward this bill in another form. I certainly give make sure that the aims of this bill are met through their human rights bill, but today, I am approving the right to go forward without another consultation, so that we do not interfere with that. Can I just get you to cover the process? Of course. Good morning. Nothing affects what the Scottish Government can or will decide to do in that sense. Should you approve the statement today, Rhoda would then have the right to introduce her final proposal, which is the one-month period that she seeks the support from 18 other members from at least two parties to earn the right to introduce a bill? At that stage, the Government has a formal right to indicate that it will legislate within two years to deliver the terms of Rhoda's final proposal. I guess that that was not my question. My question was whether the fact that the Government has made that commitment in such clear terms in relation to the agreement with the Green Party between the Scottish Government and the Green Party and in terms of the letter from the cabinet secretary, whether that changes things. In the light of that, folk should be able to say whether they think that your bill should go ahead in the light of knowing the knowledge of what the Government's proposal is. I think that I am referring back to what Nick said. Approving the statement of reasons and allowing this to go forward today does not interfere in any way whatsoever with that. What you are asking me is why I am pursuing this, because you believe that the Scottish Government is doing it. The reason I am pursuing this is that I know that the Scottish Government has said that it will enshrine human rights into Scottish law. What I am not so clear about is whether it will provide a vehicle to make sure that those human rights are implemented. That has built us both. It not only enshrines in Scottish law the human right to food, it also provides a vehicle to oversee the implementation of that. That is the bit that I am not entirely clear about, but, as Nick said, if the Government is quite clear about that and that is what it wants to do, it can take over the bill. That does not affect it. With the complexity of the food system, it would be better if it did, because it can make the bill move in ways that I, as a member, cannot. It can tie it up much better and do much more complex legislation. I am not doing it to try and beat them to it. I am trying to make sure that it happens. If they decide that they are going to do it, they will have me cheering them on and happily handing over the proposal to them. It does feel like an area that you would hope that the Parliament could work to. My point was not really the one that you have picked up. It was more about relevance of the consultation before, as anything changed. My point is that those commitments are what has changed. I think that you have answered as much as you might want to on that area. Okay. Unless there is any further wanting to contribute. Thank you very much to the member for her evidence. I hope that we are not too challenging in our questioning. It is a hugely different experience being at the other side of the table. We are required to make a decision on whether we are satisfied by the statement of reasons or whether we are not satisfied. I remind members that our decision should be based on whether we agree that the member has a statement of reasons that no further consultation on the proposal is necessary or not. We are not deliberating on whether we agree or disagree with the principle of the bill. That would be for a later stage, depending on the outcome of today. The question is, is the committee satisfied by the statement of reasons? Given that we have a member remotely, I would be proposing to call each member in turn to indicate whether they are satisfied or not by the statement of reasons. For clarity, if members are satisfied with the statement of reasons, I would ask them to vote yes. If they are not satisfied, I would ask them to vote no or otherwise to abstain. I will go around the room, starting with the deputy convener. Thank you, Joe, for that. I am not satisfied now. Karen Adam. Thank you, convener. No, I am not satisfied. Fulton MacGregor. Thank you, convener. I realise that I have just come in. I have been following proceedings on blojins. Am I able to—I do not know technically—speaking on it, able to make a comment in front of voting, yes? I want to thank Rhoda Grant for taking the bill forward. I am still out of breath, running up the stairs. I want to pay tribute also to Elaine Smith for the work that she done in the previous Parliament on this. I did support the last bill as a declaration of interest. I did sign up to supporting of the bill. I am still very supportive of its aims. Having followed what has been said today, I am also clear that the Government has written to the committee and said that they are keen to bring forward a bill as part of the overall human rights bill, as well as the good food nation bill. I feel that that is a pretty significant change in circumstances. I also feel that the co-operation deal between the SNP and the Green Party has propelled that further forward. I think that there has been a significant change in circumstances. With a degree of reluctance at this stage, I am inclined to vote. Pam Gossel. I am wanting to vote yes. I am satisfied both in terms of the consultation being comprehensive and also not asking organisations who consulted before and putting more pressure on them to do so again at this time. I am satisfied with the statement of reasons and vote yes. Alexander Stewart. I am satisfied with the statement of reasons and vote yes. I think that on balance that gives us three votes for satisfied and four votes for not satisfied with the statement of reasons. The committee is therefore not satisfied with the statement of sorry I haven't voted. I am also not satisfied but on balance I do think that there is a good piece of work to go ahead. It is an area of work that the committee will clearly have a particular interest. I am keen to encourage the member to engage with the Government going forward but it is up to the member to consult if she sees fit and bring back another proposal that would be within the rules if she deemed fit. However, my vote is for not satisfied. That would therefore be four votes for not satisfied and three votes for satisfied. The committee is therefore not satisfied with the statement of reasons. That concludes our consideration of this item. I thank Rhoda and Nick for attending. I will suspend the meeting briefly. The next item on the agenda is to take evidence on pre-budget scrutiny. We will hear from two panels of witnesses today. I welcome to the meeting our first panel witnesses. One of our witnesses is joining us virtually. I welcome virtually Alison Everson, president of COSLA, and in person Nina Munday, chief executive, Fife Centre for Equalities. Paul Bradley, policy and public affairs for the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations are all very welcome. I refer members to papers 3 and 4. I thank all of the members for their helpful written submissions and invite you each to make a short opening statement, starting with Councillor Everson, please. Thank you very much, convener, and thank you for inviting me to speak to the committee today. Local government is the anchor in our communities and from our most vulnerable groups. For children, young people and families, for the elderly and those needing support, for our most marginalised communities and the people we are welcoming in. For local businesses, for those needing help with housing and for the services that protect and improve our physical and emotional wellbeing and the environment. We work with diverse communities and local organisations every day to bring about change, to respect human rights and equalities, to embed local democracy and to enable the voices of people to be heard. Local government is indeed the key partner to achieve rights realisation across Scotland. It is therefore critical in the context of human rights realisation that local government is given a fair settlement to support this. Since 2013-14, local government's revenue budget has reduced by 2.1 per cent in real terms, while the Scottish Government's budget increased by 2.3 per cent over the same period. While local government has itself protected areas of the budget such as social work and education as much as possible, this means that cuts to other areas such as culture and leisure have been higher, and this has had an impact on rights realisation and the wellbeing of our communities. We need a holistic approach to the services delivered by local government, social care, education, housing, employability, leisure, transport and the local environment, as together they support the rights of the individual. There must be clear links between the budget, the programme for government and the national performance framework for rights realisation. In addition to a fair settlement, the Scottish Government should empower local government to raise revenue to ensure that there are maximum available resources that can be used by local government to support our communities. In particular, the council tax freeze should be dropped as it does not help those that need it most. Other areas that can be explored include the tourist tax, setting, planning and building control fees locally to enable full cost recovery. We should be continuing to work together on the three empowerment of the local governance review, fiscal, functional and community. Scottish Government should therefore be using the opportunities of human rights budgeting to enable and empower the public sector to support rights realisation and avoid the regression of rights. Thank you, convener. Thank you. Can I go to Paul Bradley? Of course. Good morning. Thank you very much for inviting me along today.  Back then, the committee had recognised the clear need to investigate how the third sector was coping under tougher financial conditions and recognised the vital role that voluntary organisations play in the delivery of equalities and human rights outcomes. Not one of us sitting around this table, although I think some new faces now, knew what was to unfold in the mumps and years ahead. I would say even today, following the pandemic, that committee's report from 2019 still rings true. The sector still longs to see much of what was in that report, from longer-term funding models, simplified application and bidding processes, reducing the competitive nature of procurement models, greater participation in the budget process and stronger partnerships between the public sector and voluntary sector across the board. On the one hand, two years on, there has been much to learn and build upon from what the pandemic has unearthed. It has shone light on how invaluable the voluntary sector is. It absolutely has stepped up to deliver vital services and communities that the public sector would not have been able to deliver on its own. And though not universal, we have seen some fantastic examples of partnership working between the voluntary sector and the public sector. The public sector has leveraged the skills, knowledge and experience of voluntary organisations in many cases. We have also seen far greater flexibility in existing and new funding arrangements. Many public sector funders, but also independent funders, flexed their models and worked and encouraged the sector to get money to where it is needed most. We also saw the Scottish Government work with voluntary sector bodies to develop co-design emergency funding models with SCVO and many others. There was clear trust in the sector to get money to where it is needed most. On the other hand, two years on, and the pandemic has only served to exacerbate the challenges that voluntary organisations have faced for many years. Those challenges are the ones that the committee heard about back in 2019, but particularly in relation to the sustainability of voluntary sector funding, which has been highlighted for many years and most recently by the advisory group on economic recovery and Scotland's social renewal advisory board. The emergency funding for the sector during the pandemic has been a lifeline, and it has kept organisations afloat, and there is no doubt about that, but one-off payments like that are no substitute for longer-term sustainable funding models for the sector. Over the coming years, this committee will hear about the challenges that voluntary organisations face with their funding, and I just want to be clear that that might have been worsened by the pandemic, but the pandemic is not the root cause. These are challenges that voluntary organisations have faced for many years. To finish, I think the sector has been clear on what changes are the most useful next steps in relation to funding and partnership working both before the pandemic and right now. It has also been clear on some of the big social and economic policy changes that are needed, and that has been neatly captured in the report of the social renewal advisory board. For progress to be made on all of these areas, it is absolutely vital that Governments alone are not orchestrating those changes. The voluntary sector must be welcome to play a crucial role in attempts to positively change the operating environment for the sector and in design and delivery of national and local outcomes in delivering equalities and human rights. I hope that the committee, through its work on pre-budget scrutiny and the rest of its work programme, will ensure that it is not just policy change that we see, but that there is a clear and obvious involvement of the sector in how those changes are designed and implemented. Thank you very much for inviting me here today. It is my first time ever being speaking to a committee setting, so thank you very much. Do tell me if I am not following the rule. Both the speakers have kind of very much said some of the things that we have already submitted, so I am going to keep my statement to be really short because I think that my statement is probably echoing some of the councillor and also from SCVO. I think that our main focus is about decentralising the funding. For equality initiatives, we believe that there needs to be ring-fenced funding allocated to local authorities for local distributions. Currently, the equality and human rights grants are administered by the Scottish Government. The majority of the recipients are national organisations based in the central belt or main cities in Scotland. Equality is a matter that needs to be addressed at every corner of Scotland. Everybody should have the rights for all the human rights and everything else. Earlier in the conversation about the food, the human rights of food, I echo that. We need to consider what we mean by human rights, just by providing the same food for everybody that is not meeting human rights. During the pandemic, five centres for equalities with some of the funding from SCVO and other partners, we were able to distribute culturally sensitive food parcels to older people that they choose the food themselves. If we are talking about human rights, we need to think of that kind of level. It is important that people with protected characteristics feel that they can thrive and fulfil a good quality of life at where they live rather than feeling that they need to move or travel to cities to access more appropriate services. Investment for local preventative projects that foster good relations is really important to foster good relations between different protected characteristics and assist these groups to utilise their rights. Five centres for equality is a very good example of how a local initiative that brings together communities of different protected characteristics. Sometimes we have the Equality Act 2010, but we are constantly segregating people into a box. Five centres for equality challenge that. We bring people together. We have five equalities forums that have representatives from disability. We are not talking about individuals. We are talking about organisations that work with people with disabilities, working with transgender, working with women issues, working with minority ethnic communities—a whole range—but we meet together once a month the organisations to look at what the common issues are. If anything, we use five centres for equality as a good example of local investment that buys a local authority—a five council—to create an umbrella organisation that helps delivering equality, helping public authorities in five to deliver public sector equality duties. More importantly, we help to build bridges on equality issues between the public sector partners and those who feel that they have been disadvantaged. I would like to advocate that investment locally is important, but it also needs to be fairer. The assumption is that, time and time again, initiatives that are based in cities are somehow worth more than projects based in the region. We employ the same amount of staff and we need to be put in the position that we are just as equally competitive. Investment in local regions is so important, because otherwise, we are not going to have this fairer distribution if people are not given the chance for education, employment, transport, health and everything that we can think of within where they live. For our first appearance at the committee, I thank you very much, particularly for your passion. The committee is keen to make sure that, as well as hearing from well-kind faces like Alison, we hear from new voices like yourself. I thank you for coming along. Paul has been to the committee before, but I thank you for your evidence, too. I will start by setting out that the committee is on a bit of a journey. This is the first year that the committee is sought to particularly look at the budget through a human rights lens. We are keen that this year is not the end of that, but that we will learn to do that better going forward. Be good to hear from yourself whether Paul and Alison represent organisations and whether those organisations are managing to take a human rights approach or what more they would need to be able to do that. Your experience as an organisation is in relation to whether you think that the partners that you work with, whether that be Thudsector or Fife Council, are taking a human rights approach from your perspective. Why don't you start with Paul? It goes without saying that the voluntary organisations are a key partner in the delivery of equalities and human rights outcomes. For SCVO, we look at the challenges that voluntary organisations face across the board. We look at patterns and trends and the challenges and try to identify potential solutions. What voluntary organisations want to do most is do what their mission says about working with people and communities to deliver the best outcomes possible. One of the biggest challenges that I have had in the calls that I have had through interviews recently with charity CEOs and senior leaders is the constant cycle of trying to find replacement funding on a year-to-year basis. Organisations use a lot of their capacity to find new funding and it is a year-round process. Organisations will get funding through the door, they will get the funding in the bank account and then they will have to start looking for funding for the next year because the concerns that funding will dry up for the following year. It can be easier for large organisations to be able to manage that. It is not easy, but it can be easier for large organisations to manage that if they have funding officers who are skilled and able to identify new sources of funding and create the best applications. When we look at the majority of the voluntary sector, four out of five registered charities in Scotland have an income of less than £100,000. I think about three to four per cent of Scottish registered charities have an income of over a million. The majority are small organisations that do not have a funding officer and do not have those skills in their teams. If we look at equalities organisations as well, many of those are specialists and are working on small budgets and do not have that capacity to be able to be chasing funding year-round. The time that is spent looking for funding is time that is spent not working on services that the public sector has invested in voluntary organisations to deliver. If you do not have a funding officer, it is the person who is delivering the services who is also writing applications to try to find new sources of funding. That is just not sustainable and it does not work. I think that another challenge that comes down to equalities being pitted against each other is that that annual cycle of funding also rubs up against the changing priorities of the day. As things move up and down the agenda, organisations can find that their well-established services have to be stripped back slightly and scaled down or cut all together. That leads to people who are still in need in communities not being able to access the services that were set up in the first place to support them. It can often cause more harm than good when it takes much longer than an annual cycle of funding to work with people to overcome some of the biggest challenges in their lives. I think that that is really key. I will just build on that quickly. I think that those organisations that are lucky enough and fortunate enough to get their hands on longer-term funding or an indicative agreement for longer-term funding often do not see an inflationary uplift for the years in which they are receiving those funds. I will give you one example. I spoke to an organisation recently that had an inflationary uplift from their local authority for 13 years. I am not sure how anyone can expect an organisation to deliver the same-scale services for the same money that they were given back in 2008. Given the recent example of the preparation for Afghan refugees in Fife, other local partners have a very good understanding of human rights and equality. Especially when it comes to a crisis like this. When you look at the whole roll-out of the Covid vaccine, a whole range of partners are working together to ensure that communities receive the messages and are coming forward for the vaccine. It is a day-to-day process that often lacks the voices of very much what Paul has spoken about. The smaller groups do not have dedicated staff and are trying to do the best for their user groups. Every day, there are more and more consultations that are coming out from national and local levels. You need local-based groups that help people to respond to these consultations, otherwise their voices will remain unheard. A lot of the consultations are still very much about how well you write in English and how well you understand. When you think about the amount of people who have communication needs, people with learning difficulties, people whose English is not their first language, people who just have difficulty of understanding written form or writing in writing. Before coming in, we spoke to Paul that the whole funding application process is still depending on how well you write. How well you can tell your story. When you have smaller communities or smaller groups who rely on volunteers with various commitments and all that, they are not able to participate in that process. You need something that is in-between, like five centres for equalities, to help individuals to give them a voice, to ensure that they have a voice in all the vital consultations. To give you an example, recently, we helped five councils with their equality outcomes consultation. To my amazement, we received 275 responses during the pandemic. People are passionate about equality, and we use things that they can respond by WhatsApp or just saying it in their own language. We have to be much more creative in wanting to really understand how people feel about things. To do that, we have to have the local group somewhere that is able to do that. We work with a range of partners, five centres for equalities. We cannot possibly understand every community's needs, so we need to have those groups that work directly with people on the ground to be well supported financially. To compete with national organisations is just a very unfair system. If investment needs to be made about equality in human rights, we need to look at how that is done within the local authorities level. Thank you very much. I recognise many of the challenges that the previous speakers have talked about and shared their concerns about those. I also very much welcome the journey that the committee has on. It is important to be on that journey. We have argued in previous years that the budget setting process needs to be based on the national performance framework and the sustainable development goals. Of course, that is a step beyond involving the committee, as it is in the budget setting. Equalities in human rights is fundamental to what we do in local government. If you have come across the local government blueprint and if you have not, I refer that document to you. In our vision for the future, moving forward in local government right across Scotland in all its diversity, human rights and equalities are central to that vision. I also think that it is really important to think about the experience of the person, the individual within all this. It is the combination of services that the council provides are so important to an individual achieving their rights and equalities within that. It is not just housing or welfare payment or education or transport. It is everything together across the piece meeting the needs of the individual if we really are going to support equalities and human rights in the way that we want to. That leads to the question of when funding for local government is not adequate and councils across Scotland have to make choices about where they are allocating funding. In doing that and making a choice that is forced upon them because of the funding settlement, it means that equalities and human rights somewhere are going to be impacted by that lack of choice, that lack of flexibility given to that council locally. It is important that it is given to that council locally because the needs right across Scotland, the experiences of our communities right across Scotland are very different from our urban areas to our villages to our islands. That needs to be responded to in any settlement. As we are trying to embed equalities and human rights in our communities, we need to think carefully, as the other speakers have done, about the funding that is made available. If we are going to be effective, we need to have the ability to do strategic long-term think funding, which we cannot do with single-year budgets. That multi-year budgeting is crucial to the strategic way that is going forward. Getting individual pots of money for individual projects can be effective short-term, but it does not help to address the needs that we really want to address. It does not help councils in their planning and their moving forward, especially when those pots of money are associated with huge administrative burdens, which take council officers' time away from delivering services to filling in forms the hand back about outcomes on sometimes a very small amount of money. Nina has referred to the problems around bidding for money as well. When you have bid funds, who are the ones that benefit from a bid fund? Is it putting money where it is needed? Is it addressing equalities and human rights in the best way? Is it ensuring that money is going to the people that can fill in the forms in the timely manner, in the most articulate manner, rather than addressing needs to where we are going? There are common issues in the other speakers and the experiences of the SVO and our voluntary partners, who we have worked with tremendously during the pandemic. At a local level, the partnerships that have been developed between a third sector and council have been tremendous and had good effect, but the problems that they are experiencing are recognised. We have the same. We need to have flexibility in funding, we need to have long-term funding, we need to have an end to small pots of money and we need to have an end to bid funding, which does not ensure that the money goes to the right places. Thank you very much. Those are really wide questions, so thanks for the responses. Going forward, we will have to be a little bit sharper on both sides so I will take part of the blame for asking such a wide question. Can I now move to Pam Gossel? Thank you, convener, and good morning, panel, and thank you for your opening statements, which have been very helpful today. Do you think that increased participation delivers better budgets and what needs to be in place for it to be successful? I know that all of you have touched on this, but looking at what actually needs to be in place and also what should experience of creating and delivering opportunities for participation? Participation budgeting, if that is what you are referring to, in theory sounds like a good process, but a lot of the communities that we have been working with have been so marginalised, that people have been ignoring their needs because they simply do not have that tickly voice that we spoke about earlier. They are not the type of people who tend to complain about lack of services. When you approach them to say what you think is best to spend the money, they will not be able to tell you straight away, because on-going engagement needs to be there all the time. That is something that we have a five-centre for equalities and five council. We have already agreed that we will be working on that together for the next four years, because people want to participate in the decision-making, but not necessarily wanting to be part of any committee or coming to any public meetings, but simply wanting to be in a very simple way that somebody explained to them how the money is being used and how it is allocated. Is that that kind of on-going dialogue that is sometimes missing? A lot of the policy makers, whether it is nationally or locally, somebody somewhere developed a plan first and then they consult. Very seldom is encouraging people to say that you yourself identify and then we consult. I think that to change that dynamic requires a lot more work, because you do need to have some people on the ground to help them to feel that they are able to have a voice. It is not simply as just inviting people in a meeting room. It needs more than that. It is a really important question. As I said at the end of my opening remarks, it is really important that it is not just Governments alone that are orchestrating this kind of work. I know that the convener will know from his work on the open government work when he was a minister that it is really important that there is transparency around the budget, that there is accountability, but it is really important that there is participation. I would say that, in terms of the third sector's role in shaping the Scottish budget, it is extremely limited. The opportunities that we have are the opportunities that we have here today, right now in this committee room, and that is why we keep coming back when we are invited. However, there is no discussion about what our priorities should be for the Scottish budget with colleagues in government before the setting of the budget. I think that that is something that needs to be worked at. Back to your point about what is needed to get voluntary organisations and others involved in participating in deciding spending decisions and what is needed most. You can have policy that indicates that voluntary organisations should play a key role, and there should be participation of voluntary groups and communities in setting the budget. We know across Scotland that the biggest challenge is the implementation of policy relating to third sector involvement in partnerships and seeing that translate into practice. We hear from voluntary organisations all the time that the policies are there in terms of engaging with voluntary organisations and making sure that they are part of shaping decisions. However, there is a disconnect with what happens in practice. That is really important that we look at that. We ensure that, whatever we do to ensure greater participation in things like the Scottish budget, we are looking at mechanisms that are holding Government to account on how they are involved in the third sector in shaping those decisions. Thank you for the reference to the open government. It is one of the areas that I have worked previously with Councillor Everson on, so Councillor Everson. Yes, convener, we have worked closely on many things in the past. I think that it is good to see you again in this role. I think that there are two levels of answer to this one about participation, firstly in terms of local government as a whole, working with the Scottish Government. I think that there is a real need to make sure that that local government voice is there right at the beginning of budget setting process as policies and ideas are being developed. We have seen the really positive impact on policy that can happen when that is in case, for instance, the early learning and childcare successful development of that. There was really much in partnership with the voice of local government heard at the beginning, and we have got a good policy outcome as a result of that. It is crucial that when the Scottish Government is setting the budget, it looks carefully at how things are going to be delivered, so that any pitfalls, any issues can be ironed out and we can really get that lens on equalities and human rights and make sure that the delivery is going to work in the most effective way. I would argue for greater transparency around budget setting in the same way that the other speakers have and ask very much that it is best that we are involved at the beginning, because then we can help develop the best outcomes from the money that is available across Scotland. The second level of the answer, of course, is around our communities and how we involve our communities. Yes, we are committed totally to that 1 per cent of participatory budgeting. We would like to see that across the whole of the public sector, and not just for local government, but it is something that everyone should be delivering and empowering the communities to get involved. That is the best way to understand what people want and how they want their services delivered. I totally understand the issues that Nina is raising and how we have got to make sure that our marginalised communities can take apart too. That is our function as local government. We have to take responsibility for that role and ensuring that voices are heard across our communities and can be involved. Those that don't necessarily have the same tools as others to participate in the spending of money and the developing of local services, we need to ensure that we work to empower them. That is a role that councils across Scotland take on through the citizens panels that they have, the listening or lived experiences groups that they have, and the way that they increasingly listen to local communities and work with them at a local level. Commitment to participatory budgeting, what to see it wider across Scotland and other bodies involved, and understand that our role is to help to empower those communities to have that voice in what they are doing and participate in how money is spent and services delivered in their local area. I think that, thus far, all the questions have been really important to hear from all the witnesses. I think that going forward, that might not be the case. When members are asking questions, if they want to direct them at a particular panel member, then hopefully that way we will manage to get through all of the areas of questioning that we have. Can I move to Karen Adam? Absolutely. Thank you, convener, and welcome to the panel. Good morning. It is nice to see well-kent faces. I am going to direct my question to Alison Everson. Just touching upon and building upon what we have been speaking about already, the pandemic has made more stark some of the inequalities that we are already aware of. There are numerous examples in terms of local authorities, increased requirement for social care, housing services, school meals, council tax relief funds and, even for domestic waste, as more people worked from home, virtually every area of local authority service was impacted by that change that we had all experienced. From a local authority perspective, in the context of what was known before and what is exposed now in this post-lockdown world, how do you prioritise or at least focus on that through that equality's lens? Going into a bit more detail about what you were seeing earlier, what does that look like practically when it comes to that pre-budget planning? Good morning, Karen. Good to see you as well. I think that you are totally right in what you are saying there, that the equalities have been exasperated during the pandemic, and we have seen things through a closer lens. They did exist beforehand, but they have come to light. We have to respond to those inequalities as we see them, and we have to make sure that we address human rights, we address the needs of people right across our communities. Obviously, that requires some different thinking. There is also not one answer to that question there, because every authority across Scotland is different, and they will be seeing needs in a different way, and they will be needing to respond in a different way. Maybe in one area it is housing as a particular need, and maybe in another, it is leisure facilities for the mental health and wellbeing of the communities. There is not one answer about how best to deliver that, and I suppose that comes down to the importance of giving the funding to local government to address the needs in their own particular community. How they find out about those needs is the on-going work of local government, of course, in our areas through the various community impact assessments that are going on, the engagement with people with lived experience, which is increasingly happening across our communities, but right at that local level. I know that there are in wards across Scotland as well, and individual council wards through really smaller areas within that council. There is that kind of engagement going on, working with partners in the third sector too to really understand the needs of that community and get to grips with what is going on. Processes will have to change as a result of this, but I think that to enable them to change, that focus on the local is increasingly important, that emphasis on giving flexibility to local councils as well to spend the money is also increasingly important, so that they can recognise that need and really address inequalities in their own area. I am going to take Maggie in, then I thank Pam Duncan-Glancy as some sops in this general area about Maggie. Thank you very much and good morning and welcome to all the panel members this morning, and thank you for what you've told us so far. I want to explore some of the progress and barriers a little bit more. I would like to ask all of you this, but I hear what Jo said about timing, so I might focus in on Paul's response if that's okay. Paul, you spoke about the restrictions and the barriers around long-term funding, around the bureaucracy, around funding applications, that kind of thing. In a previous life, I was very well aware of this going back to the compact days of the 2000s. I suppose that linking those challenges and barriers to something that I think we can all agree that we haven't made progress on enough and that's prevention. The work from the Christie Commission and 10 years on from Christie, we're still not seeing that level of investment in prevention. Never mind the sustaining of current services and full cost recovery and all of those elements. What is it that you and your members need to make sure that we can get a preventative spend as well as sustaining current ongoing services using a full cost recovery model that is so important? I think that voluntary organisations need to be funded and given the time to be able to come up with innovative ways of doing things. One of the biggest challenges that voluntary organisations face, we hear about long-term funding all the time and absolutely that is essential, but I think one of the biggest challenges that organisations face is around a lack of unrestricted funding. Unrestricted funding is really vital in supporting organisations to be able to flex and to be able to change their services and adapt to what they do based on the needs at the time. We've seen through the pandemic that a lot of funding has been flexible and it's worked really well and it's something we hope that we can keep on to keep hold of. Flexible funding, when organisations apply for funding, they're doing so based on the need at that time, but needs change. Clearly the pandemic is a very good example, but needs change and organisations need to be able to flex and adapt. That's one aspect, but in terms of building the capacity of voluntary organisations to be able to plan long-term and to be able to contribute meaningfully in partnerships and in discussions like the one we're having today, it's absolutely essential that voluntary organisations are supported through core costs. They need to be fully supported in the delivery of the services and the projects that they run. I've heard before core costs being referred to by funders mention no names as dead costs, but they aren't. They're absolutely essential and I think we've seen this move towards projectisation of funding. Public sector or independent funders wanting to fund specific projects with specific outcomes, but there needs to be that infrastructure in voluntary organisations to be able to not only deliver those but also look at the long-term, look at replacement funding to sustain those services and it's back to that point I mentioned at the start about causing more harm than good when you set up a project or a service for a year. A year isn't long enough to meet the needs of those people you're trying to support and then that service is yanked away and I think not only that has an impact on the staff of those organisations and on the service that that individual is receiving, but I think it has a probably a broader impact on their view of Scottish society and what their own Government and Governments are doing for them. So core costs cover things like IT, fundraising, HR. I think the fundraising point is really important because we've touched on that earlier on in the session, but I think it's investing in voluntary organisations capacity to plan and contribute to long-term development and delivery of Scottish national priorities and local priorities. If you're funding organisations on an annual cycle and you're funding them for specific projects, they cannot contribute to long-term strategic discussions about how policies could be changed and how they could be implemented for more preventative reasons. I think that organisations we speak to, one of the challenges that this committee and other committees and groups will find is that they won't hear from the organisations they need to hear from. You'll hear from people like SCVO and I'm pleased you do, but the organisations you really need to hear from as well are ones that aren't able to contribute because they're funding, simply they're there to deliver the service and they can't take any time away from delivering that service. So if you want voluntary organisations to deliver their skills, knowledge and expertise to shape policy and shape implementation, then you've got to invest in their capacity to be able to do that. I'm sorry that's a long answer. No, no, that's helpful. Possibly going to pick up on some other points I spoke of later as well. Yeah, not happy to hand over to Pamela. Pam. Thank you, convener, and good morning to the panel. Thank you for joining us. I want to ask a question specifically about the rights of three groups of people and in two spending areas, so quite specific and probably directed if it's all right at Councillor Everson and at Paul Bradley, if that's okay. Firstly, in recent weeks, we've seen the extreme shortages of staff in social care that has resulted in some services having to be stopped, some people not being able to get the services they need and some unpaid carers having to pick up the slack. That, at its very basic level, means that there are a large number of people in Scotland today not achieving the minimum core of their basic human rights. So I just want to get a bit of an understanding about the impact that particularly Councillor Evans, the funding settlement for social care and for local government has on the recruitment crisis, the impact of increasing wages within the sector in terms of addressing that, particularly around £15 an hour and also the impact of doing so on the equality and human rights of disabled people and women. To yourself, Paul, specifically about the ways in which the third sector has had to step in at times over the past year and for many years to provide essential services and your assessment of the funding settlement and what we could be doing in the budget to improve the human rights of the people I've mentioned, but also to make sure that we don't just meet the minimum core of basic human rights for these people that actually be progressive and realise their rights to an adequate standard of living in an independent life. Alison, do you want to kick off? Yes, thank you very much for that question and I recognise the scenario that Pam has described in there, so thank you for raising that. The underfunding of local government over many years has had a huge impact on social care and other services. I think it's important to point out that local government has actually put more money in proportionately from its budget into social care, so it's given added value to the money from Scottish government from its budget to support social care, recognising that it's such a crucial area of local delivery. This, of course, has been at the cost of other services like culture and leisure, which, in a wider sense, also have an impact on the needs of people receiving social care. It's important to see needs holistically as well, so underfunding has been a key issue and there are fundamental issues in workforce planning as a result, yes, and that is something that we do need to address right across Scotland, how we look at the workforce, how we ensure that the workforce is supported, that it can be valued and that it can be trained and developed in the appropriate way. That's something that we'd welcome joined up thinking about, the best way to take that forward, local government and Scottish government working in partnership on workforce planning. Obviously, there are other strands of work going on at the moment to look at that kind of aspect. We acknowledged during the pandemic in particular that there were particular needs and some services were not able to be delivered in the way they had been before the pandemic. Despite the fact that councils were so flexible and agile in their responses, and this again shows the importance of local delivery, we had people who normally worked in sports centres going to help deliver social care, for example, that agility locally to make sure that the important things could be delivered as much as possible in an area with staff available. I suppose the key thing to remember is local government staff are not immune to the pandemic like anyone else, they also have to socialise and isolate, they also have the issues with the family life as well at this particular time, so that context is important. I think we've argued for a long time about wanting to value our workforce in general. We see the local government workforce as one workforce and would like to be able to value and support the one workforce of local government across the piece, and that parity across the workforce has been important to us. Now you will appreciate that at the moment with the funding of local government, it's very difficult to do that, and it comes back to that question about funding for local government and how that helps build the communities that we want to see built. If we are talking about a human rights approach, if we are talking about equalities, if we are talking about local government and the people that work for local government as being crucial to the delivery of that, we've got to respond to that in our budget setting so that people can be given that value, that training, that development, that support through their terms and conditions and other aspects of employment, and that fair work agenda that we have to deliver on that, but that requires funding in itself to make that happen. I recognise the situation that you are talking about very much, local government is there to support people across our communities and make needs of people across our communities. The funding to do that is really important. We have talked so far about how that can be done through the Scottish Government budget. It was also important to mention that giving local government the flexibility to raise its own finance would be a way to address this too. There are various ways to do that. We have talked before about tourist tax, such as one example of doing that in an area where it might be appropriate, but looking at the whole fiscal framework and how local government could be supported to also raise its own money to help to deliver things like social care, because the basic problem in social care is chronic underfunding, which also prevents things like that preventative agenda that's already been talked about. I think that that must be the key to your answer, but I will also praise everybody across local government who has done so much during the pandemic and throughout the time to support people across our communities to have their basic needs addressed. Thank you and Paul. I know I probably have to be quick with this answer. At SVO, we work with a range of intermediaries who are more specialised on health and social care, but I think it would be wrong to focus on this discussion and not bring up issues around procurement in social care. Obviously, it's an issue across the board, but at time and again we hear about the shift towards tendering as a way to cut the cost of services. There's understanding in terms of that money has to be saved somewhere, and we've heard before in previous committee sessions that local government and others will look to the voluntary sector where funding isn't running thanks to to make those savings, but that shift towards procurement and towards contracts, largely those contracts are not favourable, by and large anyway, for voluntary organisations in terms of things like inflationary uplift and full cost recovery, but also the tendering process really pits voluntary organisations against each other and it drives down the quality of services in favour of cost savings. While some people refer to it as the price war and while there is that competition between voluntary organisations in social care in other areas, there's also great competition between voluntary sector providers who are trying to deliver services not for profit to improve people's lives and communities, and those services and those bids that are coming in from private sector providers too who are able to undercut voluntary organisations through things like not paying the real living wage and so on. So, these are big issues and I think that in terms of what can be done, there'll be others more qualified to give more detailed answer, but I think that we need to ensure that procurement works and enables local voluntary organisations, particularly those smaller specialist organisations that have a key role to play, but currently are excluded from the tendering process because the contracts are too large or because it's just a very timely and resource heavy process. We need to see contracts that have fair work principles, inflationary uplift and full cost recovery. I think that one solution, a key solution in terms of supporting the development of contracts that work for both the public sector and for voluntary sector providers, is ensuring that voluntary organisations are part of designing those contracts and what's needed to actually deliver them in a meaningful way that's going to help people to live a good life. That doesn't just connect with social care, it's across the board in the voluntary sector, but I hope that that's somewhat useful to your question. Nina. I know that I wasn't invited to answer that question, but I really want to answer this question, not in terms of providing the basic care, because all the issues that have been discussed seem to be the approaches like creating a priority group and just meeting the basic needs, i.e. having the carers going in to check on the person, but what we've been hearing is a lot of the disability groups in five, they're really worried about the closure of the daycare services, so when we're talking about procurement, we need to think beyond just personal care. People thrive by having built in social relationship with each other, but if that's lacking, they might have somebody coming in to check that they're okay, but they're not having this natural relationship with anybody else, they're not seeing anybody else, so we still need to not to take away those spaces where they bond with one another, where jobs are also created because of those daycare services. I know that the local groups in five, they will be really annoyed with me if I don't stress that point, that we need to think beyond just the kind of personal care. Think about the preventative stuff that's been going on for a long time and people being able to live their life fully, as mentioned many times here. Thanks very much for that, and I thought you were going to want to come in on the question, particularly when the answers came in, but Pam was trying to appease me. Alexander. Thank you, convener. In your statements, you talked about the challenges that you face, and Councillor Allison talked about fair funding packages, and the whole idea of involving the community and ring fencing, so all of that you see as potential opportunities for you as organisations and individuals, but can I maybe ask what you would see as some of the specific and focused asks that you would like to see the Scottish Government looking at in specific areas? Are there any areas within the budget that you feel that are real priorities, and that could be about the charging and the revenue that you can manage to obtain, and also about how the budgets are processed and also the timing? You've touched on all of that today about how you see that, so if I could get a short answer from all of you on some of that, that would be really helpful. The reason I say that it needs to be, especially when we talk about equality in human rights, it needs to be ring fenced, or having understanding that each local authority, if you go along the way of local authorities or key services nationally, they have to have an understanding that this money needs to be spent on equality in human rights, because otherwise they will just use money for other things. If you don't ring fencing it, because my worry has always been that people say or depending on the needs of the community, and again we're talking about who has louder voices, and very much the communities that we, like a five-centre for equalities, you're talking about people with disabilities, you're talking about a whole range of people who have been marginalised from their society, they're not going to have a voice in those talking about community needs. So I think that if whatever the funding made available, whether to local authorities or to national services, that needs to be something tied along, that they had to demonstrate the commitment. If anything, and we've asked so many individuals in five, name one thing, name one thing that you think desperately needing investment, transport, I think that goes beyond all kinds of rural or semi-urban areas, because there's this real lack of investment to take people to jobs, lack of investment to take people to where they want to study, and I think in five it's like people say that it's easy for them to get to Edinburgh than from, let's say, Cacoddy to Kelty. We don't seem to design a system that helps people to live their life, and I think if we can get that right, then that would be good, but I think it's about, but then that transport system is, it needs to be accessible by so many different groups. I'll keep it short because there's a lot in that question, but I'm going to stick to the timely aspect that was in there. I've been meeting recently, I've met with about 20 or so, I think I said it, start CEOs from different charities just in-depth interviews to discuss the challenges. I think one of the biggest things, one of the key things that the Scottish Government could do in terms of their funding for voluntary organisations is make sure, even if they can't go near multi-year funding, which they should do, but if they can't, make sure that there are timely decisions made on funding and that there are timely payments into those organisations accounts. The number of organisations that I've spoken to who are waiting to find out whether they be funded for the next financial year in March, April and sometimes May and haven't got their funding into their bank account until maybe October is unbelievable. I don't know how organisations can ever play a key role in delivering services that are going to impact on people's lives in a positive way without that stability. I just can't see it. I think another example would be Children and Families Fund. I'm not sure I've got that name completely spot on, but voluntary organisations are waiting two years on since they made those applications to find out what's happening with that fund. They've been told that they will hear something in the autumn and that's it. I don't know if they've heard anything yet, as we're now in the autumn, but organisations in that situation will need to take some tough decisions if a decision isn't forthcoming soon. They will have to put staff on redundancy notices. They will have to think about potential closure of one organisation that I spoke to. I think that this committee could really make a good step forward in asking the Scottish Government to adhere to a clear timeline in terms of making funding decisions and then ensuring payments are received by organisations. Thank you, Alison. Thank you. I will here at this point take issue. I think that we have a difference with what Nina has said. I would not support ring funds funding. I think that ring funds funding does not allow for local needs to be addressed in the appropriate way. I think that the problem has been up till now that local government has not been empowered to spend the money flexibly in terms of local needs. Removing ring funds and trusting local government, empowering local government to spend the money appropriately in the area to meet local needs and engage with its citizens and residents across the peace, particularly those who are currently underrepresented, is a key answer to that. I would not support ring funds money any more, but I would instead fund greater empowerment for local government and flexibility in how to spend the money. On specific asks, we will ask you to end the council tax freeze. That benefits higher earners rather than the people across our communities with the greatest needs that we should be supporting. I emphasise again the need for multi-year funding to do that long-term planning as well, allowing councils to make decisions around things such as setting planning and building fees so that they can ensure full-cost recovery to make sure that the money that is available locally is really supporting the people that need to be supported by it. Something that we have not mentioned to date is capital budgeting, capital funding. That can also make a huge difference to our communities and the way councils can organise assets across an area to help meet equalities and human rights agendas. The impact of capital budgets at the moment is crucial and we should look at how that funding can be given to councils. As an employer as well, it is important to remember that in many areas of Scotland, the council is the biggest local employer and it has a huge influence in creating jobs, helping employability and that way getting more money into the system locally to help address the human rights and equalities areas as well. I think that they are key issues that I would also bring forward. I also argue against pots of money in mid-year to fund particular policy priorities. That does not help strategic planning either. We need to have a longer-term view. We need to have the budget settlement when the budget settlement comes and therefore be able to make plans around that particular money as well. I think that that probably answers your questions very quickly. I think that most of the areas that I was interested in have been covered. I was particularly interested in the home care aspect that Pam Duncan Glancy talked about. I will not ask the panel to go over that again because I think that there has been some clear answers given, but just to reflect on the number of home care queries over the past few months, as a constituency MSP has been quite telling, so I think that any thoughts and suggestions that we have heard today about how we might be able to improve services here to meet human rights are welcome. I will have one brief question to finish off. It is for yourself, Paul, if that is all right. It is something that was drawn to my attention during the pandemic. There was a local organisation in my constituency that undertook a lot of work. It started up as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic and undertook a lot of work delivering food parcels and providing support to vulnerable people across my constituency area. Indeed, it went over boundaries into other constituencies as well. They have done it just by a group of volunteers. I think that the amount of work that they took on and, potentially, in a way saved the local authority doing was quite significant. We are talking about thousands and thousands of contacts that they had. When I went out and spoke to the people there, they were not receiving any funding. They were not connected with the other voluntary organisations that had a network in place. We are finding it quite difficult to get into that network as well. The amount that they were doing, they were not really looking for any additional funding particularly. That is just one example in one constituency. Is that something that you have seen through the pandemic? How do we make sure that I suppose that it goes back to that thing about the ring fence? If you are talking about ring fence, it might be that all the organisations that are up and established, whereas a local authority, as Alison Evanson was saying, might be able to pinpoint an organisation like that. I wonder if you are able to comment on that. During the pandemic, we have seen a whole host of organisations that have had to close their doors and have not surfaced again. They have completely finished. At the same time, we have also seen a whole range of groups and community groups that have been set up. That is one positive, and they have set up because there was a need. I think that organisations were able to access a whole range of emergency funding during the pandemic. We have made that work with Government and other local authorities. We have made that as simple as possible for organisations to access. There is a challenge in a way that we now have a lot of organisations or a lot of groups that have been set up based on need. Now they will need support in terms of if they are to sustain and find funding. All the issues that we have discussed about funding is pretty much a profession in itself. Those organisations will need to be supported to develop their constitutions, to secure funding and to hold people's hands on that journey to ensure that that organisation or that group does not slip away based on the struggles that they find in accessing further funding and support. I think that in terms of ensuring that organisations can access that, clearly investment in infrastructure bodies, third sector interfaces in local authority areas is absolutely crucial. They provide the link into local authorities and to funding that is available to voluntary organisations. It is absolutely crucial. I would point members to the third sector interface networks manifesto that was published ahead of the most recent election as a really good source of information to look at. Because it is something that has been raised several times, particularly by me, nine years by yourself, in your roles throughout this meeting, I am sure that my colleagues will agree that we hear all the time that thing about the funding application process being a full-time job in itself. I hear that all the time with organisations. Is that something that we need to address specifically then? I know that you have touched on it already, but the argument has mainly been that the funding process needs to be made more simpler. Would there be another way if there could be Government or local authority support for organisations on more support? Is there some support to actually do the funding applications? I would say that we need to look at the experience of the pandemic. If we look at what the committee heard back in 2019, all that stuff is still relevant about applications, about the challenges that organisations face, and we have touched on some of that today. I would say that let's look at what happened during the pandemic. It wasn't perfect, nothing ever is, but the way in which public sector and voluntary sector bodies and independent funders came together to set up things such as a shared funding platform, where data could be shared, information about where money was flowing could be shared. It was a single point of entry for organisations to access funding. That is the kind of thing that we need to be looking at, to make it as simple and as easy as possible for organisations to do the hard work in terms of navigating where those people should go in terms of specific applications and specific funds that are available, but it should be easier for the person or the organisation that is looking for funding. I think that we can look at examples during the pandemic, build on experiences with independent funders, the voluntary sector and Government, and really make sure that we are trying to build something that is easier to navigate for organisations, either who are starting out, but even those organisations that have been in the sector for a long time. I don't know if you want to say something, Nick, because we've chatted about this beforehand. Sorry, I want to add that there's a process before the funding that is presenting quite a lot of difficulties for a lot of groups, because in order to access funding you need to be constituted or decide what kind of body you want to be that allows you to apply for fund and you need to be registered with Oscar. A lot of those groups don't have the capacity to even get to that stage. I was telling Paul this example that we've been given a small pot of money from national lottery community fund to distribute to those small groups that you mentioned that happened during the Covid, who might not be constituted, might not have Oscar registered, but they just need a tiny little bit of money to continue some of the work that they do. We have this local group that wants to organise meet-up groups in Fife. They got back to us and said that they were told that they need to have public liability insurance, which they don't have, and it costs a lot of money to have that. Who can pay for that? There's five centres for equalities, and I'm hoping that my board doesn't hear this. I'm using my chief executive hat to say that if that money is actually quite small, we might be able to do that, because we wouldn't want to give them a few hundred pounds, but they can use it simply because they don't have the public liability insurance. It's about the stage before funding that how unfair the whole system can be for groups that rely on just a bunch of really well-meaning volunteers. I feel that that's going to be an area of question that Fulton might be pressing in other sessions that we have. I thank all three of you for your evidence today and for taking the time to join us. That's been really helpful. We probably could have spent the whole afternoon chatting with you. There's a lot of issues, and your evidence has been so complementary between all three of you. Thank you so much for your time. I'll now suspend briefly to change witnesses. Welcome back. We now move on to our second panel of witnesses. I'm pleased to welcome Shona Robison, MSP Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Housing and Local Government, and Scottish Government officials, Trevor Owen, head of mainstreaming and strategy unit, and Emma Harvey, head of finance and business support unit, both from the directorate of equality, inclusion and human rights. Cabinet Secretary, do you want to make a brief opening statement? Very briefly. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for the invitation to give evidence today on the equality, inclusion and human rights budget as part of the pre-budget scrutiny process. As you're aware, Covid-19 has highlighted the deep-rooted inequalities that exist within our society, and it's vital that, as we move to the next stages of our renewal and recovery work, that we use this opportunity to make fundamental and lasting changes to address these inequalities. Equality, inclusion and human rights continue to lie at the heart of our approach to budgeting. In forming spending plans, ministers must take into account the impact that their decisions will have for equality considerations. The Minister for Equalities and Older People and I will continue to work closely with ministerial colleagues to support those considerations. I'm pleased to note that the committee has written to subject committees to consider the implications for equality and human rights on their own subjects as part of their pre-budget scrutiny, and this is genuinely cross-cutting, which remains everybody's business. Turning briefly to my portfolio budget, in the 2021-22 budget, the equality, inclusion and human rights budget lines increased to £36.6 million. This was a significant increase of around 35 per cent from the 2019-20 budget position, signalling the Scottish Government's commitment to this work. Since May, we've started developing a new £5-year £10 million plan to tackle social isolation and loneliness with £1 million in funding for organisations this year and the remainder over Parliament. We've delivered the new equality and human rights fund, increasing the funding available by over £1 million a year to £7 million per annum over the next three years and supporting 48 projects across Scotland. Although I recognise this as outwith this committee's remit, my portfolio also provides significant investment to tackle violence against women and girls and support refugees and asylum seekers, and I'm happy to go into detail of that during the session. The new streamlined funding streams will more closely align with our funding with the national performance framework outcomes. I will encourage and support partnership working to tackle some of the more entrenched issues of inequality across our society. I also welcome the committee's focus on human rights budgeting in its evidence sessions to date, and in our programme for government, we committed to further embed equality and human rights within all stages of the Scottish Government's budget process, taking account of the equality budget advisory group's recommendations. EBAG presented ministers and the Scottish Government with a set of recommendations on equality and human rights budgeting earlier this year, and those are being considered as part of our on-going work around budgeting. I look forward to working with the committee and looking forward to your questions. Thank you, and I'm going to go straight to Pam Duncan Glancy first. Thank you very much, convener, and good morning to you all. Thank you for coming in and speaking with us. We've heard this morning from Councillor Evans, from COSLA and also from the SCVO as well about two particular areas that I wanted to ask a question on. At the minute, we're seeing a number of social care services being pulled as a result of the pandemic, but it's fair to say that those particular pressures existed long before the pandemic, too. I was wondering whether you would be able to outline what percentage increased investment you would think in social care would be needed in order to reach the minimum core but also to progressively realise the human rights of disabled people, and in particular in doing so to address some of the inequalities that are faced by women. In addition, in relation to your own budget line, do you believe that the Scottish Government is doing all that it can with the powers that it holds right now to alleviate the groups of disabled people, unpaid carers and women from poverty? When do you think that you intend to take control of full, devolved benefits to ensure that those groups are not left behind at the hands of the DWP? If I don't manage to cover every single aspect, I will write to the committee, just capturing all of that. On the first issue of social care funding, this is obviously an area of responsibility for Humza Yousaf and Kevin Stewart. However, you will be aware that, obviously, Humza Yousaf is going to make a statement that will outline some of the Government's thinking in this regard. The Scottish Government has been clear that we see part of the benefits of a national care service of improving the terms and conditions of the workforce, which, as you pointed out, is a predominantly female workforce. That will help to address the inequalities and will help to improve the fair work agenda in that workforce. You talked about the benefits, the disability benefits, and you are right to say that this is the next big area of responsibility for Social Security Scotland. You will be aware that child disability payment is being piloted and then will be rolled out from 22 November. Work is going apace on the adult disability payments. There are a lot of detailed considerations going on, but we have obviously been looking at the detail of those as well. We want to make sure that we have a safe and secure transition of those benefits, but that we very quickly get into reviewing those once we have the case transfer under way and looking at that and working with the committee and other stakeholders to make sure that we can make the improvements to those benefits. I do not know if I have managed to give a top response to the issues that you have raised. The area around the disability benefits is going to be really key. Yesterday, you will be aware of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's report into the experience of poverty in Scotland and 100,000 of the families who are living in poverty have a disabled person in them. There is now probably a more pressing need than ever to look at bringing forward the assessment of adequacy of disability assistance, as well as eligibility. Is there any scope to move that forward, particularly given the number of staff that were added to Social Security Scotland last week? Have you considered looking at a supplement for the Scottish child payment in order to try to lift those particular families out of poverty? We should distinguish the two things. We have the disability benefits that will transfer and will have to transfer essentially around similar criteria, albeit delivered in a very different way, for all the reasons that have been laid out particularly to the Social Security Committee of this Parliament. Otherwise, we would not be able to transfer the benefits in the timeframe allowed, and it would create a very confusing landscape if we had two different benefits working to do two different criteria. We need to get the benefits transferred and then we need to review the criteria and eligibility payments and so on. However, you mentioned the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and you are absolutely right to say that the focus was very much on the six priority families. We know that 80 per cent of children living in poverty are located within the six priority families and of course one of the priority families is where there is a person with a disability living within that family. Yesterday, a session that I did with the GRF was that the Government's focus is very much on the other areas in game changing policies that we can bring to the table alongside the Scottish child payment. Part of that is getting alongside the six priority families and identifying bespoke solutions for those families. What is it that is the barriers for the family with the disabled person in the family that are preventing them from either getting access to work or access to other areas and services and supports that could improve their lives? That is really the area that the Government is focusing on at the moment. Once we have identified how we are going to do that, I am very happy to come back to the committee with that information, but that is very much our focus. We know that that can have a huge impact on child poverty if we get that right. I want to touch on a couple of areas. You mentioned the equality budgetary advisory group report and the recommendations in your opening remarks. I wonder if you could say a little bit more about how you see progressing those recommendations, how some of that work is going and particularly, I suppose, how those recommendations are allowing us to hear the often ignored or easy to ignore voices and more marginalised community voices in discussions and priority setting of budgets. I will come back to a couple of other issues. The ebag recommendations that were made earlier this year are really important. In the programme for government that was published last month, we made a clear commitment to further embed equality in human rights within all stages of the Scottish Government's budget process, taking into account the equality budget advisory group's recommendations. The recommendations from ebag were shared with me when I came in to post back in May and then were published late just a couple of months after. We have been giving those careful consideration, including as part of the forthcoming budgetary cycle and as part of our longer-term budget improvement and equality in human rights mainstreaming work. I have agreed to renew the mandate of ebag for a further year to allow further development of our collective thinking and I plan to meet the chair, Professor Angela O'Hagan, in early November to discuss the work of ebag and their recommendations further, and thereafter we will seek to set out our thinking on the next steps in spring of next year. I would be happy to update the committee at that time. You will be aware that the recommendations were presented under four themes, which were improving processes, communications, organisation and culture, knowledge and understanding. I am a lot to look at, but I am happy to come back to the committee with detail. One of the reasons why that is so crucial is to better understand budget priorities as we look ahead. One of the things that we heard from the panel just prior to this panel was the importance of long-term prioritising so that people understood what was coming and could plan effectively beyond just the annual cycle or realistically what it is. Three months setting a project up, six months doing the project, then three months trying to scrabble around and finding money for the next year again. I wonder how you see equalities as allowing us to get at some of the issues within that sort of planning and strategic work and whether we need to, at the same time, take very seriously some of the quite significant asks from local government, from the third sector and elsewhere around understanding the core costs that are very much a part of sustaining the work that both local government and the third sector do to deliver services across various people's remits, not only on your own. First of all, I understand the very real point made by third sector organisations that they would want a multi-year funding in order to be able to plan their work over the long term. I have a lot of sympathy for that. I guess that the difficulty is if the Scottish Government is working on a one-year budget because the UK Government is working on a one-year spending review on your budget. It makes that very difficult to give certainty because we do not have the certainty, but we have made a commitment over a number of years that we want to try and work towards that because it allows longer-term planning. I absolutely understand and agree with that. In terms of strategic work, I think that it is really work in progress of embedding equality and looking at all of what we do through an equality lens and a human rights lens. It is work in progress. We have a lot better at doing it. We have a lot of expertise now, but there is work to be done. I think that EBAG showed where the perhaps weaknesses are that need to be worked on. We will constantly try to improve. I hope that next year, when we hope to be able to say more about this, we can make some further improvements still. My questions in regards to data and analysis for human rights budgeting, I would like to highlight that we are at the beginning of Black History Month, and throughout the pandemic, BAME people have been acutely affected by pre-existing inequalities across a huge range of areas. As the pandemic progressed, many of those underlying equalities made the impact of the pandemic far more severe for BAME people. I would like to ask what your views are on the quality of data and equality characteristics and what improvements are planned in the light of forthcoming human rights obligations, for example, increasing sample sizes of data on specific groups, such as particular vulnerable and minority groups? You make a good point. We are with the Scottish Government and the agencies across Scotland that we have responsibility for, collect, analyse and publish evidence and analysis by equality characteristics across a wide range of policy areas. There are many barriers and challenges to collecting, analysing and reporting equality data. Despite improvements in recent years, there are still gaps in the equality evidence base. In April this year, we launched the first phase of our equality data improvement programme to take action to make equality evidence more wide-ranging and robust. A stronger and more complete equality evidence base will help to support the collective effort across the public sector and make sure that the requirements of the public sector equality duty are fulfilled. That programme will be undertaken over the next 18 months. I am hopeful of major improvements flowing from that. You mentioned that one of the issues was about sample size. The first phase of the improvement programme comprises a series of projects that will focus on the process elements of equality data collection, including sample size. That is in the early phase of the improvement programme. I am happy to make sure that we keep the committee abreast of developments, specifically recognising data gaps regarding ethnicity. Our immediate priorities plan for race equality, which was published 14 September just last month, has at its heart the data improvement and systemic change recommendations made to us by the expert reference group on Covid-19 and ethnicity. We recognise that. A lot of improvement work is going on, and we are happy to keep the committee updated. Organisations such as COSLA and many from the third sector have raised some issues with reference to the budget process. What kind of scope for changes to the budget process are being thought about in the reflections from COSLA and the third sector? How will changes happen within that that will handle and process the budget? Also, can I touch on the national framework, the performance framework, and will things need to be revised within that context within the budget itself? Taking the last two points first, I think that we are always constantly evolving and looking at ways of improving. Obviously, the human rights budgeting is an area that is a very strong focus at the moment, early days, but it is very much a commitment to get that right. As you can imagine, I spend quite a lot of time speaking to COSLA, and the budget generally and finances is—I probably cannot think of a meeting where that wasn't one of the issues that we discussed. I think that COSLA would probably want as early engagement as possible and as much joint working around areas of priority. If we take Covid recovery, which is going to obviously be at the heart of the budget, discussions have been going on with COSLA for quite some time, for months, around essentially a joint approach to Covid recovery. They have been involved in all of the discussions, which is quite right and proper. Whether that is different from other budget setting processes, I am not sure, but I would say that this time, because of the focus on Covid recovery, the involvement of COSLA in all of those discussions around strategic priorities and, therefore, the funding of them has been very much at the centre of that, as you would expect. The third sector is a big sector, ranging from big strategic national organisations through to very small local organisations. Our engagement around the budget is more likely to be with the more strategic larger organisations by the very nature of budget processing. Simplifying the budget and making it more accessible helps the third sector organisations to be able to see the budget process and how it works and how it hangs together and what it looks like. I think that we have improved over the years at simplifying that process. I do not know if, Trevor, you would like to add anything about the third sector involvement? I do not have anything, particularly to add to what the cabinet secretary has said, that we seek to engage with the third sector. As we are going through the equality and fairer Scotland budget analysis statement, we encourage working across different portfolios, likewise for that engagement to be happening across different portfolios, and to seek to reflect that in the equality and fairer budget statement when it is published. We heard this morning, as I said earlier, from SCVO. You will be aware that, in evidence to the committee, they said that they had asked the previous committee in 2019 to make significant changes around the way that they fund organisations, including giving much more notice and certainty and around the decision making. They have said that, so far, the Government's response is underwhelming and with insignificant advances. Could the cabinet secretary at this point provide an update on what consideration you have given to those requests from 2019? I was quite surprised to hear that a sector with more than £100,000 staff and £6 billion turnover was not featured in the Scottish Government's economic strategy. I wonder whether you could undertake to make a representation to the cabinet secretary for finance to address that. On the last point, that issue has been raised with me directly around the third sector having a seat at the table around the economic strategy. That remains under discussion. I think that the role of the third sector, not least in Covid recovery, is fundamental. In my discussions with them, I have made that point. That is recognised by the Government. On the terms of the request from 2019, I might have to write to the committee about that, but, before my time, I am happy to write to the committee about updating what has been done since then, if that is okay. In response to that, the new equality and human rights funding streams committed to a three-year period of funding in an attempt to give that level of continuity for organisations. We also opened it up to ensure that we were providing core support to organisations as well, so it was not just projects and giving organisations the flex to choose what they bid for and how they wanted to use money that they were coming from. Recognising that project funding without core support for organisations is not particularly helpful for them. That was, as a direct result of that, the evidence that the predecessor committed to this one, took under the last one. As I said, there were a few more bits and pieces that we did, and I can write to you with a bit more fuller answer on that, but it definitely played in strongly to how we developed the equality and human rights funding stream. We also did a number of sessions with organisations that we funded to get their feedback on what was helpful for them and, again, attempted to add that flexibility in on the back of what we were hearing from our funded organisations. It is early days in terms of how well that worked, and we will be looking at that as we go through this period of funding to see whether they were the right adaptations and whether there is more that we can be doing for the next round and feed that through. Great. Thank you. Fulton MacGregor. Thank you, convener, and good morning to the cabinet secretary. I wanted to ask a wee question if it's fallen on from the last panel that we had, and I don't know if you had a chance to see it, cabinet secretary, but it's fallen on actually from the last line of questioning there as well. Just about the funding streams that are open to voluntary organisations, and we heard from Paul Bradley in the last session quite clearly that during Covid these were streamlined more and that that was found to be helpful, but even just going back more historically than that, I think that we all recognise that voluntary organisations can sometimes have difficulty accessing the funding because they don't have somebody to do the job of doing the applications. I wonder if that's something that you're considering taking forward through budget processes and what impact it might have if more smaller organisations are able to access some funding? The first thing to say is that obviously there was a lot of interest in the equality and human rights funding and more interest than could ever have been funded. I have to be honest about that. We obviously have an independent process for assessing applications, and I think that there's been a shift to try and make sure that that national funding, if you like, is going to organisations that are quite strategic in nature, which then I guess your question is what about the local smaller organisations? I think that there is a tension there. I think that we would see very small local organisations perhaps even funded in a different way and that we would deliver the Scottish Government funding to more strategic organisations. That is going to be a challenge obviously. I don't know if you want to… Again, the shift that we have attempted to make was to align the funding more closely with the national performance outcomes to try and see to get a bigger shift really in what we're trying to achieve with the equality and human rights funding. I think that an unintended consequence of that has been that some of the smaller organisations perhaps did find it more difficult. We did put in support through our funding partners to support organisations, and I know that they ran a number of workshops and so on to talk through organisations how to apply and so on. However, as we're now moving into more of a kind of delivery phase on that, I think that's definitely one of the things that we'll look for as to how well that worked, how that support was received by organisations, was it the right kind of support and looked to see what lessons we can learn from that, from our funding going forward. However, as the Cabinet Secretary said, it is always a tension between trying to focus budget on organisations and projects that can really shift the dial in what we're attempting to see in terms of outcomes and also providing support for more local organisations. Thanks very much, Jo. I'm going to try and pick up on and intimise the extension of what Fulton and McGregor was asking there, but to draw in a couple of other areas that I'm interested in exploring, we've heard, I suppose the first thing is to recognise and Cabinet Secretary, you already have done in your earlier remarks that this committee, never mind the Parliament as a whole, is at the beginning of trying to understand how we do better both equalities and human rights budgeting across the board. I suppose one of the obligations that we have and I think the Scottish Human Rights Commission said is the budget as big as it could be, so we have an obligation to maximise the size that our budget can be in order to deliver the kinds of things we want to deliver. So I've got a question, I suppose, around the Scottish Government's approach to tax and to other revenue-raising powers that we have. I know we have the consultation at the moment is open on tax policy and budget policy, but can you say a little bit or if you're in the position to say a little bit about how we can make sure that we actually get the budget to be as big as we possibly can, either through taxation or through other revenue-raising powers, how we're doing in that work, especially with the human rights lanes. I suppose that the point of all of that is to, coming back to the NPF outcomes, if we are looking at long-term outcomes rather than annual or even three yearly outcomes, how do we make sure that we can do this in a way that allows us to address something that we can all recognise has been not necessarily a failing, but we've not gone as far as we would have liked to in the last 10 years since Christie on prevention. I think that there's definitely more work to be done as per the Christie recommendations at focusing more resources upstream in terms of prevention. I absolutely agree with that, but it's not the easiest thing to do. We need to find ways of, not least through Covid recovery, to try and work with organisations, work with local government to look at how that can be done, because we know that the spend is more effective in that space. You asked a number of questions around the size of the budget and decisions for government around the balance of the budget and decisions about taxation. In Scotland, at least to the extent that such powers are currently within devolved, competence needs to be informed by an understanding of the resources needed to address areas of human rights deficiency or weakness. Taxation is one of the principal means of ensuring that those resources are available. However, in terms of Covid recovery, there is a balance to be stock of revenue-raising but also supporting businesses to recover and communities and families to recover. You will see from our spend of, through the Covid period, £2.5 billion of expenditure on supporting low-income households. That's been a deliberate policy decision, obviously, to recognise that the Covid impact has not been equally felt. By recognising that, that means that you then have to act in a particular way in following through your policy and your budget decisions. Through the Covid recovery strategy, which is going to be very closely aligned to the budget, you would expect to see more of that cohesive thinking across decisions that will be made. Tough decisions are always having to be made by government and particularly around budgets. There is never enough money to do absolutely everything that we would want to do. There never has been. Therefore, decisions have to be made, so you have to be more strategic. The task that the Cabinet has been set on collectively is around what more can we do in the area of tackling child poverty? If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. We have had to be very clear about what the priorities are for the Government and for the budget going forward. I hope that that will be clear once the budget process is properly under way. In the programme for government, there is lots of discussion about participation and ensuring that we get the democratic participation across the country and across the areas. What will the Scottish Government do to ensure that it increases the level and also the quality of participation within the budget process? You will be aware that the EBAG recommendations state that public participation in formulating budget commitments and ensuring that the integration of lived experience of policy decisions is essential. I think that a key aspect of equality in human rights budgeting is the transparency of the budget process and documentation and the ability for people to engage in and understand the budget, because it is quite a complex set of processes. It is complex for ministers, let alone folk who have not been through that process before. We recognise that there is work to do to improve transparency and participation in the budgeting process. As part of our response to the recommendations, we will consider how best that is achieved and through what routes as part of the wider objective to make Scottish fiscal information more accessible and understandable. The fiscal transparency programme is intended to help with the publication of timely information in an accessible way. For example, using more data visualisations, infographics and open data with clear explanations of the context. That approach is intended to support and improve the understanding of how the Scottish Government's budget is allocated and spent and thereby improving scrutiny by external and internal stakeholders. Work in progress, but we recognise that there is more to do. There are examples of good practice elsewhere in the world that we have been looking at, and we just need to keep the improvement side going on that. Thank you very much, cabinet secretary. I think that that is committee members' content. For now, we have other business to cover. Thank you for making it through the session without having a coughing effect. There are obviously one or two pieces where you said that we would write to the committee, so we look forward to receiving that and being kept up to date on the other matters that you have talked about. Thank you very much. We will now move into private session.