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I apologise—I am going over my time. I am very impassioned by the subject, Deputy Presiding Officer.

In conclusion, I simply say to Opposition members that we have a moral duty to act, and if they truly care about the attainment gap, they must care about poverty first. We should not stop until every child in Scotland has the future that they deserve.

Before I became a member of the Scottish Parliament, I was a councillor on Aberdeenshire Council and sat on the education and children’s services committee. In that role, as in this role, I would often hear the words “attainment gap” being wielded as a political weapon, but an important part of the phrase was left out—the crucial part. The first part of “poverty-related attainment gap” would be omitted, so I am glad that we are focusing on that part today.

Poverty is not just a statistic—it is a lived experience. It is gnawing hunger. It is the humiliation of not having clean clothes or of having to wear ill-fitting clothes. It is the shame of missing out on school trips. It is the anxiety of knowing that you might not go home to a warm meal that evening. A decent mattress to sleep on in a room of your own, or having a space for privacy, can seem like luxury to many children.

Education alone cannot lift a child out of poverty when they are trapped in a cycle of deprivation. For a child who is cold, hungry or struggling with the weight of any family hardship, focusing on learning can feel absolutely impossible. How can children concentrate when they have not eaten since the previous day?

I have spoken with families who often feel judged because their child has a phone at school and it is known that they get support. People ask, “Why do they have a mobile phone?” It might be their only connection to a parent who works night shift or their only means of accessing vital services. Poverty is not just about income—it is about dignity and choices that people do not have the luxury to make. We need to ensure that we eradicate judgment, and the shame and stigma that are associated with it.

That is why tackling child poverty must be interwoven with every relevant Scottish Government policy. I commend the action that the Scottish Government is taking to mitigate the damaging policies that are being imposed by Westminster.

I am frustrated by the cognitive dissonance that I see from other parties over and over again. Do Opposition members think that 14 years of Tory austerity has improved our education system? No, it has not. Austerity was imposed by the Tories and is now backed by Labour, which has also imposed national insurance hikes. What do members think that will do to our education system? We have to work together on this, but Opposition members have to stop coming to the Scottish Government and asking it to sort out the mess that both the Labour and Tory parties have made at Westminster. I am asking those members to join the dots.

We also have to look beyond the symptoms of what we hear about bad behaviour in our schools and pay attention to the causes. We must be careful and sensitive in how we have that debate. We do not want to stigmatise children with additional support needs, nor do we want to stigmatise teachers and make the public think that teachers are not coping in their jobs. There are sensitivities around behaviour in schools, and it is important that the issue is not used as a political weapon.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation projects that child poverty will decline in Scotland while rising in the rest of the UK. The Scottish child payment has, as we have heard, been called “game-changing”, and that is for a reason—because it is.

In the budget, we are investing in education as a tool not just for learning, but for liberation from poverty, by expanding free school meals, increasing the school clothing grant and investing in bright start breakfasts. Those are not just numbers on a spreadsheet—they are policies that change lives for young carers and for children who are already, before they even get to school, having to administer medication to siblings or to provide emotional support to struggling parents. Our social security system recognises that reality and provides direct financial support, and people who receive that support should not be stigmatised for it.

There are those who say that benefits are a waste of money, or insinuate that people take advantage of the system. However, we should be clear that the real waste is the cost of inaction. Studies show that childhood poverty impacts on brain development, academic achievement and future earnings. The longer a child is trapped in poverty, the harder it becomes for them to escape it. Investment in poverty reduction is an investment in education, in health and in future prosperity.

Barnardo’s Scotland is working with hundreds of schools and has documented the real impact of poverty on participation in education. It highlights children who are skipping meals so that younger siblings can eat, and parents who are unable to afford uniforms.

We must also acknowledge the real financial commitment that the Government is making through investing around £3 billion per year in its mission to eradicate child poverty, address the cost of living crisis and break the cycle of poverty. That funding supports measures—

Raising revenue through a visitor levy has the potential to be transformative, particularly in high-traffic tourist destinations, and placing the powers in the hands of local authorities ensures that no region is disadvantaged in a one-size-fits-all approach. Will the minister say more about how the decision to empower local government could benefit communities and businesses across Scotland?

Fraserburgh harbour has ambitious plans to develop its infrastructure and be the first port of call for supporting vital Scottish industries—especially offshore wind and our fishing fleet. However, the harbour must also fund, at risk, its necessary development and feasibility works. What reassurance and advice can the cabinet secretary give the harbour? Will she meet me and the harbour board to discuss that further?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To ask the Scottish Government whether feasibility studies and development expenditure for ports and harbours will be eligible for funding as part of the investment in maintaining and improving ports and harbours that is proposed in its draft budget 2025-26. (S6O-04270)

The question is, that amendment 537 be agreed to. Are we agreed?

Amendment 537 agreed to.

Amendment 638 is in a group on its own. The amendment was debated last week, but there was an error in the version of it that appeared in the first marshalled list. That was corrected in the second marshalled list, which was produced for today. In those exceptional circumstances, the amendment has been put in a group on its own for today’s proceedings to allow members to debate the corrected version before disposing of it.

I call Tess White to speak to and move amendment 638.

Amendment 572, in the name of Paul O’Kane, is in a group on its own.

As no members wish to come in, would you like to wind up, minister?