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I will be meeting the Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs, Land Reform and Islands very shortly. There are many people to talk to, and I have got through nine ministers so far. My offer is that I am quite happy to raise anything that comes up today at that meeting, which is yet to come.

I suppose that you are talking about targeted funding to address the sort of geographical issues with regard to rurality and inequality that you highlighted. I understand the issues that are faced by marginalised communities in remote, island and rural settings, and we are absolutely committed to supporting them. Something that the First Minister has encouraged is that, when we make visits as ministers, we do so on a cross-portfolio basis. Therefore, on our summer tours of constituencies, I made a special effort to visit rural and island communities and look at housing provision, and I was able to speak to not only our delivery partners but residents, including potential residents, and communities and see the challenges at first hand. I would not have known all that just by sitting in Holyrood. We are getting out and about and speaking to real people, and that is informing me and allowing me to be in a position to challenge and support my colleagues.

We need to ensure that the services that we offer are tailored specifically to the challenges that people face. Like everything else, rural impacts should be taken into account in all Scottish Government portfolios; in other words, any good policy should already be thinking about its impact across Scotland, including rural areas. Moreover, we have island communities impact assessments, which must be carried out in relation to any policy, strategy or service whose effect on an island community is likely to be significantly different from its effect on, say, another community. Those assessments must also consider the impacts on different groups on an island, too. I would say that, through such an approach, we are actually drilling down to what sometimes can be quite small numbers, which brings me back to what I was saying earlier about our challenges with regard to data sets.

We are in the process of introducing a new systemic approach, which is called the rural assessment toolkit, to aid that further and enable a greater focus to be applied to the unique needs of rural communities and businesses. That toolkit will support civil servants to understand the unique characteristics, challenges and opportunities of rural areas and weave those through all the stages of policy development so that, again, policy is being influenced early—thereby creating more robust policy that is more reflective of needs.

Thank you for that. I take on board and totally agree with your comments about silo working. That is something that I hear very commonly. However, as I have said previously, when I ask people to come out of their silos, they always say that somebody else should do it, not them. That is just a general human nature thing, is it not?

There is a bigger structural issue here, because humans are complex—we know that—and they do not see themselves as being in a silo. However, even our parliamentary structures, our committees and our systems are based on individual portfolio areas. It is a challenge for all of us, and I am certainly approaching it in the most robust way that I can.

I gave you an example of how we already do that by making sure that ministers with different portfolios undertake visits in communities and see projects that are not necessarily directly within their portfolios.

For instance, housing is not my policy area, although I take an equalities interest in it. I do not make any financial decisions over it, and I am lucky that it sits in the social justice portfolio. Nevertheless, I go out and see the challenges in real life.

The example that gave me a profound understanding was about the cost of building additional housing and the challenges around that. The questions are: why are we not building more houses and why are we not building them more quickly? I have been on the ground, seeing the landscape and the difficulties of drilling into what is pretty hard rock, as well as the transport of goods and services, and being mindful of not only the skills that are required but the impact of decisions that inflate the costs of goods and services.

Through seeing that, I am in a better position to challenge the Minister for Housing. Obviously, he will be an expert, but I put an extra lens on from an equalities point of view. For example, what happens if you are disabled? If you are building a new housing estate, where is the nearest hospital, where are the main transport routes and what is the availability?

That is happening, and I hope that it gives you a good example. I am trying to show visible leadership and encourage all ministers to do that cross-portfolio walking as well as talking.

We are not currently considering adding rurality as a specific dimension to the EFSB. The document focuses on the public sector equality duty and our fairer Scotland duty, and it supports budget scrutiny and provides evidence of our meeting those duties. Portfolios are best placed to consider the rural impacts of their policies and, where appropriate, consider those as part of their decision processes. Island impacts are considered separately as part of the budget process. Rural considerations are mainstreamed in the Scottish Government, which means that good policy should already be thinking about the impacts that policies have across all areas, including rural ones.

We know that EQIAs are an essential tool in policy development that helps us to better understand and address the needs of the people we serve. The best way to understand the impact of budget measures, including on marginalised groups, is through thorough, high-quality and robust evaluation. I am absolutely resolute in my stance that good-quality EQIAs should underpin everything that we do, and I push back on the idea that they do not have an impact.

The Scottish Government has continued to improve in this area, and it provides training materials, online guidance, best practice examples and impact assessment surgeries to support the completion of good-quality equality impact assessments.

We have brought forward a budget that is set within the mainstream of Scottish public opinion, and that would not have been possible without engagement and participation. We have worked in good faith with Opposition parties to deliver a budget that can command the support of a majority of this Parliament, and I am hoping that it will be voted through this afternoon. I believe that we have listened to and assessed the extensive proposals that were received as part of the budget’s development; we have heard a range of views from a range of stakeholders from diverse communities across Scotland, and we have heard the priorities of the third, public and business sectors. We can deliver progress for Scotland only with the support of our partners and Parliament, and we will continue to take that approach.

On your first question about my raising various issues with the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care, I believe that that meeting might have happened. Regardless of that, though, I am happy to raise the two areas that you have highlighted—that is, NHS Grampian funding, and ADHD assessments and the shortage of medication.

As for your second point, I published, in the interests of transparency, the amount of money that we spend across my portfolio. We put that up; we did not wait to be asked for it in any shape or form—it was published proactively. As for the budget lines, which you have quite rightly pointed out, we procure from organisations specific services that are required to address mental health issues, provide refuges for domestic violence and so on. There is a wide range of projects dealing with socialisation and loneliness, for instance, and those are all listed with their budget lines next to them.

What happens then is that there is a clear contract—for want of a better word—that sets out the terms of engagement, the services and the quality that we expect to be delivered. We fund helplines that support people at high risk of suicide, for instance; indeed, we fund a wide range of organisations to deliver specific services.

We then have fund managers that provide the governance for the process. They are in regular contact with all the organisations, making sure that the Scottish Government is getting the service that it is paying for. The fund managers do all the quality assurance, and they are independent of the process to ensure that Scottish Government money is actually being spent on the services that we have procured.

Many organisations will, of course, provide other services. We procure particular services provided by third sector organisations, although the organisations may themselves be providing other stuff. We are responsible for our bit.

Are you referring to intersectionality regarding mainstreaming?

The use of the human rights budgeting principles remains part of the budget process. In our attempt to streamline the document and make it more accessible, we had to focus our efforts on those parts of the publication that we thought would add most value for the readers. We have set out our approach to human rights budgeting in detail over the past two years. Since there has been little change in the principles behind the Government’s approach to human rights budgeting, we focused on analysis of the key budget decisions in this year’s document.

The six key questions that were developed with EHRBAG were used as part of the case study approach, which included two questions that specifically asked how human rights impacts had been considered. Additionally, the portfolio summary chapters tied portfolio budget activity to both human rights articles and national outcomes.

There is an increased use of intersectional evidence and analysis to inform policy making across the Scottish Government, and that is helping us to understand structural inequalities and to inform inclusive policy making. Analysts and policy professionals—I will bring in Nick Bland shortly—are building their understanding of how to apply intersectional approaches. Practical considerations are set out in “Minority ethnic women’s experiences in Scotland 2024: intersectional evidence review”. That was published in December, and the committee will be aware of it.

When undertaking intersectional research, analysts are encouraged to use qualitative and quantitative sources of data and evidence to ensure a deeper understanding of intersectional issues. We then need to triangulate those to ensure that we get the best evidence possible and the clearest picture. Nick, can I bring you in here?