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You said that you can assure me, and you said that it is difficult to measure culture. However, many believe that culture eats strategy and planning for breakfast. If the culture centralises certain services—I gave a small example, but it is huge for a lot of women—you can provide leadership and support change if you say that we need to measure certain outcomes, which come from different committees. You could go into this budget round and say, “We hear from the health committee that this direction of travel has a massively negative impact on ethnic minorities and women. We want to show measurable improvement on those things.” Will you do that and start to make a human rights and equalities approach to budgeting impact on the lives of people in Scotland?

Thank you, convener, and I thank the committee for the opportunity to make a brief remark about this petition on Police Scotland’s controversial policy on recording the sex of offenders, which, until recently, was based on self-ID.

Public interest in the petition has, understandably, been growing, as the convener has said, not least among my constituents in the north-east. That is testament to the tenaciousness and determination of the petitioners Lucy Hunter Blackburn, Lisa Mackenzie and Kath Murray from policy collective Murray Blackburn Mackenzie.

In September, it shockingly emerged that Police Scotland had justified its data recording policy because it adhered to the force’s

“values of respect, integrity, fairness and human rights whilst promoting a strong sense of belonging.”

In other words, Police Scotland was prioritising the feelings of sex offenders over those of the victims of sexual crime, and to do so was absolutely indefensible. Rape is defined in law as involving penetration by a penis without consent, and it is therefore, by definition, the act of a male body. That is why this matters.

As MBM’s submission highlights, Police Scotland appears to have publicly U-turned on that policy, and that is to be welcomed, but questions remain about the application of the policy in the past, and the detail of how Police Scotland will implement this operational change in the future.

Since the petition was lodged in June 2021, which is a considerable time ago, the committee has corresponded with Police Scotland on several occasions, and I thank you for that. My view is that if we are to get to the bottom of the force’s operational policies on data recording, the committee must urgently invite Police Scotland to give oral evidence. I implore the committee to not close the petition down, please. The Scottish Government has already washed its hands of the issue, so I urge the committee to listen to the voices of women and treat this matter with the seriousness that it deserves. Thank you.

Good morning.

Thank you.

Dr Hosie, I was going to ask whether the revised national outcomes lend themselves to greater connection and coherence in a budget-setting context, but I think that that has been asked already. You have spoken about the transformational potential and the lack of policy coherence, and you and Ms Cowan have said that there is silo working. I will drill down into that by asking two questions. One of those is broad; the other is more specific.

Against the background of the £500 million in-year spending cuts that the finance secretary announced in September, to what extent has the Scottish Government successfully adhered to the three principles of human rights budgeting?

You both mentioned silo working. I have just come from the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee and am enriched with a lot of learning from that. I come from the north-east of Scotland, where the delivery of healthcare is increasingly being centralised in order to cut costs and to gain from economies of scale. However, when you look at the impact assessment of that, you see that that approach can entrench gender inequality and geographical inequality, because services are becoming increasingly inaccessible. We have many examples of people having to travel from an outlying area like Forfar to the hospital in Tayside in Dundee for an intrauterine device, for example. Such treatment is gendered. People do not think about the cost of travel from a rural area to a major hospital or about the childcare or caring responsibilities that women have.

Is there a disconnect between budget decisions like that—I have given the example of rural healthcare—and policy outcomes?

That is not the question. The question was about how the terms should be defined. Basically, Catherine Murphy said that a lot more work needs to be done. Lewis, do you concur that more work needs to be done?

I have no relevant interests to declare.

We are about to go into a budgeting round. What you are saying has not been done before. For the rubber to hit the road, the committee must look at the budgets and see where the targets are, where they carry out an equality impact assessment and where they have some clear measured outcomes. That is what you are saying.

My question is directed at Catherine Murphy and Catherine Robertson. Engender has expressed disappointment that the thematic gender review did not cover intersectional data—I know that Catherine Robertson has also just referred to that point—and used only the available sex-disaggregated data. I ask Catherine Murphy and then Catherine Robertson to elaborate on that by explaining how the Scottish Government might have approached the review differently and what data sources it might have used.