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Organisations of any type will get funding only if they deliver what the funding is for. The minister has outlined that there is a difference between services being provided, such as suicide helplines, and the advocacy or policy position of any organisation. Numerous organisations may have policy positions that receive no funding but they provide a discrete and important practical support, such as a suicide prevention helpline. That is the distinction that the minister has made.

Every organisation is and should be subject to scrutiny by Inspiring Scotland and, in turn, by the Government to make sure that the funding that they are provided with goes on the services that they have said that the money is for, and that will continue.

That is the answer that I am giving you.

Accountability is key and I would be happy to have a further discussion with Emma Congreve or any other stakeholder who wants to discuss that in more depth.

I spoke in my opening remarks about where Scotland sits in relation to international best practice in being transparent about how, where and why decisions on the public finances are taken. Using some of those key measurements to compare Scotland with other countries shows that we have work to do but are certainly making progress.

You touch on an important point about how money is routed. If we had representatives of local government round this table, they would say that councils are autonomous elected bodies and that decisions about funding should be made there. There is an on-going debate in Parliament. Some people call for more resources to be directed through local government, or for more ring fencing, but I also hear calls for ring fencing to be removed entirely and for our 32 local authorities to be entirely free to spend money as they wish. That is a difficult tension. The Verity house agreement was an attempt to have explicit, shared objectives that the public can see and can use to hold all organisations to account. Those objectives include tackling child poverty, growing the economy, improving public services and tackling climate change and we must think about what we are going to do and how money aligns to those objectives.

There is tension and I do not think that we should pretend otherwise. I have colleagues who tell me that, if we removed the ring fencing around some funding, we would have no way of guaranteeing that that money will be spent on homelessness services or other discrete areas of work while other colleagues, particularly in local government, tell me that that there should be no ring fencing.

There are tensions and we should not pretend otherwise, but we must clearly demonstrate that funding is aligning to the key missions that the First Minister has set out. That is also a work in progress.

However, if I take child poverty as an example, I contend that the reason that the level of child poverty is falling—not fast enough and far enough, but it is falling—is that we have been able to align resources from the Scottish Government, local government and the third sector to a very clear key mission that everybody understands. That is my honest assessment of where we are at.

It is a tension, but we need to work through it, because every pound that is spent is public money, wherever it is routed, and it needs to be spent in the most efficient and effective manner and with clear objectives.

Everybody. We are accountable for setting and agreeing budgets, and in many ways, there is a parliamentary role; we can propose a budget, but at the end of the day it has to be supported in order for it to become enacted and for the money to flow in for the priorities that are collectively agreed. Once funding is allocated, it is up to local authorities, health boards and the third sector to focus on the objectives that are collectively agreed.

Accountability is at a number of levels. We are all accountable to the electorate at the end of the day, but our public servants, particularly our leadership in the public service, are also accountable. We have to be able to demonstrate progress on our objectives and to be questioned if those objectives are not being met. We should all be open to being scrutinised.

That applies to local government as well. I do not think there is anything to be concerned about there. For example, when there is variation between local authorities, and some are making great progress in an area and others not so much, we should be able to address that. It might be that they are doing better in a different area, so the more scrutiny and analysis that is applied to find out why, the better.

We will follow up on the other points that you made. I was not able to watch the earlier part of the meeting, but I will get a note of the key points, and I am happy to engage with people beyond the session.

We are happy to do so.

I will look into that issue specifically.

It goes back to Pam Gosal’s point, to some extent, in that we provide health boards with their allocation through the formula that has been used for many years to take account of deprivation, ageing population and so on. There are contentions around where that ends up landing in the overall budget. We have a growing budget for health and social care, and the formula is applied so that each health board receives its share. They have a great deal of discretion around how that funding is deployed.

Running a health board is not an easy task. There are many pressures in relation to an ageing population, both in planned care—on which there is a lot of focus—and in population health. One of the issues that Tess White has raised is very much in that space. How does a health board manage its resources, even though they are increasing, in that landscape of pressures? In some respects, health boards are a bit like local government. Some health boards are very good and have outcomes that are impressive in a whole list of areas, but they might not be doing so well in this area. Some health boards are doing better than others with the service Ms White highlighted.

How much do we want to direct health boards around the services that they provide, and how much discretion do they have? That is a tension, because we want them to do so much. There is lots of pressure on them to improve accident and emergency waiting times, and planned care and cancer care, and yet we have really important population-wide preventative measures, because we know that breastfeeding, for example, is a key preventative tool. That is a tension, and that is the honest answer.

Health boards should be held to account, and the health secretary holds them to account for the services that they provide, but there is variation across them. I am keen to minimise variation and I will take away this specific issue, but I hope that I have provided a bit of background on why services sometimes vary from one health board to another.

Tackling child poverty is a good example because it is a statutory duty. It is not a nice-to-do. The Parliament passed a law that we would meet the child poverty targets. Therefore, the work on the next delivery plan has to set out the analysis of the data on where we are.

That is important. We need to know where the base is now. Progress has been made on child poverty but we need to do more to close the gap to 2030. The ongoing analysis and use of data is really important to know whether we are on track to meet the requirements by 2030. Then it is about being able to use that as drivers and to test whether the policies that we are enacting to close that gap are working.

There is a lot of evidence and data that shows that the Scottish child payment has probably been the single most important tool, but the evidence on the investment in housing, childcare, transport and employability is a little less direct because it is not about putting money in people’s pockets per se. Therefore, it is important that we can capture the data on what impact reduced housing costs make on a household income to help to reduce poverty and how a flexible childcare service helps the family to reduce costs.

There is also employability. We know that work is the best way out of poverty, so we need to ensure that our programmes support parents and families in all the shapes and forms that they come in.

The six priority groups are a real focus for the next delivery plan. The data is really important not only for us to know whether we are making progress but for scrutiny. There is a lot of external scrutiny on progress on the child poverty targets. The eradication of child poverty is a good example of where we are probably more advanced. It is the single most important objective that the First Minister has set out and a statutory target.

I hope that that gives you some assurance that we use data a lot. We evaluate and it is crucial. Otherwise, how do we objectively measure the progress that we are making?

I will hand over to the minister on the specifics of that, but I put on the record that the funding to our health boards and local authorities has increased. There have not been cuts to funding; it has increased in real terms. That is not just me saying that—we talked about scrutiny and accountability, and the Accounts Commission and Audit Scotland have confirmed that funding for local government and health and social care have both increased in real terms. We should be accurate.

That does not mean that there are not difficult decisions to be made around where funding goes, but the funding has increased in real terms because of the decision that we made to increase health and social care funding considerably in the 2025-26 budget. It is important to put that on the record. Funding has increased, not decreased. The Minister for Equalities might wish to come in on the specifics around funding.

Yes, absolutely—we are. We have heard from the Minister for Equalities about the changes that we have made in the process to ensure that it is not a case of doing a human rights analysis after the event but of engagement before budgetary decisions are made, to ensure that decisions and potential decisions are put through a human rights lens. Success looks like having that engagement earlier to ensure that the assessment process is transparent and open.

The added opportunity on this occasion, with the upcoming fiscal events, is that, through the spending review, we are able to demonstrate the line of sight for funding that will ensure that we can be open and transparent about the commitment to this work over a number of years. Ensuring that human rights are at the heart of the budget process is the job of not only the Minister for Equalities. It is the job of every cabinet secretary and every minister to ensure that human rights are at the centre of the work that they are doing and that they engage with the Minister for Equalities, who is providing a check in the system that the processes and work that are under way meet the requirements and are being done in a way that engages with not only ministerial colleagues but key stakeholder groups.

That is what the process looks like; it should not be overly complicated, and it should have a demonstrable effect. I emphasise that we are not talking only about the funding in the equalities brief; we are talking about funding across the board and looking at whether the decisions that we are making and the decisions that have been made can stand up to the scrutiny of a human rights perspective. We are not there yet. We have work to do, but progress has been made, as I outlined in my opening statement.

You touch on a real tension. I will have to watch that I do not go back to speaking as a home care organiser, which I was in my former years, because I feel very passionate about this area. Without a doubt, huge improvements need to be made.

Clearly, as you have described, the debate on the national care service became focused on territory, powers and disagreement rather than the areas of extensive and broad agreement. What service users and their carers want to see from social care services should have been at the heart of it, but that was lost somewhat both in the broader debate and in the debate in the Parliament.

There is now an opportunity to work outside Scottish Government and local government silos and to focus on how we will improve social care, not just in the here and now. The demographics show that there will be a huge increase in the over-80 age group in the not-too-distant future. There will be a requirement for us to take a root-and-branch look at how we provide social care and ensure that the budgets will work. Silos do not help; the health and social care integration joint boards were established with the intention of moving away from siloed budgets but, in my opinion, there is still far too much siloed working.

We all have to take a step back and think about how we will transform social care in a way that will meet people’s needs both now and in the future. Human rights are at the heart of that, because the rights of those who are often the most vulnerable in our society need to be considered first and foremost. If we keep that at the heart of our discussions perhaps we can avoid falling back into what you described as the territory and powers issues.

I could talk all day about that area, but I will stop myself there because I think that we need to have a very long and hard look at it.