Seòmar agus comataidhean

Thank you for the opportunity to set out the work that we are doing to strengthen accountability and to ensure that equalities and human rights principles remain at the heart of the budget and spending review process. The Scottish Government places the utmost importance on being open and transparent about how, where and why decisions on public finances are taken. I will take a moment to reflect on what has been achieved.

Given the focus of this meeting, I am heartened that the SHRC’s report last year on how the Scottish budget for 2021-22 stacked up against international best practice showed that Scotland would be the highest-scoring country for budget oversight in the 2023 open budget survey global rankings. The most recent results for Scotland represent good progress since the SHRC last ran that assessment, in 2019, when it assessed the 2017-18 Scottish budget. Scores were up across the board on participation, transparency and oversight. When compared with the latest country rankings in the OBS global rankings for 2023, all three of Scotland’s scores sit higher than the respective global averages. When global comparisons are made, Scotland is one of only a small number of comparison countries to have made progress rather than stagnating or slipping backwards.

Of course, as ever, more must be done, and we remain committed to making further improvements and responding to feedback. For example, the committee has asked us to move towards multi-year budgeting to demonstrate accountability. As a result, we are this year undertaking a spending review alongside work on the Scottish budget for 2026-27 and that review will set spending envelopes for three future years for resource and four years for capital.

To support those processes, we are continuing to conduct impact assessments so that we can make decisions informed by high-quality evidence, ensuring that we focus on the impact on protected groups and comply with our statutory duties. We are, of course, operating in a challenging fiscal environment and it is critical that we focus our resources to deliver value for money and to advance equality.

We are introducing a new strategic integrated impact assessment approach this year, aiming to integrate multiple statutory duties to provide a more rounded and holistic understanding of the potential impacts. Our goal is to enhance both the efficiency and effectiveness of those assessments. That work is being shaped in collaboration with stakeholders, including the equalities and human rights budget advisory group and the OECD.

I am grateful for the committee’s time today and now hand over to the Minister for Equalities.

It is a fair challenge. One of the reasons that the national outcomes are being overhauled is that we want them to work better. The challenge that you present is one of the reasons why we want to have a refreshed set of national outcomes. A lot of work has gone on to gather evidence from experts and public consultation. Getting that right has meant a delay, but getting it right is the most important thing.

The Deputy First Minister has been clear that the national performance framework remains an important vision and can create the thread that you mention. There are regular holding-to-account sessions with senior civil servants, cabinet secretaries and ministers on the delivery of the national performance framework and where we are on the outcomes. That is an important, high-level mechanism to hold ourselves and others to account, because getting the outcomes right is very important.

You are right to challenge us, but that is exactly why the substantial overhaul of the NPF is being undertaken. There absolutely has to be a thread and a linkage to the missions and priorities. I hope that, when the refresh is concluded, the committee will see the benefit of it.

First of all, there is always more work to be done—we have to acknowledge that. The National Advisory Council on Women and Girls is very challenging in this space; it has challenged the First Minister and all of us to do more. Our work with them led to funded work with the OECD to explore how gender budgeting approaches can be applied to the budget process in order to make it better and evidence that we are going deeper and further with gender budgeting across all our investments. Through that pilot, we were able to identify some of the gaps, for example the need to have a more strategic overarching gender goal and the need to move away from a portfolio-based budget model to one that is, as you described, not siloed. Those form part of the need for a longer-term reform programme.

We are getting better at avoiding siloed working. If we take the example of tackling child poverty, the child poverty delivery plan does not relate just to the Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice’s job but to everybody’s job. The inputs to that plan include not just the Scottish child payment but things such as employability programmes, childcare and other services, fair work, the living wage and transport—in other words, things that sit across Government that have to brought to bear in order to have the biggest impact. I had a meeting last night with local government on how we work together to align ourselves on our child poverty objectives for the next delivery plan. I assure you that that work is continuing.

Regarding the employability service itself, we recognise that there is a strongly gendered element to child poverty and that children in single-parent households are particularly likely to experience poverty, which means that support to get parents towards and into work must fit round the person. Some of the most successful programmes have been delivered by third sector organisations, some of which are quite discreet; they build up trust with women and parents and bridge the gap into statutory services. We must look at what works and some of that has been very successful. The job is far from done, but we can point to good examples of where there are strengths that we can build on.

There should be accountability. As I said earlier, we need to hold to account our senior leaders in the public sector—or whatever organisation—for the services that they provide. The point that I was making is that they have quite a challenging job to do because of all the pressures and demands in relation to an ageing population. The population health framework has set out a real intention to enhance population health measures that can have huge benefits further down the line. We know, for example, that the investment in early years and family nurse partnerships and all those upstream investments have great benefits later on. Breastfeeding is absolutely one of those interventions.

We absolutely recognise that there will be variation among health boards. The question for us is how much variation we are prepared to tolerate and where the accountability is. There has to be accountability and there has to be a service standard across the boards. As I said, I will take that issue back to health colleagues.

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.