EQUALITY PROOFING BUDGET ADVISORY GROUP
Minutes of meeting held on 4 June 2003
The Capita Centre, St Andrew's Square, Edinburgh
Present:
Ailsa McKay, Scottish Women's Budget Group
Tim Hopkins, Equality Network
Yvonne Strachan, Equality Unit, Scottish Executive
Ewa Hibbert, Equality Unit, Scottish Executive
Peter Collings, PFO, Scottish Executive
Helen Mansbridge, Finance Department, Scottish Executive
Apologies:
Mick Conboy, Commission for Racial Equality
Morag Gillespie, Scottish Women's Budget Group
Rona Fitzgerald, Equal Opportunities Commission
Minutes of meeting held on 21 November
1. Yvonne welcomed everyone to the meeting. The Group was content with the minutes.
Action points from previous meetings
Draft response from Scottish Executive to research report
2. Ewa introduced the paper. The draft response still needs to be circulated to other colleagues in the Finance Department for their comments and signed off by Ministers, but Ewa said that she would welcome the Group's reaction to the draft text. Given the length of time that had elapsed since the research was carried out, many of the report's recommendations had been carried out, were being carried out or were under consideration.
3. There were two main areas in which the Executive did not agree with the report's recommendations. Firstly, the Executive believed that more preliminary work on pilots was needed before the Executive would be in a position to benefit from the appointment of external secondees to work on equality proofing the budget. And secondly the Executive did not agree with the report's suggestion that the budget documents were the representative statement of the Executive's overall policy objectives; there were other documents that set out Executive policies, and some important policies did not involve significant amounts of expenditure and would not feature in the budget documents. Helen added that the Executive was currently developing ideas for "portfolio plans" that would draw together more information about policies and expenditure.
4. Ailsa asked for the draft response to Recommendation 4 to explain why the Scottish Budget Equality Statement was published as part of the Equality Annual report rather than with the budget documents. The group was otherwise content with the draft response.
Action: Equality Unit to finalise and publish the response.
Update on meeting with Health Department officials to identify a pilot area
5. Ewa outlined the meeting that she, Yvonne and Helen had had with various colleagues from the Health Department. They had identified smoking cessation as the most promising area in which to run a pilot: it was a discrete area of work, information was already collected about the number of men and women who smoked and work had been commissioned to assess the amount of unmet need for smoking cessation services. Some of the information needed to conduct a full gender expenditure benefit analysis would not be available until 2004, but by then it should be possible to assess the number of men and women who smoke, how many wish to give up, how many currently access smoking cessation services, the cost of providing those services, the extent of the unmet need for such services and the cost of providing extra services. The pilot would identify whether there was any missing information or other barriers to conducting a full expenditure benefit analysis.
6. Peter suggested that it would also be worth checking what information was available and what was missing for carrying out a expenditure benefit analysis for other equality groups. Tim suggested that it could provide an opportunity to try out an improved equal opportunities monitoring form like the one recently tested by the Scottish Parliament
7. Ailsa said that the rationale for doing a pilot in such a relatively small and discreet area of the overall large health budget would need to be set out strongly to counter any criticism.
Action: Equality Unit to progress the smoking cessation pilot
Update on proposal for pilot on Sports
8. Ailsa explained that she had sent a proposal to Mike Watson when he was Minister for Sport who had said that he was interested in the idea but that he could not progress it in the run up to the elections. Given the Ministerial changes, Ailsa said she would now like to re-submit the proposal; she thought it would be useful to have an external pilot as well as an internal one to compare the two. Yvonne suggested that it would be best if she spoke to colleagues in Sports Division and that Ailsa submit the new proposal, via the Equality Unit, for circulation to the rest of the Group for further discussion. This would be better than sending it direct to the new Minister who would probably not be familiar with the issues behind the proposal. The Group were content with this approach.
Action: Ailsa to submit a new proposal to the Equality Unit.
Report of October 2001 seminar
9. The Group noted that the report of the expert seminar held in October 2001 had been published on the Scottish Executive website at www.scotland.gov.uk/library4/DD/EqualityUnit/0016316.aspx
Gender and public budgets conference, the Basque Country, December 2002; and
International expert meeting on gender mainstreaming, The Hague, May 2003
10. Helen introduced the two papers about these two events that had illustrated that other countries were also grappling with these difficult issues. The Basque government had conducted a major study to assess expenditure on men and women on sports and other physical activities (and several other areas of expenditure). They had produced gender disaggregated expenditure figures but this hadn't answered any other questions as they had not first assessed the needs of men and women in each area and what their policy objectives were for meeting those needs and so couldn't say whether the expenditure had fulfilled the policies or not, or whether the policies and expenditure levels were right. They were now going back to the drawing board to start at the policy formulation stage. One key point emerging from their work is the need to draw together policy makers, finance experts, equality experts, economists and statisticians - not seeing this as purely the work of the finance department. This study had also illustrated that it was better to start with small pilots rather than conducting several large ones simultaneously to check that the methods being used generated valuable results.
11. The events also showed that there was no one model emerging as the way to progress gender proofing work. For example, the Italians were going down the route of developing gender indicators, similar to the Executive's social justice indicators. The Canadian representative explained that they were offering encouragement to spending departments to take forward gender proofing, focusing on analysis of their data and policies, rather than compelling colleagues to compile gender indicators.
12. Ailsa, who had also attended the conference at The Hague, added that Scotland was viewed internationally as leading the way, particularly in relation to the co-operation, consultation and openness between interested parties. Given the wealth of international experience that now exists in the area of gender sensitive budgeting there is a general recognition that although shifts in policy/expenditure may be an immediate and obvious outcome there should be an equal focus on actual budgetary processes. Also, international experience suggests that a key ingredient for success is to establish mechanisms for ensuring effective partnership working, both within and external to government. Both the focus on process and the issue of partnership working are evident in the Scottish context. Ailsa also said that the Netherlands was lobbying to make gender budgeting an EU policy.
13. Other ideas suggested at the conferences included developing a European website or network for gender mainstreaming/budgeting. In the meantime Helen suggested that the Group or the Scottish Executive should have a representative on the UK group on gender mainstreaming.
Action: Finance/Equality Unit to contact UK Mainstreaming Network;
All Group members to think over the ideas thrown up by the events
and to come back to the Group with any further comments
Update on activity in other countries
14. Helen also mentioned some other examples of work done recently in Canada, Sweden and by UNIFEM. Helen distributed some information about these projects.
15. In relation to indicators, Yvonne commented that if they were to be developed in Scotland care would have to be taken to select ones that were not wholly or substantially reliant on action being taken in reserved areas such as taxation or social security. Another possible problem of indicators was that short-term adverse changes to the indicators could be used as the reason for not adopting worthwhile long-term interventionist policies; any indicators therefore would have to be selected with great care. Ailsa said that Statistics Canada were now linking their work with the work being done by academics to develop new data sets on work and home life. Ailsa said that she would like to find out more about this work, including its costs. Statistics Canada's data sets were 25 years old and therefore very full, but the data they had historically collected may have lost some if its relevance.
Work with HM Treasury
16. Ailsa introduced her paper and outlined the work that she and Rona, along with Diane Elson of the UK Women's Budget Group, were doing with HM Treasury; the work was subject to the finalisation of contracts and so Ailsa could not go into details yet. The key point was that officials in two sectoral Departments would engage in a retrospective scoping exercise of their respective SR 2002 spending allocations with specific reference to gender equality. This would be followed by a more in depth analysis of two selected policy areas for each department. Ailsa said that she would encourage them to publish the outcomes of the work.
17. Ailsa asked whether it would be possible to see the Scottish Executive Finance Department's Spending Review Guidance for 2002; Peter said that confidential references would need to be removed but it could probably be shown to Ailsa on a personal basis; it was in any case based on guidance drafted by HM Treasury.
Action: Finance to amend and send the Guidance to Ailsa.
18. Ailsa asked whether the Executive would consider producing a gender aware spending review in September? Yvonne said that she would rather see some of the outcomes of the HM Treasury work before considering this further.
Update on Finance: AER/Draft Budget timetable and equality improvements
19. Peter said the Partnership Agreement had now been published; it was a four-year programme setting out the new Administration's priorities. As well as all existing commitments continuing (such as the overall commitments to equalities and social justice), new commitments had been made by Ministers (such as explicit commitments on racism, sectarianism and concessionary fares). During the period June to August the Executive would be considering what changes were needed to spending plans to fund the new commitments. Peter expected the timetable for the rest of the year to be as follows:
· August/September - publication of amended spending plans (that may or may not have accompanying policy documents);
· October-December - development of new Spending Review Guidance
· January - start of next Spending Review process
20. Equalities issues would be included in the guidance. The Group agreed that it would be useful to have a meeting in November to consider and comment on the draft guidance.
Future of the Group
The Group's title
21. The Group's remit was agreed at the last meeting, but the Group discussed whether its title should also be amended to reflect the new definition of equality proofing the budget, to better reflect the link between policy and the budget. Although "budget" was an off-putting word for some people, the Group agreed that it could not be removed from the Group's name. After some discussion of possible options, the group agreed that the Group should be re-named the Equality Proofing Budget and Policy Advisory Group.
Membership
22. Although the Group had agreed at the last meeting to expand membership to include a mainstreaming expert and representatives from the mainstreaming pilot areas and the potential pilot areas, on reflection Yvonne said that she thought a mainstreaming expert was not required as between them the existing members of the Group had sufficient expertise. The Group agreed. The Group also agreed that it would be useful to invite a statistics expert to any meetings of the Group that focused on information needs, and that if the new Parliamentary Finance Committee appointed an advisor, the advisor should be invited to join the Group.
Proposed work plan
23. The Group agreed that this should be:
· Smoking cessation pilot
· Sport pilot
· Consideration of guidance on the next spending review
· Further discussion on the development of indicators
· Making contact with further international experts in Ireland, Canada and possibly Germany.
Date and venue for next meeting
24. The Group agreed that the next two meetings of the Group should be arranged (diaries permitting) for September and November at the same venue.