EQUALITY PROOFING BUDGET AND POLICY ADVISORY GROUP
Minutes of meeting held on 9 September 2003
The Capita Centre, St Andrew's Square, Edinburgh
Present:
Ewa Hibbert, Equality Unit, Scottish Executive (Chair)
Rona Fitzgerald, Equal Opportunities Commission
Tim Hopkins, Equality Network
Kay Simpson, Scottish Women's Budget Group
Peter Collings, PFO, Scottish Executive
Christine Reid, Equality Unit, Scottish Executive (Minutes)
Professor Arthur Midwinter, Adviser to the Scottish Parliament Finance Committee (observer)
Apologies:
Ailsa McKay, Scottish Women's Budget Group
Mick Conboy, Commission for Racial Equality
Yvonne Strachan, Equality Unit, Scottish Executive
Minutes of meeting held on 4 June
1. Ewa welcomed everyone to the meeting. The Group was content with the minutes.
Action points from previous meetings
Publication of research and Scottish Executive response
2. The research which the group had commissioned on exploring the role of gender impact assessment in the Scottish budgetary process and the Executive's response to the research report recommendations had been published on the Executive's website at www.scotland.gov.uk/library5/society/epbudget on 5 September.
Smoking cessation pilot
3. Covered below.
Sports pilot proposal
4. Rona reported that Ailsa had not had time since the last meeting to submit a new Sports pilot proposal to the Equality Unit but that she still intended to do so.
5. Rona mentioned a Sports Council for Wales tender entitled, "Gender Analysis of Sports' Participation and the Leisure Centre Budget in Wales" which she had received from Kate Belamy of the UK Women's Budget Group. She passed a copy to Ewa for her information and retention.
Action: Ailsa to submit a new Sports pilot proposal to the Equality Unit which would pass it for comments if necessary to SportsScotland which had a specific fund to help women become more involved in sport.
Further Comments on Basque and Hague Conferences
6. Rona added that at the Basque conference there had also been a discussion about how to build gender indicators into policy and how to feed them into budgets. Different ways of measuring had been discussed, e.g. indicators, benchmarking, risk assessment.
There was likely to be further discussion at European level on this topic which might produce useful exchanges of information and the Commission had already sent some comments to HM Treasury about equality proofing.
Mainstreaming Equality Research Database
7. Ewa reported that this database would soon be available and would be updated monthly.
Update on pan-British Isles gender budgeting conference
8. Ewa felt that her attendance at the gender budgeting conference, which had been held in London in July, had been productive. A common theme of the day was that everyone was finding gender budgeting difficult. It was particularly encouraging to know that Scotland seemed to be further advanced on its thinking on this than anywhere else. The view was that a gender budgeting conference should be held every 6 months, but this would be dependent on securing funding.
9. Tim asked if the other strands had been mentioned and Peter asked if there had been any specific proposals to move towards looking at race budgeting next. Helen said that this was mentioned in The Hague, that DTI was trying to look at gender and race at the same time and that she was aware that Australia and Canada were equality proofing in respect of their indigenous peoples.
10. Ewa reported on the Salford regional participatory budget initiative in which local residents were asked what they wanted the local authority budget to be spent on from given choices, and results were plotted on a sophisticated matrix. The results of seeking views in this way would be complex to implement given the range and contradictory nature of the views collected; it was also important to ensure that particular interest groups promoting prejudiced views were not allowed to dominate the process. Further information on the Salford project and the other topics discussed at the conference is available at http://www.wbg.org.uk/ME_Pan.htm
Update on work with HM Treasury
11. Rona said that Ailsa had been working with DWP and Rona with DTI and both departments had produced interim reports on the Gender Analysis of Expenditure (GAP) project. Rona's view of the DTI interim report was that considerable progress had been made. She informed the Group that a final report was to be produced in advance of a seminar on 9 October 2003 to exchange results and codify lessons.
12. Rona, for herself and on behalf of Ailsa, made the following further points:
- DTI's Small Business Service had previously been doing something along these lines so the GAP work is complimentary.
- DWP New Deal lent itself to this sort of analysis - also complimentary to what was being done already.
- As a result of the project the DTI had realised that although their Small Business Loan Guarantee scheme is targeted at both men and women, they had not made the connection that the effectiveness of the scheme was heavily influenced by the lending practices of banks.
- DTI may do a 2-3 year project around Small Businesses as a result of the project, but do not anticipate overall a major change to how things are budgeted.
- Both departments had been initially concerned about what was being asked of them in the GAP project - they had thought it was more difficult than it turned out to be. They now know where the gaps are in the information that they collect and who they should be working with to deliver some of their objectives.
- It was a shame that DfEE had pulled out; both DTI and DWP work mainly by setting a framework and then relying on other agents to do the delivery (e.g. local enterprise networks) whereas DfEE do more of their own delivery of policy.
- It was unclear how HM Treasury and DTI Women & Equality Unit would take this work forward; it did not appear to be a priority for them.
Portfolio plans and budget documents
13. Helen reported that the draft budget would be announced on Thursday 11 September. She was not sure yet whether portfolio plans would be made public. The plans did not contain new information but offered a new format that could pull together various issues - targets, risks, equality issues, how we were working with partners - in the one place to enable read-across. Arthur added that the material in the draft plans on equalities projects was very useful.
14. Tim said that although the Executive has targets for and publishes information about the number of its own staff by gender, disability, and race (the last two groups self declared), there was no financial breakdown concerning salaries and no publication of such numbers/salary information in respect of other organisations in the public sector, e.g. NHS. The Executive should consider adding this information to its budget documents.
Smoking cessation pilot: discussion of project specification
15. Ewa handed out a set of 10 draft questions prepared by Rona that could be used for this pilot project and asked group members to let her have any suggested additions or alterations. Tim suggested asking for additional disaggregation of information, e.g. disability and sexual orientation.
16. In this area there was a well-established concern about the number of young women smoking but it was not yet known if other groups were specifically targeted. Ewa said the intention would be to publish any results - depending on what is disclosed of course - and take forward a similar pilot study to a more complicated area of policy.
AOB
17. It was suggested that the Group should consider holding a seminar about its work for the new Equal Opportunities Committee similar to the one held in 2002 for the previous committee so that they would have a better understanding of and not build up unrealistic expectations of the progress that can be made in this area of work.
Action: Ewa to contact the Clerk to ask if they would like a seminar.
Date and venue for next meeting
18. Thursday 20 November 2003, 11.00-14.00, at the Capita Centre, St Andrews Square, Edinburgh - at which time meeting dates for 2004 would be arranged.
Equality Unit
November 2003