EQUALITY PROOFING BUDGET AND POLICY ADVISORY GROUP
Minutes of meeting held on 8 December 2004
The Capita Centre, St Andrew's Square, Edinburgh
Present:
Ewa Hibbert, Equality Unit, Scottish Executive (Chair)
John Aldridge, PFO, Scottish Executive
Ailsa McKay, Scottish Women's Budget Group
Professor Arthur Midwinter, Adviser to the Scottish Parliament (observer)
Apologies:
Yvonne Strachan, Equality Unit, Scottish Executive
Rona Fitzgerald, Equal Opportunities Commission
Tim Hopkins, Equality Network
Maureen Fraser, Commission for Racial Equality
Item 1: Minutes of meeting held on 26 February 2004
1. Everyone was content with the minutes.
Item 2: Action points from previous meeting
Seminar for Equal Opportunities Committee
2. Ewa confirmed that at an informal meeting of the Committee on Tuesday 16 March, she, Helen Mansbridge from the Executive's Finance Department and Rona Fitzgerald had held a briefing session for the Committee about the Group's work. See also Item 6 below.
Report of Pan Island Gender Budgets Conference
3. Ailsa reported that the conference, held in Glasgow on 24 March, had been a success. Representatives from England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland had exchanged information about work being done in their areas (eg Welsh sports pilot, a new pilot in Ireland) and Dianne Elson had presented a particularly interesting paper. The next conference would probably be held in Wales in 2005.
Action point: Ailsa to circulate a copy of Dianne Elson's paper to the Group.
Item 3: Report of the meeting of Nordic Council of Ministers
4. To save time, Ailsa said that she would circulate a note about the Council meeting.
Action point: Ailsa to circulate a note to the Group.
Item 4: Best Value audit report (Angus Council)
5. Ewa drew to everyone's attention the publication of this first Best Value audit report and the references in it to the equal opportunities aspect of the duty of Best Value. Further Best Value audit reports were expected to be published every one to two months in order to complete the cycle of all Scottish local authorities over the next 3 to 5 years.
Item 5: Timing of a possible visit from Dianne Elson
6. The Group agreed that Dianne should be invited to come to its meeting in late March/early April 2005 for her to provide feedback on the pilots and the Group's work generally and possibly to give a short presentation on other gender budget developments in other countries. John mentioned that although 2005 should be a lighter year than 2004 for the Finance Department, if a UK general election was called in the spring this might prompt a mini sending review at about that time and might limit the ability of Finance Department officials to participate.
Action point: Ailsa to contact Dianne Elson.
Item 6: Possible seminar with the Finance Committee
7. In a recent letter from the Minister for Finance & Public Service Reform to the Finance Committee, the Minister had mentioned that officials from the Group would be happy to hold a seminar for the Committee if the Committee would find it helpful. The Committee had not yet replied and the Group agreed that the Finance Committee should be reminded of this offer if a reply was not received in the next month or two. The Group also agreed that any seminar for the Finance Committee in 2005 should be held separately from a further seminar for the Equal Opportunities Committee given the Committees' different levels of knowledge and interests.
Item 7: Spending review 2004
8. John summarised the approach taken to equalities in the latest spending review document ("Building a Better Scotland: Spending Proposals 2005-2008: Enterprise, Opportunity, Fairness" available at http://www.scotland.gov.uk/library5/enterprise/babs-00.asp ). There was greater focus on the three cross-cutting priorities in this document than before, and although equalities had been brigaded with Closing the Opportunity Gap in the same chapter, that chapter had a separate section for each as well as a reference to the overlap between some of the Executive's equalities and CTOG work.
Item 8: Draft Budget 2005-2006
9. John explained that more detail about work on all of the three cross cutting priorities was provided in each portfolio chapter of the Draft Budget for 2005-06 (available at http://www.scotland.gov.uk/library5/finance/db0506-00.asp ). The amount of detail on equalities varied from portfolio depending on the intrinsic nature of their programmes and from their progress in being able to identify expenditure on cross-cutting priorities. Ewa added that the focus had been on implementing the Finance Committee's recommendation to improve the overall consistency of information given by each portfolio for each of the three cross-cutting priorities. For some portfolios this meant more information being provided on equalities - and CTOG and sustainable development - than last year, but for portfolios that had provided a lot of detail on equalities work in last year's Draft Budget it had meant that their entries were shorter. The further following points were made:
- Arthur said that he regretted the loss of some of this detailed information on costings and examples of specific equalities projects that portfolios such as Transport and Education had provided last year. He also said that while the Finance Committee was happy with the document overall its message was likely to be that it could still be improved. Arthur also said that the Equal Opportunities Committee wanted to see more progress with the pilots and with the development of equality indicators.
- Ewa said that she hoped that one of the outputs of the pilots would be model equality entries or at least a template for a model entry for each of the budget documents. She also said that departments were still grappling with the problem of how to describe the impact of their mainstream expenditure on delivering the cross-cutting priorities without being accused of double-counting.
- Ailsa said that the SWBG were still concerned about equalities being brigaded with CTOG in the Draft Budget and preferred the clearer separation of them in the Spending Review document. The terminology around the adoption of the new main priority of Growing the Economy, and the three other new main priorities, and the interface between these and the three longer standing cross-cutting priorities had not helped departments who still appeared to be struggling to understand the structural nature of gender inequality. For example in relation to Modern Apprenticeships, the SWBG were not advocating a 50/50 target for uptake or any other arbitrary target, but what they wanted to see was a more sophisticated system of monitoring who was taking up what sort of MA and why, and what happened to them during and after the completion of their MA.
- There was a general discussion about the extent to which public bodies currently collect and publish information about their own workforces - which varies currently from body to body - and it was noted that to do so is very likely to be a requirement of the planned gender public duty.
Item 9: Sports pilot
10. The Group discussed the comments on the draft sports pilot study proposal that had been circulated before the meeting. Ailsa responded to all of the comments made and agreed to revise the proposal as follows:
- To reduce the length of time to be spent on the literature review so that it provides only a minimum of necessary context;
- To continue to cover only SportScotland - to keep the study to a manageable size - but to focus on its expenditure and ensure that any evidence/lessons learning at this micro level can be translated to a higher level;
- To make some minor changes to reflect the latest AER and Draft Budget documents; and
- To not run a final seminar, in order to reduce costs, and instead to produce a final briefing paper that would include as far as possible a model set of objectives, targets and allocations for SportScotland policy and expenditure for each budget document and a guide for non-experts as to how to equality proof their policy and expenditure so that the learning gained during the pilot study can be transferred.
Action point: Ailsa to revise the proposal and to circulate it to Group members for further comments.
Item 10: Health pilot
11. Ewa informed the Group that Kay Simpson, who had recently stood down as the Scottish women's budget Group worker, had agreed in principle to work for the Executive's Equality Unit for six months from mid January 2005 in order to progress work on the smoking cessation pilot study and other equality proofing the budget work. Ailsa and Rona had also agreed to provide some technical assistance to Kay in this work which would also involve officials from the Executive's Equality Unit, Finance Department and Health Department.
Item 11: Equality Audit ideas
12. Arthur explained that he had drafted the circulated note about suggestions for a possible equality audit - looking at expenditure across a whole portfolio - at the behest of the Equal Opportunities Committee, in response to its concern about the slow rate of progress with the pilots. Arthur's suggestion was for the Committee to do this work itself, as part of its role of scrutinising the Executive, and if necessary using part of its research budget to appoint a researcher to do this work. As a scrutiny exercise it would not be appropriate in his view for the Executive to do it itself; however, it would necessitate the provision of information and other forms of co-operation from the Executive.
13. The Group discussed the options for handling any request from the Committee to co-operate with an equality audit should the Committee decide to undertake one themselves or ask the Executive or Group to undertake one. Ewa said that although she had no concerns in principle, given the Executive's difficulty in finding the necessary staff resources to progress the smoking cessation pilot study, Executive staff would not be able to undertake any additional new commitments until 2006. The Group agreed that if approached by the Committee it would respond as follows: the Group supports in principle the idea of doing an equality audit but thinks that it should be done by the Committee rather than by the Executive or the Group, and that whilst the Committee could do some scoping work during 2005 neither the Group not the Executive would be able assist with the work until 2006 due to other commitments.
Item 12: AOB
14. Ewa sought the Group's view as to whether minutes of the Group's meetings should be published in the future. John explained that although under the new rules for the publication of information under the Freedom of Information legislation, the Group did not fall into the category of body whose minutes would automatically be published, there was now a presumption that minutes of meetings of all Groups with external membership would be published by the Executive from the beginning of 2005. After discussion, the Group agreed that from now on minutes of its meetings would be published on the Equality Unit's webpages. Any discussion of matters that were confidential and excluded from FoI publication requirements would not be include in the published minutes.
Item 13: Date and venue for next meeting
15. The Group noted that there would be some changes in its membership in 2005:
- Rona, who had represented the EOC and was also a member of SWBG, would be leaving the EOC in March 2005 and would need to be replaced;
- Ailsa would consider further who should be the SWBG's second representative to replace Kay Simpson;
- David Thomson would replace Ewa as the Equality Unit's second representative; and
- Helen Mansbridge would take over again as the Finance department's second representative.
16. The Group agreed to aim to meet three times in 2005 at the same venue: in
- late March/early April (for an update on the progress of the pilot studies and hopefully to hear from Dianne Elson),
- September (for the outcome of the smoking cessation pilot study); and
- December (for the outcome of the sport pilot study)
Action Point: Equality Unit to canvass for dates.
Equality Unit
December 2004