Equality evidence strategy 2023-2025: interim review
The report contains an interim review of the Equality Evidence Strategy 2023-2025. It outlines progress and learnings to date, as well as identifying key next steps to take forward for the final year of the Strategy.
Annex A: Updates to Actions
Table 2 shows actions that have been amended, require course correction, or have a status update of ‘No Longer Feasible’.
| Action | Original Action | Need for Change |
|---|---|---|
Action 8 Justice On course |
We will undertake a series of equality “deep dive” research projects into specific aspects of criminal activity including on police recorded crime, cyber-crime and drugs analysis. | Amendment: Original data audit referred to hate crime, not crime in general but this word was missed off the action, should be: We will undertake a series of equality “deep dive” research projects into specific aspects of criminal activity including on police recorded hate crime, cyber-crime and drugs analysis. |
Action 17 Poverty On course |
The following actions are not solely focused on statistical data improvements. “To improve the broader evidence base on poverty and disadvantage we will carry out a: Scoping exercise to assess key gaps in users' awareness of existing information (both statistical and broader), and development of a minimum viable product to address this. Scoping exercise to assess potential for further evidence synthesis/primary research and appropriate dissemination for diverse range of stakeholders.” | Course Correction: The Poverty team felt that this action has been carried out through existing poverty-related publications and resources produced by other teams, as well as a wide range of external organisations. They will therefore re-focus their attention on collating, or signposting to existing evidence, as well as directly engaging with key external organisations. |
Action 20 Equality Not Yet Started |
Gather data on public attitudes to discrimination in the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey (SSAS). Publish findings from the SSAS module on attitudes to discrimination in a Scottish Government report. | ‘No longer Feasible’: Context has changed as SSAS is undergoing a review so the specifics outlined in the action are not possible. |
Action 22 Equality On course |
We will undertake work to strengthen the evidence base on the experiences of non-binary people in Scotland: By the end of 2023, we will carry out and publish a review of available quantitative and qualitative evidence on the experiences of non-binary people in Scotland. Throughout the period of the strategy, we will expand the range of evidence on non-binary people’s experiences presented on the Equality Evidence Finder to include third sector and academic research. By the end of 2024, we will engage with stakeholders to identify and agree priorities for filling evidence gaps. By the end of 2024, we will work with key stakeholders to co-design research to fill priority gaps, working within available budget and other resource constraints. By the end of 2025, we will publish a report of findings from the commissioned research. | Course Correction: On completion of the evidence review, a decision was made not to procure research at present. This was due to a number of factors including substantial evidence being gathered during the evidence review process, no clear priority for filling any evidence gaps being identified either internally or by stakeholders, a reluctance to over-consult with the community where there is no clear benefit from doing so. A decision has been made to instead focus on producing outputs from Census data (when this data become available). This update will also appear in a similar action that exists in the Non-binary Action Plan interim update report. |
Action 32 Health and Social Care Delayed |
The Mental Health Inpatients Census (MHIC) is split into 3 parts: Part 1 covers Mental Health and Learning Disability Inpatient Beds. Part 2 covers Mental Health, Addiction and Learning Disability Patients: Out of NHS Scotland Placements Census. Part 3 of the MHIC covers Hospital-Based Complex Clinical Care and Long Stay patients. The MHIC is in the process of being reviewed. The MHIC was paused in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the need for health boards to prioritise critical activities. The MHIC will run in its current form in April 2022. The Scottish Government is exploring new ways of collecting the information for the MHIC primarily to reduce the burden on health boards and to also examine what other data sources might be available to complement or replace parts of the MHIC. Alongside this, the content of the MHIC is also being reviewed to ensure that we are collecting the right data for users to meet their needs. As part of this work, we intend to expand the range of data that is collected to cover all nine of the protected characteristics if possible. | Course Correction: Work on reviewing the content of MHIC has been paused. This pause was required to prioritise work on revising errors discovered in previous publications and to introduce new, more efficient coding into the MHIC data analysis. We still intend to expand the protected characteristics data collected in MHIC in the spring 2025 survey. |
Action 40 Constitution, International and Migration Completed |
The 2020 ‘importance of voting in local elections’ data was published for the first time in January 2021. Due to the impact of the move from a face-to-face to a telephone survey in 2020 due to COVID-19, no comparisons were made with previous years in the 2020 report and the data was not broken down by equality variables. When the 2022 data is available in 2023 an assessment will be made as to what is possible to publish given the sample sizes. The Scottish Government elections policy team will be consulted to see what would be useful. It should be possible to provide breakdowns by age, sex, disability, ethnicity, sexual orientation and religion. The general rule of thumb is that we don’t publish breakdowns if the base is smaller than 50. However, even with bases of 50 or larger, the confidence intervals can be quite wide, and so the results need to be interpreted carefully. | ‘No longer feasible’: The team originally intended on improving equality data breakdowns available from the Scottish Household Survey but found that it no longer asks about the importance of voting. The alternative route they found was the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey (SSAS) which asks about the "Importance of voting in local elections". However, this action then became part the wider objective of action 41, which is to review what equality breakdowns are collected and published in SSAS before the next module runs (which should still be possible to complete before the end of the Strategy). This action was originally marked as ‘complete’ due to lack of appropriate status. Following publication of this interim report, this action will be marked as ‘no longer feasible’. |
Action 44 NRS On course |
We will issue a revised version of the laminated card which Registrars show to the next of kin when asking about ethnicity of the deceased. This would provide a clearer explanation of the need for the question and how it should be answered. We will reorder the sequence of questions to ask about ethnicity before country of birth to avoid the two answers being conflated. Revise guidance to Registrars. | Amendment: Death registration cards are now completed online and not in-person. Suggested change to action wording: For in person registrations, we will issue a revised version of the laminated card which Registrars show to the next of kin when asking about ethnicity of the deceased. This would provide a clearer explanation of the need for the question and how it should be answered. We will reorder the sequence of questions to ask about ethnicity before country of birth to avoid the two answers being conflated. Revise guidance to Registrars. The team are considering what impact this change in data collection will have on the ability to complete the action before the Strategy’s end date. |
Action 45 NRS Delayed |
2022-23: We will consult local authorities on the feasibility and cost of providing more granular data from their council tax billing systems on households with ‘disregarded adults’, in particular so that data on households with disabled adults can be separately identified within the statistics. 2023-24: Subject to confirmation from local authorities of the feasibility of providing data from their council tax billing systems on households with disabled adults, and the availability of funding for them to pay for any software upgrades necessary, trial and evaluate the extended data collection. 2024-25: Commence routine collection of data on households with disabled adults within the annual collection of data for the small area household estimates. | Course correction: Suggested addition to action: Should the feasibility of collecting relevant data from council tax billing systems not be established, or the likely utility of the data collected judged not to be adequate, then alternative sources of data such as the census will be investigated. This will be added as the data from the 2022 Census generally offers a much richer source of data on the number and characteristics of households, including those which include people with limiting specific long-term health conditions, or with a health problem or disability that limited their activities. Census data is also readily available for a variety of geographies down to census output area. |
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