Equality and Fairer Scotland Budget Statement 2022-2023

Introduction

What is the Equality and Fairer Scotland Budget Statement?

The Equality and Fairer Scotland Budget Statement looks at the impact that the Scottish Budget might have on people in Scotland.

It assesses what the Scottish Government is proposing to spend public money on, whether this is likely to benefit some types of people more than others, and how it might help reduce inequality between different people.

The Equality and Fairer Scotland Budget Statement is published with the Scottish Budget every year.

What is inequality?

Inequality means that for some groups of people, parts of their lives are harder or worse than for other groups of people, such as finding a job or feeling safe. They may not see themselves represented in positions of power or they may feel discriminated against.

What groups of people are we talking about?

We have laws that say we have to think about the differences between people according to certain characteristics. These are:

• Age (e.g. children, older people)
• Disability (disabled people)
• Gender reassignment (trans people)
• Pregnancy and maternity (mothers)
• Race (e.g. Black Scottish, White Gypsy/Traveller)
• Religion or belief (e.g. Christians, Muslims, Sikhs)
• Sex (men, women)
• Sexual orientation (e.g. lesbian, gay and bisexual people)
• Socio-economic disadvantage(e.g. people with low incomes or wealth, people who live in a deprived area)

How is the Equality and Fairer Scotland Budget Statement completed?

People working on each of the nine main budget areas are asked to think about how the decisions they make about their budget for the coming year will affect different kinds of people.

Like last year, we asked people working in each area to complete a template as part of this work. This template looked at the impact that the budget could have on different key inequalities relevant to each area of government. The full templates can be found in Annex A.

This work was designed to help ensure the Scottish Government's decisions about budgets are not making existing inequality worse, but instead helping to promote equality between different groups of people.

Our analysis mainly looks at each characteristic one by one, but we understand that people's real life experiences are shaped by combinations of multiple characteristics. For example, the barriers, opportunities and life experience of a disabled, minority ethnic man may be very different from a disabled, White woman. We also asked people working in each area to think about this when completing their analysis.

About this document

This document summarises some of the main information from the templates completed by each budget area.

It also talks about:

• the context for the 2022-23 Scottish Budget
• the Scottish Government's priorities, which help it decide how public money should be spent
• how the budget is likely to affect different groups of people.