Equality and Human Rights Mainstreaming Strategy: Consultation

Part 1 – Proposals on the Strategy Content

Proposed Vision and Objectives

Vision

To support the continued growth of strong communities across Scotland, built on a solid foundation where everyone enjoys realisation of their human rights. These communities will be diverse, inclusive, empowered, resilient and safe. We are committed to tackling the persistent and entrenched systemic inequalities that still exist in Scotland.

Through this we will advance and improve Scotland’s position as a global leader in equality and human rights.

Objectives

In order to achieve this vision, the Strategy objectives are to:

• remove systemic barriers;
• improve how policy decisions are made and delivered;
• establish the leadership, capability, capacity, culture and practice that ensures Government and public sector policy and service delivery are focused on equality and human rights.
• embed transparency so it is easier for those affected by decisions to hold Scottish Government and the wider public sector to account.

This includes informing the direction and development of policymaking at all stages, especially early stages of influencing and shaping planning and outcomes.

To achieve this vision and objectives, the Strategy will support Scottish Government, and the wider Scottish public sector, to focus on and achieve mainstreaming equality and human rights. The framework laid out in the Strategy will support all Scottish public sector organisations to play their role in this ambition and to use the toolkit to develop their own mainstreaming plans and take action to reduce inequality and uphold human rights.

This will be achieved by successfully focussing on the knowledge, experience, priorities, concerns and contributions of everyone in Scottish communities. This will include those with protected characteristics as defined by the Equality Act, and others experiencing systemic discrimination and poorer life outcomes. This includes taking an intersectional approach. This information will become an integral part of the development of all policy creation and review processes. This will partly be achieved through the Impact Assessment process and taking a human rights-based approach but will also require a change of culture and skill. Therefore, we will strive to promote, protect, and uphold human rights through everything we do. This means ensuring people’s rights are at the centre of policy development and implementation, using the PANEL principles. These are underlying principles which are important in applying a human rights based approach in practice. PANEL stands for:

• Participation: Active, meaningful involvement in decisions affecting human rights.
• Accountability: Effective monitoring and remedies for rights violations.
• Non-discrimination and Equality: Prohibit and eliminate discrimination, prioritise marginalised groups.
• Empowerment: Understand rights, participate in policy development, and assert rights.
• Legal: Recognise rights as legally enforceable entitlements, linked to human rights law.

Questions

1. Do you agree with the vision?

• Yes
• No
• Don’t Know

1a. Please explain your answer or provide more information

2. Do you agree with the objectives?

• Yes
• No
• Don’t Know

2a. Please explain your answer or provide more information

Drivers of Change

Through the earlier stakeholder engagement exercise and reviewing the prior work of others (detailed in Annex A), we have identified six key drivers as essential to advancing the mainstreaming of equality and human rights.  These drivers for change collectively form a theory of change.

The Strategy will set out a framework for action against these six key drivers of change:

• Strengthening leadership; 
• Developing accountability and transparency;
• Ensuring effective regulatory and policy environment; 
• Utilising evidence and experience; 
• Enhancing capability and culture; 
• Improving capacity.

In the following section we expand on these drivers. We are seeking your view on these drivers and the meaningful steps needed that would move us towards the vision and objectives.

The Six Key Drivers:

1. Strengthening Leadership

Summary of aim: To support Scottish Government and public sector leaders to:

• motivate, guide and challenge others;
• increase their own knowledge and understanding, while supporting others to do the same, to ensure equality and human rights are fundamental aspects of policy making and operational delivery;
• take a leadership role to ensure equality and human rights are fundamental across policy and delivery, directing focus, attention, and resources to protect them;
• proactively assessing progress in mainstreaming and ultimately advance equality and human rights across the board.

This includes leadership at all levels – Political, Scottish Government executive and across public sector.

Strong leadership is fundamental to achieving mainstreaming equality and human rights. The Strategy will focus on strengthening leadership to develop sound strategic principles and clarity of policy goals which focus on the future of Scotland and further improving the lives of the people of Scotland. Strong leadership is fundamental to the successful achievement of all other mainstreaming drivers, creating the culture change required to motivate and inspire others in equality and human rights. Without strong leaders who are committed to mainstreaming, the other five drivers won’t be achievable.

The Strategy aims to inspire strong leadership in equality and human rights. This means leaders who:

• have the necessary level of understanding to be able to support, guide, lead and challenge others in respect of equality and human rights,
• ensure that work to advance equality and human rights is adequately resourced and protected,
• are proactive and engaged in assessment of progress to mainstream equality and human rights throughout their area of responsibility,
• are proactive and engaged in their areas of responsibility for impact assessments that advance equality and human rights and ensure legal obligations are met.

The Strategy aims to support leaders to leverage their existing strengths and the existing tools to build equality and human rights through the other five key drivers identified.

This includes:

• Political leadership in Scottish and local government based on a deep understanding of the specific issues covered by their portfolio and the ability to work across central and local government to achieve policy goals. This includes an awareness of the impact of decisions and priorities on marginalised/underrepresented groups. Ministers ensure their portfolios and agencies reflect commitment to equality and human rights through sustainable, long-term policy solutions for the benefit of the people of Scotland.
• Executive team leadership – guiding the culture, behaviours, practices, capability and capacity of Scottish Government towards achieving the goals and objectives laid out in the National Performance Framework. This internal leadership drives organisational change and improvement through making strategic decisions, setting a vision, and inspiring and coordinating teams towards a shared objective.
• Public sector leadership - focussed on supporting and providing equal access to, and delivery of equitable, rights based public services which meet the diverse needs of the people of Scotland efficiently and effectively. This will be achieved through a workforce representative of this diversity and through continuously improving the inclusivity of those services.

Questions

3. Do you agree that strengthening leadership is a key driver for mainstreaming equality and human rights?

• Yes
• No
• Don’t Know

3a. Please explain your answer or provide more information.

4. Do you agree with the focus on different levels of leadership?

• Yes
• No
• Don’t Know

4a. Please explain your answer or provide more information.

5. Have we captured the core elements of strengthening leadership within the context of mainstreaming?

• Yes
• No
• Don’t Know

5a. Please explain your answer or provide more information.

6. What actions would you recommend to ensure strengthening leadership as outlined above will contribute to mainstreaming?

The Six Key Drivers:

2. Developing Accountability and Transparency

Summary of aim:

Accountability and transparency are critical for ensuring good governance in Government and the wider public sector, with scrutiny being an essential element of this. Those who live in Scotland have the right to relevant information about policies that affect them in a format and structure that suits them. This includes legislative activities, policymaking, legal provisions, policy enforcement and performance, administrative budget, and public expenditure. Scottish Government, and the wider public sector, must be accountable to the public, as well as stakeholders, for the way they have carried out their functions. This accountability must encompass scrutiny of performance on realising and protecting equality and human rights.

Accountability and transparency are inextricably linked and mutually beneficial. Accountability includes sufficient scrutiny, compliance against agreed standards and public bodies being held to account for their performance. Transparency is required to increase accountability. The free flow of information in accessible formats is the foundation of transparency. Transparency of how decisions are made and how equality and human rights informed these decisions is a vital part of this.

Scrutiny is equally integral to accountability in assessing the impacts of policies and practices on equality and human rights. Effective scrutiny empowers diverse stakeholders to raise issues, ask questions, and push for transparency, leading to increased understanding of how well accountability mechanisms are realising meaningful progress in mainstreaming.

The Scottish Government, along with the wider public sector, is accountable to the public, as well as stakeholders, for the way it carries out its functions. There is a need for accountability approaches to be constructed in a way that does not require specialist knowledge by rights holders to understand them. Therefore, the ambition for this driver for change is to drive improvement of both accountability and transparency within the Scottish Government and the wider public sector, regarding mainstreaming equality and human rights. This means ensuring that everyone in Scotland can easily access information about what affects them. This includes legislative activities, policymaking, legal provisions, policy enforcement, administrative budget, public expenditure, and other relevant political information.

Within the Government, external accountability is achieved through key stakeholder groups, who examine policy intentions and make subsequent recommendations. Of course, this includes the Scottish Human Rights Commission and the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Accountability is also achieved through:

• The Scottish Public Services Ombudsman
• Scrutiny bodies such as the Care Inspectorate, Healthcare Improvement Scotland, the Scottish Housing Regulator, Audit Scotland and inspectorate bodies.
• The Scottish Fiscal Commission
• Reporting on equality and human rights progress as requested by the United Nations, through mechanisms such as the Universal Periodic Review, examination of State progress on individual human rights treaties and investigations of UN Special Rapporteurs with specialist expertise.

Internally, Scottish Government has established various mechanisms to ensure accountability, monitoring and transparency around equality and human rights. These include:

• The role of Accountable Officers, who have personal responsibility to monitor proper management of public funds and compliance with regulations, which includes equality and human rights.
• Publishing equality impact assessments, child rights and wellbeing impact assessments, and Fairer Scotland Duty assessments.
• Budget monitoring through the various mechanisms above, as well as the Equality and Fairer Scotland Budget Statement.
• Various Human Rights reporting mechanisms as described above.

The proposals for the Human Rights Bill intend to introduce a specific human rights remit for relevant escalated complaints bodies and scrutiny bodies, to require them to take steps to help those bodies which they oversee to fulfil core duties in the Bill. This will maximise the scope for these bodies to add value as part of a multi-institutional model which embeds a human rights culture across the public sector. The proposals for the Bill intend to expand the powers of the Scottish Human Rights Commission and the Children and Young Person’s Commissioner to, amongst other things, raise and intervene in civil proceedings relating to the Bill as well as expand their investigation powers.

Questions

7. Do you agree accountability and transparency are a key driver for mainstreaming equality and human rights?

• Yes
• No
• Don’t Know

7a. Please explain your answer or provide more information.

8. Have we captured the core elements of accountability and transparency within the context of mainstreaming?

• Yes
• No
• Don’t Know

8a. Please explain your answer or provide more information.

9. What actions would you recommend to ensure greater accountability and transparency contributes to mainstreaming?

The Six Key Drivers:

3. Ensuring effective regulatory and policy environment

Summary of aim:

To create regulations and policies, and the tools to support policy development and creation, that meet the public sector equality duty and realise fundamental human rights for all the people of Scotland. This includes specific equality and human rights legislation, and that other legislation properly takes account of equality/gender requirements. To create a cohesive legislative framework that specifically supports Scotland’s ambition to be a global leader in equality and human rights.

Regulation and policy development is a core function of government. Producing regulations and policies that routinely, fully and properly consider equality and human rights is a key driver of mainstreaming, and therefore key to achieving better outcomes for those that experience disadvantage.

This requires:

• Specific legislation that directly supports equality and human rights. We are currently driving specific and significant transformation in this area as described in the landscape section (pages 11-13).
• Formal processes to ensure equality and human rights are properly considered in all legislation and policies.
• An approach to regulation and policy delivery in a cohesive way to ensure positive benefits.

The aim is to produce regulations and policies that are fairer, advance equality of opportunity and realise fundamental human rights for all the people of Scotland. The Scottish Government and the wider public sector should collaborate to ensure new and revised regulations and policies respond to challenges and make positive change in the real world.

Equality Impact Assessments (EQIAs) are fundamental to ensuring equality and human rights are properly considered in order to establish a cohesive approach to policy and legislative development. The Scottish Government adopts a continuous improvement approach to the EQIA process, with new training courses and guidance materials currently being created and piloted, and a dedicated team providing support. Work is also underway to develop and pilot a human rights impact assessment framework.

Questions

10. Do you agree that ensuring an effective regulatory and policy environment is a key driver of mainstreaming equality and human rights?

• Yes
• No
• Don’t Know

10a. Please explain your answer or provide more information.

11. Have we captured the core elements of ensuring an effective regulatory and policy environment within the context of mainstreaming?

• Yes
• No
• Don’t Know

11a. Please explain your answer or provide more information.

12. What actions would you recommend to ensure that an effective regulatory and policy environment will contribute to the achievement of mainstreaming?

The Six Key Drivers:

4. Utilising Evidence and Experience

Summary of aim:

To use robust evidence and experience to improve policy development. This will support innovation and adaptation, based on evidence, data and context at individual, organisational and service levels. It also means actively and meaningfully involving those directly impacted in the design and implementation of policy. This means effective engagement with marginalised communities.

Data and evidence

Robust and comprehensive equality evidence is vital for the design and delivery of inclusive policies and services, so building skills to effectively utilise such evidence, is crucial. Comprehensive equality evidence involves the integration of research evidence, policy-maker expertise, and critically, insights from people directly impacted by the policy. Blending knowledge from different sources is essential in establishing an inclusive approach because knowledge is personal, intersectional, context-driven, and evolving. Equality evidence provides vital insights into the impacts of policies on different groups, while skills to analyse and apply this evidence enable policy makers to design meaningful solutions.

This allows for analysis and understanding of whether differential impacts (e.g., in terms of access, satisfaction and outcomes) are being experienced by those sharing certain characteristics. There are a number of complexities involved in collecting and analysing equality data (as set out in the Equality Evidence Strategy), which requires the development of specialist skills and understanding to ensure best practice is followed.

There are many challenges to collecting, analysing, and reporting intersectional equality data. Despite improvements in recent years, there remain gaps in Scotland’s equality evidence base. A stronger and more complete equality evidence base will support the collective effort across the public sector to fulfil the requirements of the PSED.

Our aim is to use this approach to utilising evidence and experience to develop policy. This will support the creation of innovative policies, based on individual, organisational and service level evidence. It should also reduce bias.

In the context of more developed work on equality indicators, we are giving consideration to how we can further develop Human Rights indicators – including through our National Performance Framework.

Lived experience and engagement

The Scottish Government and public sector should continue to improve how they collaborate closely with diverse stakeholders including through robust impact assessment processes. This enables us to learn from lived experiences and create policies that truly serve and improve outcomes for all communities in Scotland and all those intersected characteristics that live within them.

One of the main tools the Scottish Government uses to gather evidence are lived-experience panels. Lived experience means using knowledge from direct, first-hand involvement experiences from real people and communities, rather than what officials believe to be the case. This ranges from setting up small panels for individual pieces of legislation to investing in significant infrastructure such as the Anti-Racism Observatory for Scotland.

Questions

13. Do you agree that utilising evidence and experience is a key driver for mainstreaming equality and human rights?

• Yes
• No
• Don’t know

13a. Please explain your answer or provide more information.

14. Have we captured the core elements of utilising evidence and experience within the context of mainstreaming?

• Yes
• No
• Don’t know

14a. Please explain your answer or provide more information.

15. What actions would you recommend to ensure that utilising evidence and experience as outlined above will contribute to the achievement of mainstreaming?

The Six Key Drivers:

5. Enhancing Capability and Culture

Summary of aim:

To influence the culture of the Scottish Government and other public bodies to make consideration of equality and human rights part of standard thinking and behaviour. I.e. not requiring direct input from equality / human-rights specific staff. This includes ensuring all staff have the required level of knowledge and skills and that there are highly competent specialist staff as required. Simultaneously developing understanding amongst rights holders – particularly those whose rights are most at risk.

Changing process alone with no aligned cultural and capability enhancement will not lead to mainstreaming equality and human rights. Enhancing capability and culture means equipping all public sector staff, at all levels, with the skills, knowledge, and motivation to fully integrate equality and human rights into everything they do.

This requires investment to ensure all staff have a suitable base level of knowledge and skills in equality and human rights. It also means developing more in-depth skills for specific and specialist roles. All public sector staff must have access to the right development opportunities, guidance, and tools when they need it, with clear frameworks setting out the depth of knowledge required.

Clear frameworks of knowledge, skills and behavioural requirements allow equality and human rights to be built into all aspects of management including:

• recruitment and promotion;
• performance management (building on the use of diversity objectives);
• development and talent management.

Improving capability means expanding the skills and knowledge of staff so that they understand not only their responsibilities in, but also the benefits of considering equality and human rights. This allows staff to be creative and innovative, using systems, technology, and processes to support the policy-making process. A more diverse workforce further supports cultural change.

Training and development must recognise the needs of different groups e.g., the specific need for disability and gender competence. There is also a need to ensure this understanding of equality and human rights is specific to policy teams’ working area. In the Scottish Government, we are piloting Centres of Expertise in Government portfolios to develop officials’ understanding of equality and human rights within the context of different policy areas. The underpinning principle is to offer ‘just in time’ training, development, and resources. This approach helps to ensure that staff are enabled to develop policies, including impact assessments, when required rather than repeat training on a fixed timeline.

To fully realise the increased capability, all initiatives undertaken must be evaluated and continuously improved, so it will be necessary to consolidate and review any changes in approach. We will continue to develop the necessary skills across the Scottish Government and to share lessons learned and best practices with the wider public sector, so that equality and human rights considerations are hardwired into all thinking across the board.

The Strategy ambition is a transformed culture in government and the public sector where equality and human rights are central pillars guiding all internal and external processes. This means:

• Policies consistently considered from an equality and human rights perspective from the outset;
• Ability to manage relevant tools and approaches such as Impact Assessment and intersectional analysis;
• Diverse voices and experiences shaping decisions at all levels;
• Staff confident in applying equality analysis and able to recognise exclusionary practices;
• An organisation that feels inclusive, respects all identities, and leverages diversity to innovate;
• A workplace where everyone can thrive and reach their full potential.

This cultural transformation will enable Scotland to become a true leader on equality and human rights, fundamentally improving outcomes for all those who live here.

Questions

16. Do you agree that enhancing capability and culture is a key driver for mainstreaming equality and human rights?

• Yes
• No
• Don’t know

16a. Please explain your answer or provide more information.

17. Have we captured the core elements of enhancing capability and culture within the context of mainstreaming?

• Yes
• No
• Don’t know

17a. Please explain your answer or provide more information.

18. What actions would you recommend to ensure that enhancing capability and culture as outlined above will contribute to the achievement of mainstreaming?

19. Do you agree that this Strategy will provide a foundation to influence a culture of mainstreaming equality and human rights within Scottish Government and the wider public sector?

• Yes
• No
• Don’t know

19a. Please explain your answer or provide more information.

The Six Key Drivers:

6. Improving Capacity

Summary of aim: To support the Scottish Government and wider public sector to allocate the resources and budget to fully integrate equality and human rights into everything they do. Fundamental to this is ensuring equality and human rights are built into resource allocation and budgeting decisions as critical factors in decision making. This includes funding for third-sector organisations to create external capacity.

Our ambition is to ensure the Scottish Government and wider public sector have the resources, structures and processes to fully integrate equality and human rights into everything they do. This requires organisations to utilise their staff, financial and other assets to support positive change for the communities they serve.

We intend in the final strategy document to deliberately separate out capability (the skills and knowledge), from capacity (people, time and resource). These are different issues to be addressed separately. For example, more training does not help staff with no time to consider these critical issues. There is a need to create an environment where the ability to advance equality and human rights is woven into the fabric of the organisation, enabled by appropriate underlying capacity and resources.

This will be reflected in sufficient staffing, budget and time to conduct comprehensive intersectional analysis and impact assessments (including engagement from the outset). Adequate resources also enable incorporating diverse expertise and lived experience through staffing, advisory groups, and ongoing stakeholder engagement.

Equally as critical, there is a need to enable broad personal and team capacity: individuals need to be supported to allocate time to consider equality and human rights issues and for this to be prioritised. Alongside ensuring capacity for all staff this includes sufficient numbers of specialist staff with in-depth knowledge.

Improving capacity also extends to supporting civil society to mainstream equality and human rights through fair and sufficient grant funding.

The aim of our grant funding is to support civil society and partners to develop, embed and mainstream equality and human rights within policy and practice in Scotland, in line with the ambitions of the National Performance Framework and relevant Scottish Government strategies.

Empowering civil society organisations financially enables them to develop specialised, tailored programmes and services for marginalised and disadvantaged groups. It allows them to recruit skilled staff, plan comprehensive strategies, and deliver programmes sustaining real impact. This builds essential capacity and expertise within the third sector to mainstream equality and human rights across society.

Ensuring financial resources are aligned to progressing equality and advancing human rights is directly linked to equality and human rights budgeting approaches. This ensures that spending and revenue raising advances equality and human rights. We have taken a range of actions to increase the use and effectiveness of equality budgeting, including establishing the Equality and Human Rights Budget Advisory Group, and the publication of the Equality and Fairer Scotland Budget Statement.

We are committed to continuing to develop these approaches in Scottish Government and supporting others public bodies to do so.

The Equality and Human Rights Budget Advisory Group set out recommendations to the Scottish Government on equality and human rights budgeting. Since then, a response has been published outlining the actions that the Government intends to take to progress these recommendations.

Questions

20. Do you agree that improving capacity is a key driver for mainstreaming equality and human rights?

• Yes
• No
• Don’t know

20a. Please explain your answer or provide more information.

21. Have we captured the core elements of improving capacity within the context of mainstreaming?

• Yes
• No
• Don’t know

21a. Please explain your answer or provide more information.

22. What actions would you recommend to ensure that improving capacity will contribute to the achievement of mainstreaming?

How will the Strategy support real change?

We recognise that although a Strategy provides direction it does not achieve change on its own. Although currently at an early stage of development, we propose publishing alongside the Strategy two key supporting resources to drive change: 

• An action plan. This will articulate actions Scottish Government are taking to mainstream equality and human rights. This will include:
  • collating the wide range of cross-cutting mainstreaming actions that have already been committed to elsewhere such as in responses to the recommendations of the First Minister’s National Advisory Council on Women and Girls (NACWG) or Scottish Government’s Mainstreaming Report published in April 2023. We recognise that current commitments towards equality and human rights mainstreaming are not available in a single place and feedback from stakeholders to date highlighted these as including general statements rather than specific time bound actions.
  • We believe collating and grouping these wide-ranging actions in a single place will increase transparency. For example, commitments to developing competence have been made in response to recommendations from the NACWG, response to recommendations from the Equality and Human Rights Budget Advisory group and in Mainstreaming Report 2023.
  • Additional actions will subsequently be identified as result of this consultation and associated engagement.
  • It will focus on cross-cutting actions against the key drivers.
  • This action plan would be updated annually to add further actions and provide statements of progress.
  • These statements of progress will directly link to and form part of required statutory reporting.
• A toolkit to support the public sector, including Scottish Government, to deliver mainstreaming in practice. The toolkit will provide examples of the steps needed and the practical tools that an organisation can implement to mainstream equality and human rights. It will provide self-diagnostic tools, guidance, best practice examples and training materials. This will supplement the technical guidance for specific legislation. We envision the toolkit will:
  • Be web-based and accessible to all, providing practical and pragmatic support.
  • Be regularly maintained and updated.
  • As well as hosting specific tools, it will provide a single portal to signpost to other resources, such as technical guidance.

Questions

23. Do you think the proposed approach to a collated Action Plan will drive change?

• Yes
• No
• Don’t know

23a. Please explain your answer or provide more information.

24. Do you think there is a need for a cross-public sector toolkit to support mainstreaming of Equality and Human Rights?

• Yes
• No
• Don’t know

24a. Please explain your answer or provide more information.

25. What practical steps would you include to make the toolkit an effective resource?

Reporting

There is extensive existing and proposed statutory reporting for both Scottish Government, and the wider public sector. So we do not propose that the Strategy will have separate stand-alone reporting requirements beyond the action plan updates.

Existing reporting requirements include: 

• PSED Mainstreaming report. The Scottish Government’s Equality Outcomes and Mainstreaming Report is published every two years in line with our legal requirements as set out in the SSDs. The next Report will be published in April 2025. 
• Reg 12 of the SSDs: places a duty on Scottish Ministers to publish proposals for activity to enable better performance of the PSED. 
• Treaty reporting. The Scottish Government is accountable for compliance with international human rights requirements in devolved areas and contributes to regular reporting cycles regarding implementation of human rights treaties. For example, the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) is a unique mechanism of the United Nations Human Rights Council that calls for each UN Member State to undergo a peer review of its human rights records every 4-5 years.
• The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Incorporation)(Scotland) Act 2024 sets out the following reporting requirements:
• a requirement on Scottish Ministers to publish a Children’s Rights Scheme, setting out the arrangements that are in place, or are to be put in place to ensure compliance with the compatibility duty and to secure better or further effect of children’s rights;
• a requirement on Scottish Ministers and listed authorities to report on actions they have taken and intend to take to ensure compliance with the compatibility duty and actions taken and planned to secure better or further effect of children’s rights; and
• a requirement on Scottish Ministers to prepare and publish a Child Rights and Wellbeing Impact Assessment (CRWIA) under certain circumstances, such as when Scottish Ministers introduce a Bill into the Scottish Parliament, when making certain SSIs, in relation to certain school closures, and in relation to decisions of a strategic nature that relate to the rights and wellbeing of children.
• The proposals for the Human Rights Bill intend to introduce reporting requirements for Scottish Government and public authorities.

The Scottish Government has also accepted a recommendation from the National Advisory Council on Women and Girls to deliver an annual statement, followed by a debate in the Scottish Parliament, on gender policy coherence. This statement will cover activity being undertaken by the Scottish Government to deliver gender mainstreaming.

Questions

26. What are your views on establishing additional reporting requirements?

• Additional stand-alone reporting requirements should not be created
• Additional stand-alone reporting requirements should be created
• Don’t know

26a. Please explain your answer or provide more information.