Scotland’s Equality Evidence Strategy 2023-2025

Ministerial Foreword

As a strong advocate of the use of data to improve the quality and inclusivity of Scotland's services, strengthening the equality evidence base to ensure that services deliver for everyone is vital. The Scottish Government has a longstanding commitment to inclusive, evidence-based policy.

Scotland's Equality Evidence Strategy 2023-2025 builds on our ambitious and wide-ranging Equality Data Improvement Programme (EDIP), which began in April 2021. Through the EDIP, we worked closely with partner organisations to undertake a range of actions to share good practice and make improvements to priority datasets.

This new strategy aims to deliver better equality evidence that will, in turn, enable policymakers to develop sound and inclusive policies to improve service delivery and improve outcomes across Scotland. Good quality equality evidence is essential to informing our understanding of what is happening in the lives of all of Scotland's people and in implementing effective solutions to tackle structural inequality, helping the people who need it most.

The Scottish Government and our partners already publish a wide range of robust equality evidence, and this new Equality Evidence Strategy adds to that. It aims to improve and expand data already collected, explore new and innovative ways of improving Scotland's evidence base, and importantly has the primary aim of improving the lives of everyone in Scotland.

Christina McKelvie
Minister for Equalities and Older People