Equality and Human Rights Budget Advisory Group's recommendations: Scottish Government response - easy read

Scottish Government - Our reply to the recommendations from the Equality and Human Rights Budget Advisory Group - Easy Read

Recommendations are things that a group thinks should happen.

Recommendations are advice from a team of experts.

Equality means everyone having the same chances to make the most of their lives and their talents.

Talents mean the skills and things we are good at and love to do.

Some people may need extra help to get the same chances.

Human rights mean the basic rights and freedoms that belong to every person in the world.

What this Easy Read document will tell you

This document will tell you what the Scottish Government thinks about a report it got.

It will tell you:

• who wrote the report
• about the recommendations
• what we think about them
• what we are going to do

About the Budget

Every year the Scottish Government writes a plan for how it will make and spend money.

This is called the Budget.

The law says that the Budget must think about equality and fairness.

About the Advisory Group

The Scottish Government works with a group called The Equality and Human Rights Budget Advisory Group.

The group has people from:

• the Scottish Government
• COSLA – the Scottish councils voice
• public organisations
• equality organisations
• human rights organisations

What the Advisory Group says should happen

The Advisory Group wrote a report about:

• the work of the Scottish Government
• the Budget

The report has 31 recommendations.

They say what should happen to make sure that Scottish Government is thinking enough about equality and human rights.

The recommendations are about 4 important areas:

1. how the Budget is made

2. how the Scottish Government communicates

3. the Scottish Government’s ways of working

4. understanding equality and human rights better

The Scottish Government’s reply to the Recommendations

We want to carry on making equality and human rights stronger in all parts of Scottish Government – including our Budget.

This is because we want everyone in Scotland to have equality and human rights.

We will carry on looking very closely at equality and human rights.

We want our decisions to help the people who need equality and their human rights the most.

We will keep putting our equality and human rights progress into our important document - called the Equality and Fairer Scotland Budget Statement.

We will also make sure they are part of all Scottish Government work – including the whole budget process, from start to finish.

We still believe that working together with other organisations is very important to make equality and human rights happen.

Here are the things we will do:

We will look at how we can work with the public to help make the Budget.

The public means people who live in Scotland.

We want to make sure that the people who lead and make decisions think about equality and human rights more.

This means they can do their jobs really well.

We will make our work on impact assessments better.

Impact assessments are special checks before something happens, to see who will be affected.

We want to work more closely with the Equality Outcomes and National Performance frameworks.

A framework is a type of plan.

These ones are about how well the Scottish Government is doing and what the results are.

We want to write a programme to help every part of the Scottish Government get better with equality and human rights.

We want to make sure there is enough money and staff so that we can look at putting equality and human rights into all our work.

We want to keep the Equality and Human Rights Budget Advisory Group going.

And we want to work with them to make an action plan for all these actions.

This next part is about the recommendations 4 important areas.

1. How the Budget is made

We want to carry on getting better at writing the Budget with equality in mind.

We will carry on looking closely at our work to see where we can make things better.

We will also work with the Equality and Human Rights Budget Advisory Group to make sure we are doing things right.

We have 8 actions for how this will happen.

2. How Scottish Government communicates

We want to use the 3 important values of human rights budgeting.

We want to:

• make it easier for anyone to read our finance information
• check how well we are doing this by looking at what other countries do
• find better ways to let the public have their say on our finance information

Finance means how money is managed.

We have 9 actions for how this will happen.

3. The Scottish Government’s ways of working

We have a document called the policy prospectus.

The policy prospectus has an equality mission.

Mission means aim or goal.

Our mission has 2 aims:

1. We want fewer people without enough money to live well.

This is called poverty.

2. We want to stop people getting harmed or hurt.

These 2 aims are part of every piece of work we do.

We want to make sure that we are looking closely at our work and finances with equality and human rights in mind.

This means helping our staff to think about equality and human rights in their jobs.

We have 4 actions for how this will happen.

4. Understanding equality and human rights better

We want more staff to work on equality and human rights, with more understanding.

We want to learn from other organisations.

We are making sure there is more:

• training
• guidance – this means advice about what to do

This means our staff will be able to use equality and human rights to plan and give better services.

We have 3 actions for how this will happen.

If you want to know more

If you want more information about this, you can email EHRBAGsecretariat@gov.scot