The formation and functions of the Equality, Inclusion, and Human Rights (EIHR) Directorate: FOI release

Information requested

You asked for "by year, from the formation of the Equality, Inclusion, and Human Rights Directorate to present day, the amount and proportion of that Directorate’s budget which was spent on functions which were not previously present in the Scottish Government before that Directorate’s formation and were moved from other Directorates into the EIHR Directorate."

Response

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the Scottish Government does not hold the information you have requested. As with other areas of government, our workloads are dynamic and changing over time, and as a result we do not record costs and budget to project detail that would break down the published EIHR budgets to a level which would allow a distinction to be made between the specific functions undertaken and whether they were 'new' or not.

The general functions that the EIHR Directorate delivers on were all previously present prior to the Directorate's formation. The creation of the new Directorate brought together the 'Connected Communities Division' with the 'Equality and Human Rights Division', both of which had previously sat within the Local Government and Communities Directorate. When the new Directorate was created the Equality and Human Rights Division was split into two distinct Divisions; Equality Division and Human Rights Division. The Connected Communities Division was in due course renamed the Mainstreaming & Inclusion Division, and following the absorption of the Ukraine Resettlement Programme, a new Asylum, Refugee, Resettlement and Ukraine Division was created from the remnants of the Ukraine Resettlement Directorate and elements of the Mainstreaming and Inclusion Division dealing with Asylum and Refugee integration.

While some individual projects were new pieces of work not being undertaken at the point of creation of the Directorate, these are aligned with the general purpose and functions of the teams that were subsumed into the Directorate. For example, the creation of the Anti-Racism Observatory for Scotland is a new and current anti-racism commitment but it flows from anti-racism work being undertaken since the publication in March 2016 of the Race Equality Framework 2016 to 2030.

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