Equality and Human Rights Mainstreaming Strategy

Scottish Government and wider public sector 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 NPF 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.