In previous blogs, we’ve explored how human rights can be used as a lens to both build budgets, and to scrutinise them. We’ve also used the three principles of human rights budgeting – transparency, accountability and participation – to analyse the themes in committees’ pre-budget scrutiny, and in the Budget itself.
Through this session, the Equality, Human Rights and Civil Justice (EHRCJ) Committee has used human rights budgeting, and the three principles, as a structure for its pre-budget scrutiny. In this final year of scrutiny in Session 6 of the Scottish Parliament, it explored accountability with the help of a group of citizens who it had previously worked with in 2023. This took the form of a new collaborative approach to human-rights based budget scrutiny based on “minimum core”, an approach explained in this blog. This included working with members of a grassroots organisation, the Commission Advocating Rights for Minorities (CARM), with support from the Scottish Human Rights Commission (SHRC).
This blog explores this scrutiny approach in more detail, and where it may bring wider opportunities for structuring committee scrutiny in the future.
A separate blog looks at the longer-term participation approach taken by the EHRCJ Committee, from the perspective of members of CARM, members of which also worked with the Committee in 2023.
Minimum core
Economic, social and cultural rights (ESCR) are human rights that are necessary to live a dignified life free from fear and want. There is an expectation under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) that to protect and respect these rights, governments must work towards:
- Progressive realisation: Governments must take steps towards the full realisation of economic, social and cultural rights over time.
- Minimum core obligations: These are the minimum protections that governments must guarantee everyone.
- Non-retrogressive measures: Human rights principles state that governments should not take active steps to deprive people of rights that they used to enjoy.
- Non-discrimination: All forms of discrimination must be prohibited, prevented and eliminated. This principle implies that budgets should be allocated in a way that reduces systemic inequalities.
- Maximum available resources: Governments are obliged to take steps to progressively realise rights to the “maximum of its available resources”.
The work carried out with the EHRCJ Committee focused on minimum core obligations. Specifically, employability was chosen as an area to explore, because this was both an area of interest of CARM members, and a policy area used by the Scottish Government as a case study in the Equality and Fairer Scotland Budget Statement 2025-26. Identifying a policy area meant that the relevant Articles of the ICESCR could be used to frame scrutiny – Article 6 on the Right to work, and Article 7 on The right of everyone to the enjoyment of just and favourable conditions of work.
As an example, under Article 6, the Government must ensure and safeguard the right for everyone to have an opportunity to gain their living by work that they freely choose or accept. Minimum core obligations in this case might mean that everyone has access to employability support to help to achieve this.
AAAQ framework
In a facilitated workshop on 2 September 2025, with the support of Dr Alison Hosie (SHRC), the Committee and five members of CARM explored the Scottish Government’s fulfilment of its minimum core obligations on employability using the criteria of availability, accessibility, acceptability and quality, otherwise known as an AAAQ framework analysis.
This approach gives a structure to consider whether there is evidence that minimum core responsibilities on human rights realisation are being met. AAAQ criteria can explained as:
Availability – Enough services and supports exist and coverage is stable.
Accessibility – People can reach and use support without discrimination or unaffordable costs.
Acceptability – Design and delivery are appropriate and respectful with adaptations where needed.
Quality – Support is competent and safe and achieves outcomes.
AAAQ works particularly well in a scrutiny setting because it helps Committees to identify whether a policy is the right approach to addressing needs, if the delivery and resourcing makes it possible to achieve the intentions behind the policy, and if it does what service users need it to do.
Workshop approach
In the workshop, members of the Committee and CARM, in small groups, worked through a carousel activity with four stations, each of which represented one of the AAAQ criteria. There were then four rounds of analysis, with the groups rotating to the next criteria station between each round.
The questions that groups were asked to explore each round were the same for all four groups, so they were asking the same question at the same time, but of different criteria. The questions were as follows:
Round 1 – “Are minimum core responsibilities being met in this context?”
Round 2 – “Does the Scottish Government’s narrative match the statistics?”
Round 3 – “Could more be done to demonstrate this?”
Round 4 – “What conclusions and recommendations might be drawn on whether the Scottish Government is meeting its obligations?”
The activity approach meant that all groups got to work on each criterion and build on each other’s contributions. Discussions and recommendations were recorded on flip charts by facilitators, and recommendations presented back by each group at the end.
Following the workshop, with support from SPICe, the Committee and CARM agreed a set of co-produced conclusions and recommendations based on this activity (along with reflections on the impact of previous participation work). In this, they concluded that the Scottish Government’s employability case study in the Equality and Fairer Scotland Budget Statement 2025-26, although presenting a positive narrative, did not give a level of detail which made it possible to understand if the Government was meeting its minimum core responsibilities. The AAAQ approach allowed the Committee and CARM to make constructive suggestions as to how the Scottish Government could improve its reporting process to better show the impacts of its policy approach. This would allow for more thorough scrutiny and strengthen accountability in the budget process.
The Committee also concluded:
The Committee considers that using human rights budgeting as a framework and taking a progressive and long-term scrutiny approach has been a worthwhile exercise. While the Committee’s work might not have resulted in a radical shift in how the Scottish Government has approached human rights budgeting this session, the Committee believes that the process has been an effective one and one that it hopes will bear fruit next session.
The full set of recommendations made can be found in the Committee’s pre-budget report.
Wider budget challenges and opportunities
Typically, pre-budget scrutiny might involve evidence-taking, followed by committees drawing conclusions based on evidence heard. Committees either structure budget scrutiny around a specific theme or policy area or look at spending across the wider Cabinet Secretary portfolio in their purview. As we’ve explored in other blogs, pre-budget scrutiny can be truncated due to both competing work programme deadlines, and the budget timetable. This makes it challenging to dig deep into whether spending is delivering its intended outcomes, and indeed, whether spending is being driven and adjusted based on outcomes and need (in line with OECD best practice).
The Budget Process Review Group, in 2017, set out suggested changes to the budget process and a recommended framework for the Parliament’s process, which included the suggestions that scrutiny should be on a continuous cycle, and should be evaluative, with an emphasis on what budgets have achieved and aim to achieve over the long term. In its 2025 review of implementation, the Finance and Public Administration Committee noted its disappointment in the Scottish Government’s progress towards communicating the outcomes of spending decisions, and its openness to stakeholder influence over spending decisions. There are opportunities to tackle these challenges by using minimum core and AAAQ framework analysis.
AAAQ as an opportunity?
The EHRCJ Committee’s use of the AAAQ approach to explore the Scottish Government’s adherence to meeting its minimum core responsibilities gave the Committee and stakeholders a clear structure for exploring spending, and a way to interrogate the data and narrative presented by the Scottish Government. This fed into the Committee’s subsequent evidence-taking with stakeholders who had given evidence throughout the Parliamentary session. By reframing how the budget could be examined, the Committee was supported to explore the evidence-base around outcomes and potential solutions with witnesses in a collaborative round-table approach.
Could this be an approach used by committees going forward? There are three key areas to consider.
- The AAAQ framework analysis approach in this instance required careful preparation, both to ensure that the Committee and CARM understood the context and aims, and to find a facilitated structure for the workshop which worked. It was an ambitious approach, which was successful largely because CARM were already familiar with the budget process and the Committee, and because Parliament staff and Dr Hosie were able to do some preparation work with the group. Repeating this with another group would be resource intensive, but the feedback from all involved suggests it would be a worthwhile scrutiny activity to repeat. It is also worth noting that AAAQ analysis can be done by committees without citizen participation.
- Narrowing down the policy area to focus on in this instance was straightforward – employability was the only policy area which featured in both CARM’s key areas of interest and the EFSBS case studies. Given that AAAQ analysis works best with a discrete focus, how might other committees narrow their focus down, particularly given competing calls from stakeholders and the broad portfolio area coverage of committees?
- Data was one of the areas highlighted as lacking when exploring the employability case study. Given that data quality and transparency has been a long-standing theme across pre-budget scrutiny, in most portfolio areas, this is likely to be the case in any analysis. Could that lead to the potential that findings of AAAQ analyses will always fall towards a negative conclusion, because AAAQ criterion cannot be found to be met when the data isn’t there to prove it?
A broader framework for scrutiny?
Without changes to the budget timetable, routinely carrying out AAAQ framework analysis as a part of budget scrutiny could be ambitious. There are, however, ways in which taking a broader approach to including minimum core in scrutiny could support year-round evidence gathering on spending outcomes. Arguably, the questions one might ask around availability, accessibility, acceptability and quality are ones which provide a useful starting point for any policy scrutiny process.
In September 2026, after the election, new committees will be agreeing their work programmes and priorities. Understanding gaps in human rights realisation may provide a useful starting point in work programming by identifying policy areas to focus on during inquiry work. Going on to use AAAQ framework analysis within these inquiries to explore and gather data on how policy is working on the ground, including through understanding lived experience, could then provide a lynchpin between inquiry work and pre-budget scrutiny.
Practically speaking, using an inquiry approach which explores the availability, accessibility, acceptability and quality of services could go on to feed directly into committees’ questioning during pre-budget scrutiny.
Essentially, this means that an AAAQ framework approach to inquiry work could begin to provide the rich data on outcomes that committees have been finding so lacking in the Budget itself.
Ailsa Burn-Murdoch, Senior Researcher, SPICe