Historically, citizen participation in budget scrutiny has been low, despite calls for change. The Budget Process Review Group in 2017 highlighted the potential role of understanding service user experiences when evaluating policy, and said that “subject committees have a key role in providing a mechanism for the public to influence policy priorities which will inform the formulation of the Scottish Government’s budget”. However, stakeholders have noted that progress on that aim has been minimal.
Throughout this session, as part of a long-term look at human rights budgeting, the Equality, Human Rights and Civil Justice (EHRCJ) Committee has sought to understand the role of participation in budget scrutiny, and the role that committees can play in offering opportunities for meaningful engagement. For this reason, the Committee has included deliberative participation processes in budget scrutiny with the same group of citizens in two years of its pre-budget scrutiny work this session.
This blog recaps that work, and looks at the process and impact from the perspective of the individuals involved.
A separate blog explores the scrutiny approach taken this year in more detail, and the Committee’s final budget report sets out the processes used, impacts and recommendations in more detail.
How were people involved?
In 2023, for its pre-Budget 2024-25 scrutiny, the Committee sought to work with a group of citizens on understanding the impact of spending decisions on human rights. Crucially, it wanted to take this beyond consultation, and give citizens a deliberative (decision-making) role.
Because of the limited time available for pre-Budget scrutiny, the Parliament’s Participation and Communities Team (PACT) approached an existing community group. Capital City Partnership, and several of its delivery partners had already brought together Edinburgh citizens from a minority ethnic background to work on a citizens panel as part of the Whole Family Equality Project (WFEP), and 12 members of that panel agreed to work with the Committee on its pre-Budget scrutiny. The panel learned about the Parliament, Committee and budget, explored the impact of human rights spending with the Committee, and then deliberated and agreed on a set of questions for the Scottish Government. Panel members then appeared before Committee in a formal session to explain their questions, and then watched the Committee direct their questions, word for word, to the Scottish Government’s Minister for Equalities.
In 2025, the work took the form of a new collaborative approach to human-rights based budget scrutiny based on minimum core responsibilities (as explained in the partner blog to this one). By this stage, the Whole Family Equality Project process had wound up, but members of the citizen’s panel had gone on to form the Commission Advocating Rights for Minorities (CARM). Their existing knowledge of the Committee and budget process meant that a more in-depth analysis of the Budget could take place, and the result was a series of conclusions and recommendations on accountability co-produced by the Committee and CARM.
Both outcomes – questions being developed by citizens in a deliberative process, and co-produced recommendations – are Scottish Parliament firsts. More detail on the processes used can be found in the annexes to the Committee’s pre-Budget report.
The impact of participation
The Committee and CARM considered the impact of their 2023 collaboration as part of this year’s work. They noted that the questions that WFEP developed were used and referred to repeatedly by the Committee, including into the following year’s scrutiny. Outside of scrutiny, the current Minister (who was Convener of the Committee in 2023) has spoken about how the work had informed her approach to her ministerial role.
The approach was highlighted in the Parliament’s Participation Blueprint and referenced by both stakeholders and MSPs as a good example of scrutiny and participation work during the Committee Effectiveness inquiry run by the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee.
More widely, the work has been recognised by other organisations as being pioneering, was highlighted in an OECD paper, and was recently used as a good practice case study by the International Parliamentary Engagement Network.
Reflecting on the process of working together during the 2 September 2025 workshop, one Committee member suggested that the session had provided clear and direct information and highlighted the value of participation and engagement. They emphasised the importance of considering how the Committee influences the Scottish Government’s thinking about budgeting and the budget process, so that the Government, committees and partner stakeholders could all access the time, resource, space and confidence to include participation. They concluded that a valuable output of the Committee’s human rights budgeting project would be to get some systemic change, not just tokenistic change, embedded in its processes.
The impact on the Committee and on scrutiny practice is clear.
What about the impact on CARM and its members?
In a recent Scottish Parliament podcast, two members of CARM, Afam and Justine, told their story. The rest of this blog shares some of what they said.
Afam, talking about the impact of moving from the WFEP citizens’ panel to working with the Parliament, explained:
We had expectations [about working with Capital City Partnership] and we had really no idea about how damaged we were and how affected we were by the community. So, we had the citizens’ panel. It was a way to talk to each other and demand things to be changed.
The interesting part started with having a call through from [the Parliament], which was almost like a new planet appearing in in in the Solar system. And I turned to, I remember my colleague Justine … and I said, “So what do we do?”. And he said “We’ve gotta go. Gotta go to the Parliament”. And there was a general excitement, but also confusion of what we were about and what was to come… Because we began to, we were given a space, a very safe space, called a Parliament. The giant community centre that it is.
And in there, we were allowed to develop a voice through looking at really complex ideas… We were then listened to, and we shaped our ideas around what the Parliament.
Speaking about what it felt like to come into the Parliament to work with the Committee and its staff, Afam said:
… what we found … was understanding the government budgetary issues and human rights, and having the two mesh was highly complex. But what was more interesting was actually having us mesh with the Parliament, first of all getting used to trusting people around us, so we didn’t have facilitators. In the end, they’re part of the team. We were all as one, and then … we started just to talk among ourselves and we weren’t pushed to talk about anything in particular. We were given themes to work with and then we will listen to ask questions about those themes. So, the themes could run around through housing to just personal inclusion.
Some emotional stuff popped up, which was quite incredible because we had MSPs in at one point and it was one of the most interesting journeys, I think for CARM, because the participating part was the important part… But the idea of us being in the same space, talking about very complex subjects and actually taking ideas off each other and then talking with professionals as well around us, we actually felt like part of the Parliament. So, the journey was actually us meshing with the Parliament.
He went on to explain how the process of reading questions to the Committee, and hearing those asked, inspired the formation of CARM:
… the emotional part was hearing each of the members of CARM saying their thing. The Citizens’ Panel at the time and Citizens’ Panel in that [room] that day turned into CARM. The voices started to come forward.”
Afam also spoke about the work that CARM now does with Turn2Us, a national charity providing practical information and support to end financial insecurity, in supporting their own recruitment and operational models, and how this was inspired by the model of participation used by EHRCJ. He explained that “the framework is what we took with us to Turn2Us and it’s the framework that we’ve been using a lot.
Justine went on the talk about that it was like to come back in to work with the Committee again, and how that is impacting on his local community:
We already had an experience, you know… so it made it so easy if you ask me. And the accountability side of things … is not really policing anybody, so to speak, not really trying to look for faults, harm or mistakes here and there. No, it’s just ensuring things are done correctly… and in such a way that everyone … can say this is our thing. This is our budget. This is our Government.
So, because up until even very recently within the community, you hear a lot of people say stuff like “it’s them against us”… and truth be told, you may not really blame most of the people within the community. … a lot of people just believe the Government doesn’t care. … but to a large extent, that perspective is changing for a lot of us, from the experience we gained while doing the work with the with the PACT team and taking it out there to the people we represent. So, there’s this hope being built that yes, things can get better.
Where next?
It’s clear that CARM is taking their experience with the Committee forward in the advocacy work it does. And the Committee?
In the 2 September 2025 workshop, one Committee member suggested that including voices in Parliament should be a bare minimum, and that participants should expect more of committees. They argued that working with citizen groups should be ongoing and that such an approach would strengthen citizens’ voices as they came to expect more of their Parliament and committees. Put simply, the suggestion was that scrutiny shouldn’t end at the point that ministers give responses, rather it should be an ongoing and a continual process.
In its report, the Committee concluded that:
[CARM’s] input was critical to the Committee’s enhanced understanding of how to scrutinise the Scottish Government’s budget effectively. The Committee draws this work to the attention not only its successor committee, but to committees more generally in session 7. Effective scrutiny should be shaped by lived experience.
Ailsa Burn-Murdoch, Senior Researcher, SPICe