Putting people at the centre of a transformed Scottish economy

The ALLIANCE has submitted a briefing to the Scottish Government Advisory Council on a National Strategy for Economic Transformation.

The significant impact of COVID-19, and responses taken to it, will be felt for many years to come, including on the Scottish economy. As the ALLIANCE indicated in our 2021 Scottish Parliament election manifesto, we believe it is possible to embed equality, transparency, and people’s participation in Scotland’s economy in order to achieve transformational and positive change that works for everyone.

The Scottish Government has appointed an Advisory Council (this link will take you away from our website), comprised of business leaders, academics and economists. Its role is to help shape a new 10-year strategy to drive Scotland’s economic transformation.

The ALLIANCE believes that economic transformation and a fair and equal recovery from the COVID-19 crisis could be achieved by giving greater weight to progressive economic systems like human rights and gender budgeting, and the wellbeing and caring economy. We hosted an expert panel session at this year’s Annual Conference about these models, that you can watch on our YouTube channel (this link will take you away from our website).

Our recommendations to the Advisory Council include:

• Expand the group’s membership and focus to account for alternative economic systems like gender and human rights budgeting, the caring and wellbeing economy.
• Expand the group’s membership and focus to better-recognise and include the third sector.
• Carry out timely and robust Equality Impact Assessments and Human Rights Impact Assessments  to inform the development of economic transformation policy and to assess its impact after implementation.
• Ensure greater recognition of the gendered nature of care and its role as an investment in Scotland’s economy, society and people (rather than a ‘burden’).
• Apply a human rights based approach (HRBA) to better identify economic priorities and how (financial) resources are generated, allocated and spent.

Our briefing to the Advisory Council is closely related to our recent submission to the Finance and Public Administration Committee’s inquiry on the 2022-23 budget and COVID-19 recovery.

Last year, with the Scottish Human Rights Commission, we submitted a response to the previous Finance and Constitution Committee’s inquiry on the impact of COVID-19 on public finances and the Fiscal Framework, which you can read about here: https://www.alliance-scotland.org.uk/blog/news/covid-19-public-finances-and-human-rights/

The ALLIANCE is a member of the Human Rights Budget Work Steering Group. You can find out more about this here: https://www.alliance-scotland.org.uk/policy-into-practice/human-rights/human-rights-budget-work/ 

You can read our briefing to the Scottish Government Advisory Council on a National Strategy for Economic Transformation at the link below.

End of page.