Professor Angela O'Hagan:

It is absolutely key. It is one of the issues I will be focused on in the next iteration of the equality budgets advisory group. It forms part of our 31 recommendations to the Scottish Government, on which we are waiting to hear back, about capturing the knowledge, progress and learning as to how we got there and what difference was made.

One of the formal feedback loops is around the national performance framework. Officials within performance and strategy in the Scottish Government look at the differences year on year or over different periods of time in terms of meeting the indicators and targets within the national performance framework. The trinity there is really to have the budget commitment and the analytical processes that inform the budget process and the budget commitment aligning with or being seen as part of that triangle of the national performance framework and the programme for government. They all need to be linked. If the budget is giving resource expression to government commitments that are about achieving the national performance frameworks, then we need to see that alignment. The analytical processes that the equality budgets advisory group is trying to improve and instil within the Scottish Government processes require us to have much closer alignment to the budget process. That has been a little tricky because the fiscal events of the UK Government have moved about quite a bit in recent years, which means the formal part of the Scottish budget process - going through parliament, from the draft budget to the finalisation of the budget - has become a bit truncated. We have also not had a resource spending review for a significant number of years. The first resource spending review in, I think, ten years was produced in the last few months. In brief, there is a lot going on but there is a lot more to do to improve the ways in which we measure progress and improve the process.