Chamber and committees

I am not sure that I would know what—

I am grateful for the opportunity to update the committee on the progress of Scotland’s redress scheme, now it has completed its first full year of operation.? The scheme is delivering tangible redress in the form of acknowledgement, payment, apology and support to people who suffered abuse as children in the care of the state.

Scotland’s redress scheme opened in December 2021.?As of 31 December 2022, 1,960 applications of various levels of completion have been received;? 345 initial applications have been completed, verified and passed to Redress Scotland for independent decision making; and 277 initial determinations have been made. Payments totalling £11,368,373 have been issued directly to applicants.? Although those figures are heartening and demonstrate good progress, there is more work to be done, and feedback from survivors and their representatives is continuing to shape the scheme.?

Redress payments are not dependent on contributions from any organisation, and organisations are not compelled to contribute.? When the scheme launched, 10 organisations were contributing to the scheme. That figure is now 16, with potential contributions totalling £122 million. In December, I wrote to each applicant to reassure them of my on-going personal commitment to the scheme and to reiterate its three principles, which are compassion, dignity and respect.? I understand that some applicants are experiencing challenges in accessing records to support their applications and that some are finding that the process is taking longer than they had anticipated.? Those concerns have been heard and are being responded to.

The number of case workers who are supporting survivors or their next of kin to complete applications has increased from 12 to 23 since the scheme launched, in December 2021. That will mean that there is swifter allocation of a named case worker to people who have completed applications that are ready for verification checks. I recognise the need for on-going communication and have assured all applicants, no matter what stage their application is at, that they will receive an update by the end of February and that there will be more regular communication going forward.?

The survivor forum, which was established in March 2022, will increase its activity and provide opportunities for survivors to give their feedback and further shape the scheme. A new group including representatives from the Scottish Government and local authority bodies has been established and will work collaboratively to provide support to applicants to the scheme.? A standing agenda item for the group is access to records and supporting information, and the group will be holding its second meeting in the coming weeks.?

Survivors have told us that the provision of personal acknowledgement and apology is often the most meaningful and important aspect of redress.? So far, the scheme has supported 12 survivors who have requested a personal apology, and that has already been secured for 10 of them. ?Feedback from some survivors who have received an apology has been positive and moving.?

I welcome the on-going interest from the committee, and, more widely, from members of Parliament across the chamber, in the scheme.? I am confident that Scotland’s redress scheme will continue to build upon its successful first year of operation, delivering a robust and credible route to redress in a swifter, less adversarial way than court action. I am committed to ensuring that all the necessary steps for the scheme to be effective are taken and that any improvements that are required are delivered. I am happy to answer members’ questions.

Any new scheme inevitably takes time to find its feet and its effectiveness, efficiency and pace of work. There will be a range of applications to a scheme of this type, and a new issue will be uncovered in probably every application. That issue will have to be considered and related to the legislation. Colleagues will recall that the legislation for the scheme inevitably has to be very complex. A variety of considerations must be made on literally every application, so it is fair to say that the scheme will be slow to begin.

The pace will be maintained. One way to illustrate that, which might help to address Mr Dey’s question, is to look at March 2022, which is a couple of months after the scheme began operating. In that month, 26 applications were passed from the Scottish Government to Redress Scotland for determination. Those were applications that had been completed and were to be judged for a redress payment. In November 2022, that number was 66. I hope that that gives the committee some reassurance that the pace is increasing. The November figure also predates the recruitment of essentially double the number of caseworkers.

I unreservedly accept that any scheme of this type takes time to find momentum. More applications came in more quickly than we had anticipated. The total number of applications is not adrift from our expectations, but the rate at which they have come in is most definitely different. The state of development of those applications is variable: some are very advanced, some are not. It has taken a lot of time to support applicants to get to a conclusion. There is now a growing sense of momentum within the scheme, which I am keen to build upon.

Yes, we did.

I do not know the answer to your question, and I do not know whether I could answer it. I cannot answer it now because I most definitely do not have detailed knowledge of any application, and I am not actually sure that I could ask anyone, if you get what I mean.

I am not being difficult, but we have to be awfully careful about the personal data issues involved, so I am not sure about that.

Nevertheless, there is a deeper point that underpins Mr Marra’s question, which is whether there is a route for such a process to happen. I think that there is. That is the reassurance that I have given to the group that came to see me.

I listened to the quotes that Mr Marra gave—this relates to the key paragraph that I read out from Jackson Carlaw’s letter to me—and I can understand why people think, “The state was all over this.” An interesting and disturbing conversation can be had with Fornethy survivors to work out why they were there. I am really struggling with that point because, from listening to their stories, I cannot fathom it.

That is why I say that I think that the scheme is perfectly open to Fornethy survivors. However, I have to satisfy myself, and I do not think that I can do that by being able to answer the question that Mr Marra put to me on whether a survivor has been successful. I do not think that I will ever know the answer to that question unless a Fornethy survivor tells me.

At this stage, I would say that all public organisations have to be open and candid about things in the past. The Scottish Government established the Scottish child abuse inquiry because we came to the conclusion that, despite a number of very welcome, well-thought-through approaches to try to address the deep trauma, hurt and agony of individuals, we had not done that successfully without airing the truth about all this.

The Scottish child abuse inquiry is generating material that is unfathomable. In some cases, I readily admit to finding the material unreadable—I literally cannot read some parts of it. It is about the country facing up to its past and its obligations, which is incredibly difficult. I say to any organisation in the country that this is not a moment to be anything other than candid.

The advance payment scheme was handled pretty swiftly, pretty timeously and pretty straightforwardly. Of course, there is a big difference between the advance payment scheme and this scheme. The advance payment scheme had a much lower bar of evidence and process than is involved in the fully legislated-for scheme. In that respect, Mr Mundell puts his finger on a fair point, which is that we probably conveyed the impression that there would just be a continuation of the swiftness of the advance payment scheme, when that is not what would happen. What we were legislating for was more complex and demanding, so that is one factor.

There is another factor. I hope that I have been as candid during the meeting as I set out to be when I came into the room this morning. I have said that applications came in with varying degrees of evidence: some applications came in with literally only a name, an address and “I was in care at X” and others came in with a folder of stuff and with all the evidence marshalled and all the rest of it. Those two examples of applications require significantly different levels of time and attention.

Therefore, although we have a number of applications that require a lot of development work, I am not sure that I could describe them as “applications”—they are almost pre-applications. In saying that, I am not being in any way disrespectful to what has come in, but I am trying to give colleagues the sense that a lot of development work was required. Although we have got—

No, 22 is the gap between Redress Scotland determinations and acceptances; it is the number of people considering offers that have been made to them. There have been 19 review cases: four of those remain in progress and have not yet had an outcome; three have resulted in the initial determination being upheld; and 12 have had the initial determination varied—which means that the offer of financial redress was increased.

The process is about looking again at the information; I am not sure that it involves new information.