Chamber and committees

The safety of children is always paramount, and our children and young people have the right to be protected from all forms of harm. The Scottish Government budget for 2021-22 includes £2.066m specifically for Child Protection. This funding will allow the Scottish Government to continue its financial support across various policy areas, to support action to tackle child abuse and children subjected to domestic violence. This includes continued funding to our third sector partners: Children 1st, Barnardo’s Scotland, NSPCC, Childline, The Moira Anderson Foundation and Stop It Now! Scotland.

We recognise that providing early support to families is the most effective form of protection and are funding a range of work to enable delivery of prevention and early intervention activities, and improve parenting capacity and family support. This includes providing £14m core funding in each of the last 5 years to strengthen early intervention and prevention to better protect children and young people in Scotland from abuse and neglect. In addition, we have committed over £0.5 billion to protect people and communities impacted by Covid. This includes a £50m Wellbeing Fund to help charities and others who require additional capacity to work with at-risk people who may be worst affected by the crisis and NSPCC Childline received £60k from this Fund to support those children most vulnerable to abuse.

We are investing over £12 million over 2020/21 from the Equality and Human Rights Budget to support a range of projects and initiatives- including services that support women and children affected by domestic abuse- and have offered this indicatively until September 2021.