Chamber and committees

Following commencement of a national BWV solution in Spring 2025 to Tayside Division, Police Scotland have advised that the target schedule to complete rollout is Summer 2026 for circa 10,695 front-line officers and staff and then into Spring 2027 for rollout to the remaining officers and staff.

As highlighted in the launch of Police Scotland's Body Worn Video (BWV) rollout, around 750 Tayside (D) Division officers, including road policing officers, operational support and custody staff, will be equipped with the new devices over the coming weeks. As the roll out progresses, Police Scotland will issue more than 10,500 Home Office-approved Motorola VB400 cameras to frontline officers from constable to inspector ranks, and to police custody staff, across the country.

Previously to this national rollout, approximately 440-Armed Policing Officers have access to BWV. BWV has been used in A Division since 2010 as part of a legacy Grampian Police deployment and currently have 228 operational devices in use on a pool basis. The national BWV solution will replace this legacy system in line with other divisions.

In total approximately 1440 BWV devices are currently operational with a mixed estate of both pool and personal issue. Training across Tayside is currently ongoing, which will increase officer use of this technology daily.

To date, the Scottish Government has supported the Pathfinder phase of Bairns’ Hoose development with an almost £10 million investment from 2023 to 2025.

(a)The Scottish Government is taking a phased approach to the development of Bairns’ Hoose, to create a system that works nationally and allows for flexibility to accommodate the needs of different areas (urban, rural, island) across Scotland. The first – Pathfinder - phase began in October 2023 with the announcement of six Pathfinder and four Affiliate partnerships. Each partnership is delivering some Bairns’ Hoose services with four partnerships currently delivering these from Bairns’ Hoose sites. We continue to work collaboratively with all ten partnerships as they trial the Bairns’ Hoose Standards.

(b)The Bairns’ Hoose programme is already improving children and young people’s experiences of the child protection, justice and health services as partnerships start to introduce Bairns’ Hoose services across Scotland.

One of the strands of the Pathfinder phase is to establish a core indicator set which will include information on the numbers of children accessing services.

The Scottish Government invested approximately £40k to support the important work of the National Bairns' Hoose Governance Group. The Group held its final meeting in June 2024 and has since been replaced by the National Bairns Hoose Implementation Group.

In accordance with the Programme for Government 2024-25, we are working with partnerships across Scotland to test our approach to Bairns’ Hoose across ten areas – providing safe, trauma informed environments for child victims and witnesses to access multi-agency support and recovery services – ahead of a national rollout, incrementally, from 2027.

We believe that appropriate trauma-informed services and support should be available to all children who need them. Our phased approach to Bairns’ Hoose testing and implementation will help ensure that the principles of Bairns’ Hoose can meet the individual needs of any child, wherever in Scotland they are, who may be referred to Bairns’ Hoose services.

As noted in my previous response on 6 January 2025 (S6W-32278 on 6 January 2025),applicants already have to agree to specific terms and conditions when signing up for the scheme, however we are working to strengthen these through changes to application forms to specify expected standards of behaviour when travelling and development of a behaviour code linked to operator’s conditions of carriage and existing legal protections.

We are exploring the legal means to suspend access to concessionary travel for perpetrators of persistent antisocial behaviour of any age, and this will inform development timescales. The National Concessionary Travel Schemes in Scotland are provided on a universal statutory basis, therefore detailed and thorough consideration of any process and penalty must be undertaken to ensure consistency and fairness.

All answers to written Parliamentary Questions are available on the Parliament’s website, the search facility for which can be found at https://www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/written-questions-and-answers

Total known direct costs were £7,792.64 including VAT. This covered publishing costs for the main report and the supporting evidence paper - A Review of Antisocial Behaviour in Scotland - Data Survey and Literature Review; travel expenses of any members/officers who claimed for in-person attendance at meetings and fact-finding visits to two local authority areas; and teas/coffees for meetings.

Members provided their services free of charge with costs - other than travel expenses, which were met by the Scottish Government - being assumed within their own organisation’s budgets. There were no meeting venue costs as these were held hybrid in Scottish Government buildings or members’ sites. Refreshments were also provided by the respective hosts for these meetings. Most engagement meetings, with stakeholders, were hybrid so incurred no direct expense.

We do not hold any other known direct costs or estimates. The group was supported by a secretariat - generally two Scottish Government officials - whose time costs were contained within existing budgets. One member did require printed copies of meeting papers - contained within a central budget. The Scottish Community Safety Network held two online engagement sessions and costs of these were met from within their existing Scottish Government grant.

There are no plans for Transport Scotland to introduce a formal reporting and tracking system for antisocial behaviour as there is no requirement on all operators in this deregulated sector to collect and share this data, which will affect the coverage of any data collected. Additionally, operator thresholds for reporting antisocial behaviour will vary affecting the consistency of any shared data.

Nevertheless, Transport Scotland is working with the Confederation of Passenger Transport and operators to encourage the industry to collect more data and to similar standards to improve knowledge of antisocial behaviour on buses. This supports the recommendations from the Independent Working Group on antisocial behaviour. Furthermore, the Transport Focus Your Bus Journey survey provides an indication of perceived trends in behaviour on buses. The results for Scotland show that in 2023 5% of respondents stated that passenger behaviour caused concern (8% in England). This increased to 6% in 2024.