Chamber and committees

Section 1 of the Protection of Children and Prevention of Sexual Offences (Scotland) Act 2005 provides for an offence of 'meeting a child following certain preliminary contact'. This is commonly referred to as a 'grooming' offence.

There is no specific criminal offence concerning the 'grooming' of adults. However, there a number of criminal offences that may be used to prosecute a person who 'grooms' an adult for the purpose of abusing or exploiting them. Depending on the facts and circumstances of the case, these may include the offence of improper use of a public electronic communications network at section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, offences concerning indecent communication and causing persons to see sexual images in the Sexual Offences (Scotland) Act 2009, offences concerning human trafficking and slavery, servitude and forced or compulsory labour in the Human Trafficking and Exploitation (Scotland) Act 2015, and common law fraud.

The Scottish Government has no plans to introduce further specific legislation concerning 'grooming' at this time. However, the Scottish Government monitors the effectiveness of legislation on an on-going basis in conjunction with justice system partners. We will carefully consider any evidence that suggests there is any gap in the laws in place to deal with exploitation and abuse of either children or adults.

We are committed to working with stakeholders to develop and oversee national policy to protect children and young people. The National Action Plan to Prevent and Tackle Child Sexual Exploitation and National Action Plan on Internet Safety for Children and Young People were developed in consultation with our stakeholders. Oversight of the implementation of these plans will continue to be overseen by multi-agency groups.

Barnardo’s Scotland are in receipt of core funding from the Scottish Government Children, Young People and Families Early Intervention and Adult Learning and Empowering Communities Fund. This enables them to continue the reach of their frontline child sexual exploitation services, to ensure that children and young people at risk of or affected by sexual exploitation are identified early and receive appropriate support. £300,000 has been awarded to Barnardo’s Scotland per year since April 2016 through the fund.

NSPCC are in receipt of £198,000 per year since April 2016 through this fund, to support Childline in Scotland. Childline in Scotland also receive an additional £115,200 per year through the Scottish Government Learning Directorate.

Funding has also been awarded to StopItNow! Scotland to the value of £39,000 and to the Moira Anderson Foundation to the value of £25,000 for 2018-19.

In terms of work to prevent the exploitation and abuse of adults, the Scottish Government has funded the Trafficking Awareness Raising Alliance (TARA) to visit Romania along with officers from Police Scotland

• To meet local NGOs and understand more about the context of pre trafficking vulnerabilities which make women at risk to help TARA and Scottish Government understanding of need,
• To strengthen links with Romanian authorities to better facilitate safe return of trafficking victims, and
• To explore with Romanian authorities what awareness raising and upstream preventative work they have in train and what more can be done to prevent women being transported from Romania to Scotland for sexual exploitation.

The Scottish Government published the latest information about Ministerial engagements, overseas travel, car journeys, domestic travel and gifts received on 20 June 2018 at https://beta.gov.scot/publications/?term=Ministerialtravel&publicationTypes=transparency_data

Section 1 of the Protection of Children and Prevention of Sexual Offences (Scotland) Act 2005 provides for an offence of 'meeting a child following certain preliminary contact' for the purpose of unlawful sexual activity. This is commonly referred to as a 'grooming' offence.

Information on people convicted of this offence is contained in the following table:

The Scottish Government has not undertaken research specifically looking at the question of how ‘grooming’ takes place. However, a range of research exists looking at the question of how, in particular, grooming of children for sexual exploitation takes place.

For example, In 2012, the European Commission Safer Internet Plus Programme funded a project which comprised of experts from across Europe and was tasked with meeting the following research objectives:

• describe the behaviour of both offenders who groom and young people who are ‘groomed’,
• describe how information, communication technology (ICT) may facilitate online grooming,
• identify how young people are selected and prepared by online groomers for abuse online,
• contribute to the development of prevention initiatives aimed at parents and young people.

Barnardo's has undertaken research that identifies the demographic characteristics of children who were ‘groomed’ for sexual exploitation and the relationship between the abuser and child, and the NSPCC have undertaken research on the impact that ‘grooming’ for sexual abuse has on children.

The Online Grooming Communication (OGC) Project at Swansea University is carrying out an examination of the language used by groomers to lure children, to help understand the process better and develop effective interventions to detect and prevent online grooming.

The Scottish Government has not commissioned any research regarding air pollution from distilleries.

The UK Official Receiver is still in the process of liquidating Carillion and so the final impact on the public purse is not yet available.

The Scottish Government does not offer specific advice to people whose homes are affected by air pollution from distilleries. General advice to the public regarding air quality is available on the Scottish air quality website: scottishairquality.co.uk

All local authorities in Scotland are required to regularly review air quality in their areas against objectives for several pollutants of concern for human health. If this work indicates that any objectives are not being achieved, the authority concerned must declare an Air Quality Management Area (AQMA) and produce an action plan to tackle the issues identified.

To date, no exceedences of any of the objectives have been identified in Scotland relating to air pollution from distilleries.

Over the last 10 years, 74 people have been prosecuted for fraud:

Drug death statistics are produced by National Records of Scotland (NRS). Towards the end of 2017 NRS published a user consultation on the timing of Vital Events statistics. The consultation was published on the NRS website consultation page https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/statistics-and-data/statistics/user-consultations-groups-and-seminars/consultations

Users who had registered an interest in population or health statistics on the ScotStat register http://www.gov.scot/Topics/Statistics/scotstat received an email alerting them to the consultation. Various user groups were also told about the consultation and encouraged to respond, such as the Population and Migration Statistics user group and the Scottish Public Health Observatory Steering Group. Key users within the Scottish Government and the NHS were also alerted.

The consultation ended on 7 December 2017 and an analysis of responses (which included the new publication timetable) was subsequently published on the NRS website – https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/files//statistics/consultations/user-consultation-on-timing-vital-events-stats.pdf The new publication date has also been listed on the Future Publications page of the NRS website - https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/statistics-and-data/future-publications

Ministers were informed of this change but are not required to agree such changes. These are National Statistics and the UK Statistics Authority Code of Practice for Statistics ( https://www.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/code-of-practice/the-code/ ) states that the Chief Statistician/Head of Profession for Statistics should have sole authority for deciding on the timing of the release of regular statistics.