Chamber and committees

I recognise that domestic abuse can have significant physical, social, and emotional impacts on children. While one child experiencing domestic abuse is one too many, it is positive that children are reaching out to Childline to seek support. I welcome the NSPCC Christmas campaign to highlight to children and young people that there is a dedicated service, Childline, to provide support over the festive period and beyond.

Through the Children, Young People and Families Early Intervention & Adult Learning and Empowering Communities third sector funds, the Scottish Government provides £726,600 in funding, across 5 organisations to deliver outcomes supporting child protection. This includes £312,900 in funding to the NSPCC, allocating £207,900 specifically to its Childline services.

We are also investing £19 million a year in specialist services and projects through the Delivering Equally Safe (DES) Fund to support 83 projects to undertake work with children and young people who have experienced violence and abuse.

Our National Guidance for Child Protection in Scotland 2021, updated 2023, includes detailed advice on domestic abuse considerations in safety planning.

Through our Equally Safe Delivery Plan, we are also progressing work to strengthen the links between domestic abuse and Child Protection systems, and to ensure that staff are trained and confident to identify and deal sensitively with the issue.

We are committed to tackling all forms of violence against women and girls, including financial abuse, which, as a tactic of coercive control and abuse, can have lifelong impacts on victims.

Through our Delivering Equally Safe fund, we are providing approximately £600,000 over three-and-a-half years to GEMAP for their Financially Included project. This focuses on improving responses to economic abuse across the money advice and gender-based violence sectors through development and delivery of training and toolkit resources and provision of financial advice.

Alongside this, in 2024-25, the Scottish Government has allocated over £12 million for the provision of free income maximisation support, welfare and debt advice. We fund a range of mainly national advice providers including Citizens Advice Scotland, StepChange Debt Charity and Advice Direct Scotland.

We recognise that a variety of solutions and delivery mechanisms are needed to effectively respond to the many different and sometimes distressing circumstances that people find themselves in.

We have responded to this need by continuing to support a multichannel funding programme providing face-to-face, online and telephone advice, ensuring that all individuals or households, whatever their situation, can access support in the way that best suits their needs.

At this time, therefore, we are do not plan to establish a new programme of specialist services but would urge anyone needing support, whatever their situation, to contact a free advice provider as soon as possible.

Delivery of healthcare and the NHS is devolved and therefore work on the safety of and continuous improvement in maternity services in Scotland is the responsibility of the Scottish Government. The National Maternity Safety Ambition was launched in 2015 by the Department of Health and Social Care and applies to maternity services in England only. Officials and professional advisors meet regularly with colleagues across the UK, including from the Department of Health and Social Care in England, to discuss priorities across the UK, such as the Mothers and Babies: Reducing Risk through Audits and Confidential Enquiries across the UK (MBRRACE-UK) and to better understand work underway across each of the four nations.

The National Maternity Safety Ambition in England was launched in 2015. Delivery of healthcare and the NHS is devolved and the Sottish Government is committed to continuous improvement in maternity safety across Scotland, working in partnership with NHS Boards and clinicians and service users, to deliver the best and safest care for mothers and babies. The Scottish Government’s Scottish Patient Safety Programme (SPSP) Perinatal strand (formerly MCQIC), part of Healthcare Improvement Scotland (HIS), was established in 2009 to improve outcomes and reduce variation in maternity services by providing safe, high-quality care for all. The aims of the programme are to reduce stillbirths; understand variation in caesarean birth rates; improve the recognition, response and review of the deteriorating woman, and to reduce neonatal mortality and morbidity.

The Scottish Government has also commissioned HIS to develop standards for maternity services, to support consistency of service design and delivery across Scotland. We continue to work with NHS Boards, clinical leaders, the third sector and national partners to develop our approach in the Scottish context.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-31894 on 11 December 2024. 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

The Scottish Government has committed to a pilot project which has been established through the Scottish Legal Aid Board up to a limit of £432,000 over a period of three years from 1 April 2023 - 31 March 2026, to support Scottish Women’s Aid for the provision of legal advice to those affected by gender-based violence and provides an early intervention service providing legal advice, intervention services to those impacted by domestic abuse. The project is being taken forward in collaboration with Edinburgh Women’s Aid and a firm of solicitors.

Between September 2023 – August 2024, 230 women have been referred into this legal service project. The majority of clients have sought help for a legal problem connected to child contact, child maintenance and divorce.

We will evaluate the pilot model once the current funding ends in March 2026 and learning lessons from projects such as these, is incredibly useful and enables us to shape and inform any future services and target funding in the places it is most needed.

We remain committed to tackling all forms of violence against women and girls, including domestic abuse, and we will continue to work closely with statutory agencies and stakeholders to ensure that victims receive the support they need.

I received initial advice from Transport received on the emerging outcomes of the Corridor Review in February 2024 followed by comprehensive advice on the outcomes from the Review’s appraisal and assessment work including full details of the magnitude of the Review’s associated reporting in July 2024.

I then received a hard copy of the full Corridor Review’s Transport Appraisal Report on 28 August 2024 which set out the outcomes of the Transport Appraisal of the Review. Following consideration of the advice from Transport Scotland officials, the reporting from the Corridor Review was published on 28 November 2024 in draft for consultation. A copy of the reports published for consultation are available from the Transport Scotland website at https://www.transport.gov.scot/our-approach/strategy/a96-corridor-review/.

Feedback from members of the public and key stakeholders will be vital in helping inform the Scottish Government’s final decision on how best to take forward improvements to the A96 whilst also balancing the demands of the challenging economic climate and the climate emergency and will inform our timescales going forward.

Keeping children safe from online abuse and exploitation and tackling misogyny in our society are key priorities for the Scottish Government. We are committed to ensuring that robust measures are in place across Scotland to ensure our services can identify and support victims of online harm, including children and young people.

While regulation of the internet remains a reserved matter, we have engaged with both the previous and current UK Government administrations to strengthen the protections for children in the Online Safety Act. The Minister for Children, Young People and The Promise and I met with the online safety regulator Ofcom in August to discuss their strategy for online safety in Scotland. We await Ofcom’s draft guidance on protecting women and girls online, due to be published next year, and will reflect on its recent research which has highlighted the increased risk and concerns teenage girls and women face in relation to misogynistic content.

The Scottish Government also works closely with operational partners to tackle cyber-crime including Police Scotland, the National Cyber Security Centre and Cyber and Fraud Centre Scotland. These agencies link to international partnership working, and we will continue to identify opportunities for international engagement as we develop our approach to the global threat of online harm and radicalism.

As part of our existing approach, we support victims of abuse linked to misogyny, including through the provision of Our Delivering Equally Safe fund. This includes an award of over £110,000 to the South West Grid for Learning to deliver advice to victims of intimate image abuse and to improve awareness of sexual exploitation – or ‘Revenge Porn’ across Scotland. The Safer Scotland website was updated earlier this year to provide information, links to support and advice for victims on reporting intimate image abuse and our ParentClub website provides information on online harms including specific advice on misogynistic content.

The Scottish Government has also established an internal policy group on Technology-Facilitated Violence against Women and Girls, in recognition of the cross-cutting nature of this issue. This work will look to coordinate and accelerate the Scottish Government’s strategic approach to tackling technology-facilitated violence against women and girls, including how we further strengthen our approach to addressing online misogyny.

The Scottish Government received the final evaluation of the fund to leave pilot from Scottish Women’s Aid in August 2024. The fund to leave provided financial support to women to leave an abusive relationship, including to women experiencing financial abuse. The assessment stage is nearing completion and we hope to be in a position to set out next steps soon.

Household estimates showing the total number of dwellings and long-term empty properties by the Scottish Government 8-fold rural classification are published on the National Records of Scotland website - [ARCHIVED CONTENT] Household and Dwelling Estimates by Urban Rural Classification (2011 Data Zone based) | National Records of Scotland. Data for council areas are available in the Data file for the publication Households and Dwellings in Scotland, 2023 (total dwellings – table 2, long-term empty properties – table 6c). The latest data are for 2023.

Please note that the links take you to the archived version of the National Records of Scotland website. A new version of the website launched this month but is not yet fully populated with content from the previous website.