Chamber and committees

This report was funded by The Promise Partnership, of which the Scottish Government is the principal funder. The Scottish Government recognises that it raises important issues about how children and young people are supported to enforce their rights, and welcomes that Clan ChildLaw commissioned this work. Many of the report’s findings align with The Promise, particularly that Scotland must consider the creation of an accredited legal specialism to set standards for legal professionals representing children.

Through legal aid, children and young people can access legal support for a wide range of matters including children’s hearings, criminal proceedings and to resolve civil disputes. The Legal Aid Fund pays for legal advice and representation, but it is not designed to fund wider support needs. The young people’s statements of their ideal legal services, as captured by the report, extend beyond the traditional model of service delivery by law firms, and the scope of the current legal aid system.

As the report has highlighted, “There may be a need for the development of initiatives, partnerships and funding bids focused on specific issues and needs” and officials will continue to engage on how to best to support such work.

Responsibility for the management of the police estate sits with the Scottish Police Authority and the Chief Constable.

However, Police Scotland has confirmed that 15 police stations have been closed since 2013 across Ayrshire, Renfrewshire and Inverclyde with the majority of them been moved to a new modern co-located accommodation within the same towns or officers were moved to new police stations nearby.

The Police Scotland Estate Strategy, approved by the SPA in May 2019, provides a framework for planning the future of the police estate to support the long term vision of policing which includes enhanced partnership working, and seeks to respond to the changing needs of communities while maintaining public visibility and confidence.

On 26 October 2022 16 case workers were employed, working to 15.4 full time equivalent (FTE).

From the 14 November 2022, 23 case workers are expected to be in post, with a FTE of 22.2.

Through the Community Mental Health and Wellbeing Supports and Services Framework, we are providing local authorities with £15 million per annum to fund community-based mental health supports for children, young people, their families and their carers. North Ayrshire Council’s share of this year’s funding is £360,000 and Inverclyde Council’s is £192,000.

In North Ayrshire, the following supports and services for children and young people are delivered through the funding:

• Family-Centred Wellbeing Service: A multi-agency, strengths-focussed, community-based assessment and support service for families with children aged 5-12.
• Aberlour Sustain Service: Offers support to families with children aged 5-12 experiencing a range of challenges, including poverty, isolation, mental health and wellbeing issues, self-esteem, and anxiety.
• Crisis Counselling: Works with children and young people aged 5-24 who need very specific response methods to permit them to relate their emotional and mental health difficulties in age-specific ways and enable them to develop coping strategies and support them through challenging situations.
• Therapeutic Services For Care-Experienced Children And Young People: Play therapy, music therapy, dance therapy and art therapy for children and young people aged 5-26. These approaches have proved successful in addressing significant trauma and have enabled young people to develop coping strategies, self-regulate and develop sustainable skills.
• Mental Health And Wellbeing Project Delivery Officers: ‘Your Resilience’ sessions for multiple youth groups and positive mental wellbeing sessions alongside youth workers, via the mobile youth centre, ensuring young people who are geographically isolated have access to supports and services.
• Penumbra Self-Harm Project: Supports primary schools to continue to embed the ‘My Body My Way’ resource, runs parent support groups and workshops on how to deal with self-harm, and provides therapeutic support for children and young people displaying self-harming behaviours. For those aged 10-24.
• Bespoke Mental Health And Wellbeing: Delivering bespoke co-produced intervention with families who are currently under either voluntary or statutory measures with social work or the children and families team.

In Inverclyde, the following supports and services for children and young people are delivered through the funding:

• Inverclyde Emotional Wellbeing Triage Team: An inter-agency team of children and young people’s mental health services. Children, young people and families only tell their story once as the referral is handled by professionals on their behalf.
• Action For Children Wellbeing Service: This is a preventative mental health service aimed at P7 pupils at risk of non-attendance due to anxiety-based issues through transition to secondary education.
• Barnardo’s Wellbeing Support Worker Service: This service works with children and young people with additional support needs and their families to build parental capacity in response to the child’s developmental, social, and emotional needs.
• Cygnets Programme: This programme is aimed at parents and carers who are supporting children and young people experiencing difficulties due to autism spectrum condition.
• Children And Young People’s Participation Service: Workshops are being piloted in education establishments to gain the views of children and young people who have completed or are undergoing work with mental health and wellbeing services.

It is not possible for us to break down the amount spent on each of the above supports and services as local authorities are not required to provide us with this information under the terms of the grant.

In the first year of the Communities Mental Health and Wellbeing Fund for adults in 2021-2022, we funded 38 projects supporting adults living in North Ayrshire and 20 projects supporting adults living in Inverclyde.

In North Ayrshire these were:

Scotland’s Redress Scheme is committed to providing a swifter and less adversarial option than court action for survivors of abuse in care. We are aware that, for some applicants, the process is taking longer than they have expected, and officials are working to ensure opportunities for improving the service are identified and acted upon.

Recent improvements include the recruitment of additional case workers. There are currently 17 case workers in post, and by the middle of November 2022 this will rise to 23.

It is not possible to give an average or target time from receipt of an application through to issuing of a redress payment and apology. Applications progress at differing rates depending on how complete they are when submitted, the availability of information, evidence and records, and the extent of verification checks required. Priority is given to applicants with a terminal illness and those over 68 years of age.

Applicants have six months from receipt of offer of payment to accept or decline the offer. As of 31 October 2022 payments totalling £8,570,168 have been made to survivors or their next of kin.

The most recently available data for payment breakdown, as of 30 September 2022, shows that redress payments of £3,464,900 have been attributed to organisations contributing to the scheme. The NHS boards contribution is included in this figure, however, for survivor data privacy reasons further breakdown of the data to the level of individual organisations would not be appropriate at this time.

There are 16 contributors, with potential contributions agreed reaching £122m. The live list has been published online since 8 December 2021.

The Fireworks and Pyrotechnic Articles (Scotland) Act 2022 was passed by the Scottish Parliament in June of this year and received Royal Assent on 10 August.

Work is underway to implement the measures within the Act. Firework licensing, Part 2 of the Act, requires secondary legislation and the development of an appropriate licensing system as part of implementation. The licensing system will therefore not be in place until late 2023/early 2024 at the earliest.

Since the Level of Service Case Management Inventory (LS/CMI) IT errors were identified three forms of review have been underway:

• Open cases review
• Risk Management Authority review
• IT review

Letters have been submitted to the Criminal Justice Committee on 3 March 2022, 12 May 2022, 28 June 2022, and 27 September 2022, providing updates on these three review elements.

The Risk Management Authority review is not looking at “failed assessments”. They are exploring impact from the known system error in relation to risk and scoring. Part of that review is an assessment of possible material impact, as it is a feature of risk assessment that much more than one IT system output goes into the risk assessment process.

With the caveat that the review work has to be led by what is found at each phase, it is currently anticipated that phase 3 of this work will conclude in November 2022 and report thereafter.

In Scotland, the Scottish Medicines Consortium (SMC) appraises the clinical and cost-effectiveness of newly-licensed medicines. Following a full submission for zanubrutinib (Brukinsa ® ) as monotherapy for the treatment of adult patients with Waldenström’s macroglobulinaemia (WM) who have received at least one prior therapy, or in first line treatment for patients unsuitable for chemo-immunotherapy, the SMC issued ‘not recommended’ advice for routine use of this medicine in NHS Scotland on 12 September 2022. The advice detailed that a comparable drug is currently available for this indication, and the company did not present a sufficiently robust economic analysis to gain acceptance by the SMC.

However, the SMC has received a fast track resubmission which was reviewed at the SMC’s Committee meeting on 4 October 2022, and its advice will be published on 7 November 2022. In the meantime, you can access a summary of the current status of this resubmission on the SMC’s website here .

There are alternative routes of access available for a medicine that is not recommended by the SMC. A doctor can request access to licensed medicines for a patient on an individual ‘case-by-case’ basis through the Peer Approved Clinical System (PACS) Tier Two process, where a doctor considers there would be a clinical benefit for a patient.

The decision on whether to prescribe a medicine for a patient, and which medicine to prescribe, is entirely one for the clinician in charge of a patient’s care to make, having taken into account the patient’s clinical condition and the safety of the patient.