Meeting of the Parliament 19 June 2025
I thank Pam Duncan-Glancy for that comment. She points—probably not for the first time today—to a discussion that is exceptionally important, which is about intersectionality. We no longer can or should be talking only about “women”; we need to recognise the additional challenges and barriers that some women face—whether they are disabled women, black or minority ethnic women, or other women—in accessing public services. She raises a very important situation, and I agree that it is unacceptable.
In the next phase of the plan, timely access to gynaecology services will be a priority. We have allocated more than £8.8 million to health boards to target long waiting times for gynaecology, and we expect that to deliver significant improvements in the coming year. In addition, work is under way to target cervical cancer and identify steps that we can take to eliminate it in our lifetimes.
We have invested more than £53 million since 2018 to fund access to free period products across a range of settings. With the Period Products (Free Provision) (Scotland) Act 2021, Scotland became the first country in the world to enshrine access to free period products in law.
We continue to target all forms of violence against women and girls, through our world-leading equally safe strategy and by strengthening the laws that enable us to respond robustly to perpetrators and to protect women and girls. The Scottish Parliament passed the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018, which created a specific offence of domestic abuse that covers both physical and psychological abuse and makes it easier to prosecute coercive and controlling behaviour. Today, the Criminal Justice Modernisation and Abusive Domestic Behaviour Reviews (Scotland) Bill, which is currently at stage 3, proposes to create a statutory framework for Scotland’s first national, multi-agency domestic homicide and suicide review model.
We have taken action to create a trauma-informed process for people who have experienced sexual violence, including the Forensic Medical Services (Victims of Sexual Offences) (Scotland) Act 2021. That act provides a statutory basis for health boards to provide person-centred, trauma-informed forensic medical services for people who have experienced rape or sexual assault. Since 2017, we have invested more than £17 million to enable sexual assault response co-ordination services to be provided in every health board area.
We have also increased public sector pay in Scotland, despite significant constraints on our budget. Increasing women’s pay helps to reduce child poverty, which is one of the Scottish Government’s four priorities. In 2025-26, we are investing £155 million to enable an increase in the pay of adult and children’s social care workers in commissioned services to the new real living wage rate of £12.60 per hour. That overwhelmingly benefits women, who make up the majority of that workforce.
Scotland also has the most generous childcare offer in the United Kingdom. Parents of all three and four-year-olds and eligible two-year-olds can access up to 30 hours of funded childcare each week in school term time. Supporting families by providing quality, affordable and accessible childcare supports women in work and keeps families out of poverty.