Education, Children and Young People Committee 10 September 2025
I will add a couple of comments in relation to your questions, convener, around engagement and what the review might have envisioned back in 2020.
Engagement has been frustrating. I am sure that the Government will explain to you why it felt that there was no room for engagement on the specifics of the bill. We are in touch with officials all the time about things to do with the Promise. A lot of activity to progress the Promise is, quite appropriately, being taken forward outside legislation—legislation is by no means the only vehicle for effecting change.
In May 2024, The Promise Scotland sent a briefing to Government officials that set out a long list of things to consider for inclusion in the bill. We had various bits of engagement following on from that. We published all that information on our website so that everyone could see what we had been saying.
In speaking to colleagues who have experience of being involved in legislation in previous years, I found that everyone was struck by how locked down this bill was. It was locked down for reasons that we do not fully understand. Any legislation is all about the detail, and I would argue that that is the case with this bill in particular. It was only in the middle of May that I was given a confidential verbal briefing that set out only the headings that would be in the bill. We had no indication of the details until the bill was published on 18 June. As can be seen from a lot of the responses to the committee’s call for evidence, that has had a direct impact on how people are engaging with the content of the bill. It has landed quite cold. There is a sense that some of the things in it were consulted on officially, as the Government did four formal consultations, but that others have not had any consultation at all, and even came as a bit of a surprise to us. As Sheriff Mackie said, there has been a significant uptick in engagement since the bill was introduced. That is very positive. The Government held an engagement session this week. However, that means that a lot of engagement and stuff needs to be figured out between now and spring if the bill is to pass.
In terms of what the care review might have envisaged, Fiona Duncan has mentioned a key thing, which is the sense of decluttering a very busy legislative landscape. To be fair, officials were quite clear early on that that was unlikely to happen in the bill, but we have progressed work on it anyway. We commissioned somebody to do a thorough review of the legislative landscape and come up with options for how to simplify and streamline it—we are not giving up on that. If a decluttering of the legislative landscape is not in the bill, we think that the Parliament will need to come back to it in the next session.
The other thing that became clear through engagement towards the end of 2024 was that the scope of the bill was unlikely to cover areas of the Promise that could be described as being a bit further away from the core care system, if I may use that phrase. Much of the Promise touches on education, criminal justice and health, but they are not covered in the bill because its scope broadly focuses on what people would recognise as this thing that is known as the care system. It is important that there are other opportunities to progress the work in those other areas, which, as we have said to the committee in the past, are critically important to keeping the Promise.