Meeting of the Parliament 30 September 2025
I am grateful for the work that I know the cabinet secretary has done with Scottish Women’s Aid. Because of that work, I will not move amendment 327.
I have worked with Scottish Women’s Aid on the issue that amendment 17 deals with. The “working group report” that the amendment refers to made a wide range of recommendations that were accepted by the Scottish Government. Some of them have already made their way into the bill; others, as the cabinet secretary has said, are in train. However, the report was wide ranging and made 27 recommendations, and we still have a way to go to see many of those being implemented in full.
There is more work to be done on housing first strategies for victims and survivors, on ensuring that homelessness policies are designed and implemented with a gendered lens, and on improving how homelessness that results from domestic abuse appears in statistics. That is the premise behind my amendment 17. That is why I recommend inserting a simple monitoring process into the bill, whereby we check annually on progress on those recommendations. I believe that that will help to ensure that we stay on track to implement in full those crucial recommendations that the Scottish Government has already accepted.