Meeting of the Parliament 14 January 2026
It is a personal honour for me to open this debate and introduce a bill that will, with the Parliament’s support, change lives across Scotland.
We are making good progress on keeping the Promise. More than 2,500 fewer children are in care now than in 2020; the number of students who are supported in higher education by the care-experienced bursary more than doubled between 2019-20 and 2024-25; the introduction in 2023 of a minimum level of allowance for foster and kinship care families benefits more than 9,000 children every year; and no young person aged under 18 has been imprisoned since April last year.
However, we know that there is more for us to do as a Government if we are to keep the Promise by 2030, as we committed to doing, and the Children (Care, Care Experience and Services Planning) (Scotland) Bill will take us further faster. It provides the scaffolding that is needed to build solid systems of support to wrap around whole families and move our services and interventions more towards prevention. However, I acknowledge that some stakeholders and members of the Scottish Parliament feel that it does not go far enough.
I thank everyone who provided evidence to the committee at stage 1, everyone who has engaged with the bill team and Government officials since the bill was introduced last summer and the many people I have met in our communities who are doing important work to support children and young people who are in care or have left care. Most important, I thank children and young people for continuing to share their stories, concerns, challenges, ideas and dreams in the hope that we will take all that experience and make change happen for them and especially for children who might need care and support in the future.