Five years on: the Children (Scotland) Act 2020

A joint blog from Scottish Women’s Aid and Children First

 

The Children (Scotland) Act 2020 officially commenced five years ago.

 

The Act contains important provisions to improve children’s participation in decisions about them, to strengthen children’s rights throughout civil court processes, and to improve standards of professional practice.

 

These court processes make legal orders that can have a huge impact on children’s lives. They affect where they are going to live, who they will stay with and how their family will connect when they can’t all live together.

 

For years, children have continually told us how important it is for them to be heard. One young person, sharing their story in 2020 as part of the Improving Justice in Child Contact project, said of their interaction with a Child Welfare Reporter: “I felt ignored and I was worried I might not have any power over what happened to me.”[1] The young person was clear that “children and young people should get to speak to the people they think are best able to listen.”[2] Another young person in 2019 shared that “not that many children and young people have a say in their lives, because people think we are too young to know better.”[3]

 

In situations of domestic abuse, decisions on child contact are too often made without a full understanding of the abuse and its ongoing impacts on children and mothers. In these situations, child contact decision-making processes, and the contact itself, can constrain the ability of mothers to keep themselves and their children from further harm and trauma. Poor decision-making represents a significant danger to women and children.

 

The 2020 Act is designed to improve decision-making processes. Organisations like ours, along with children and families, worked hard to campaign for changes to ensure children’s voices are heard.

 

Five years on, many of the Act’s core promises remain unfulfilled. This is not just a technical issue. The failure to make the changes that were legislated for has real, harmful consequences for children and families across Scotland every single day.

 

Children’s voices are going unheard, and their needs disregarded. This continued inaction undermines trust and fails the very children the legislation was designed to protect.

 

We are still waiting for action on key elements:

 

·       Child Welfare Reporters (CWRs) remain unregulated, and the planned register of CWRs has not commenced. Without consistent standards, reports lack quality and consistency, fail to represent children’s views and risk minimising abuse and recommending unsafe contact arrangements.

 

·       As part of its aim to align with the UNCRC, the Act includes a duty to provide advocacy services. This has not commenced, meaning children’s voices regularly continue to go unheard, and children’s rights cannot be fully realised. 

 

      As well as this, though secondary legislation has been drafted, child contact centres remain unregulated. This leaves uneven safeguards in places where victim-survivors and children may be forced into contact with perpetrators - spaces that can retraumatise and endanger families. The potential for the system to put women and children at greater risk can also affect women’s willingness and ability to seek help in situations of domestic abuse.

 

Failures to implement legislation creates a breach of public trust in parliamentary process. By passing the Act, Scottish Government made a promise to protect women and children by improving how the system worked for them, and reducing harm and trauma. This promise has not been kept.

 

The broader implementation gap

The failure to implement the Children (Scotland) Act 2020 is a symptom of the wider problem of the implementation gap across Scottish legislation. Many pieces of legislation are in a similar situation.

 

This means that organisations like ours, along with children and families, can no longer feel assured that the passage of legislation will translate to tangible change on the ground. The gap between policy and practice, between conversations in Parliament and families’ reality, continues to grow. As we outlined in our joint letter in November 2024, this also affects our belief in the power of future legislative change.

 

The next Parliament will need to tackle this urgently to rebuild public trust in parliamentary process.

 

What needs to happen

We want to see:

 

Accountability and monitoring

·       Thorough parliamentary scrutiny and awareness of existing legislation. A transparent and publicly accessible process for monitoring the implementation of legislation after it has been passed.

 

Resource allocation

·       Clear and transparent commitments of budget and civil service capacity to resource existing legislation within necessary timeframes.

 

A refreshed approach to legislating

·       A commitment from the next government to undertake an audit of unimplemented legislation, tackle the backlog, and take steps to prevent this happening in the future. This must include a better process for allocating resource and timeframes to policy proposals.

 

The failure to implement key provisions means that the fifth anniversary of the 2020 Act is a cause for concern rather than celebration.

 

Children and families cannot wait any longer for progress. They have trusted the Scottish Parliament to make improvements to their lives - Parliament must now commit to keeping its promises, and to earning this trust back.

 

Read our letter to the Convener of the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee here: (SWA-and-Children-First-letter-October-2025.pdf)