Chamber and committees

As set out in the 2017-18 Programme for Government, the Scottish Government is leading a bold drive to reduce stressful and poor quality childhoods and support children and adults in overcoming early life adversity. We will embed a focus on preventing ACEs and supporting the resilience of children and adults in overcoming early life adversity across all areas of public service, including education, health, justice and social work. This involves a broad range of policies and related resources to help improve the health and wellbeing of children and adults, tackle inequalities in life-chances, and reduce intergenerational disadvantage.

This is part of the government’s approach of Getting It Right For Every Child which has wide-ranging policies including: pregnancy and parenthood, family relationships, children’s services and child protection, focused on prevention and early intervention to ensure all children have the best start in life. Some examples of the types of action being taken across these policy areas are as follows:

• providing more support for children and families in the very earliest years, for example, through our universal health visiting service and the rollout of family nurse partnerships
• focusing on achieving equity in education through the Scottish Attainment Challenge and, in combination with the Pupil Equity Fund, allocating funding directly to schools to close the poverty-related attainment gap
• putting children's wellbeing first through the Child Protection Improvement Programme , keeping them safe from abuse and neglect by ensuring effective child protection procedures are in place
• supporting children affected by parental substance misuse
• taking measures to reduce parental incarceration by moving to a presumption against short prison sentences
• our ambitious child poverty targets set in the Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan

As evidenced above, this government is fully committed to this agenda and is participating in the Scottish ACEs Hub (established by NHS Health Scotland in 2016), which brings together organisations from different sectors to learn from the evidence on childhood adversity and explore what further actions can be taken to prevent and mitigate ACEs in Scotland.

Most recently, I hosted an event in March 2018 in Glasgow involving people working across a wide-range of related sectors and Year of Young People Ambassadors. This explored what was working well, where further action is needed and opportunities for collaboration. I committed the government to further dialogue with partners about ACEs and to build on the positive work that is already taking place.

The information requested for 2016-17 is provided at page 13, Table 5 of the published Affordable Housing Supply Programme Outturn Report 2016-17 which can be accessed using the following link:

https://beta.gov.scot/publications/affordable-housing-supply-programme-out-turn-report-2016-2017/

The Affordable Housing Supply Programme Outturn Report for 2017-18 will be published later this year.

The Scottish Government has not set a minimum percentage of new build affordable homes which must be accessible to wheelchair users. As the statutory housing and planning authority for their area, local authorities are responsible for assessing housing need and demand and setting out how the requirement for housing will be met, through their Local Housing Strategy and Strategic Housing Investment Plans, this includes the size and type of housing required.

A Fairer Scotland for Disabled People - Our Delivery Plan to 2021 set out our commitment to increasing the supply of wheelchair accessible housing across all tenures by requiring all local authorities to set a realistic target for delivery within its Local Housing Strategy and reporting annually on progress. This requirement will be included within updated Local Housing Strategy guidance.

a) The Scottish Government publishes statistics on affordable housing completions each quarter, with the latest published set of figures covering the time period up to end December 2017. The next quarterly update, which will cover the quarter from January to March 2018 and therefore will provide complete coverage of the 2017-18 period, is planned to be published on 12 June 2018.

The number of affordable homes built in each local authority area is shown in the following table. These figures include new build homes only; rehabilitations and off-the-shelf purchases are not included.

Table 1: Number of new build affordable homes completed in 2016-17 and 2017-18 (up to December 2017)

The Scottish Government ‘s draft strategy to tackle social isolation and loneliness was published for consultation in January. Since then, we have held a number of community engagement events across Scotland to allow stakeholders and members of the public what matters to them. The consultation closed at the end of April, and we have received over 400 responses which will now be carefully considered in advance of publication of the final strategy later this year.

The strategy will help to build on the range of work we are already taking forward to tackle these issues, which include strengthening community empowerment, integrating health and social care, improving health and wellbeing, supporting the third sector and volunteering, and improving accessible travel.

As the statutory housing and planning authority for their area, local authorities are responsible for assessing housing need and demand and setting out how the requirement for housing will be met, through their Local Housing Strategy and Strategic Housing Investment Plans, this includes the size and type of housing required.

A Fairer Scotland for Disabled People - Our Delivery Plan to 2021 sets out our commitment to increasing the supply of wheelchair accessible housing across all tenures by requiring all local authorities to set a realistic target for delivery within its Local Housing Strategy and reporting annually on progress. This requirement will be included within updated Local Housing Strategy guidance.

The Affordable Housing Supply Programme supports the delivery of flexible housing capable of being adapted to suit peoples’ changing requirements. Therefore wherever possible, all units are built to Housing for Varying Needs standards.

The grant subsidy arrangements for the Affordable Housing Supply programme are sufficiently flexible to support the development of specialist housing identified by local authorities as a priority, helping disabled people with more complex needs live independently in their own homes and older people to stay in their own homes for longer.

The Scottish Government is currently exploring options for inclusion of ACEs questions in the Scottish Health Survey 2019, which will help us to understand better the prevalence of ACEs in adults in Scotland and how this can impact on people’s health and social outcomes. It is proposed that these questions will focus on the ten most commonly measured ACEs, which include: abuse (emotional, physical and sexual); neglect (emotional and physical); and household challenges in which people grew up in a household with adults who had alcohol or drug problems, had been in prison, had mental health difficulties, and where a child witnessed domestic violence or experienced parental separation. This will enable the Scottish Government to compare the results with other countries including England and Wales.

There are a range of other types of childhood adversity that can also have negative long term effects, for example, bereavement, bullying, poverty and community adversities such as living in a deprived area and neighbourhood violence. The Scottish Government is committed to addressing all types of childhood adversity and using research to inform the development and delivery of policy.

The Scottish Government continues to analyse the data from the Growing up in Scotland (GUS) study. GUS collects information on some of the commonly measured ACEs, including: parental separation, parents’ alcohol and drug use, mental disorder in the immediate family, domestic abuse, and parental imprisonment. GUS also collects information on other types of childhood adversity for, example, bereavement of a close family member, bullying, and homelessness. The evidence illuminates the circumstances underpinning such adversities and identifies protective factors associated with positive outcomes and resilience. For example GUS research indicates that improving the physical and mental health of mothers and supporting parenting skills can help protect against the impact of adversity and disadvantage in childhood. A key paper which has informed Scottish Government early years policy is Tackling inequalities in the early years: key messages from 10 years of the Growing up in Scotland Study http://www.gov.scot/Publications/2015/10/7513 .

The Scottish Government is keeping abreast of the wider evidence on ACEs and resilience including key studies undertaken by Public Health Wales and evaluations of trauma-informed approaches which aim to prevent and mitigate ACEs. The Scottish Government is also closely engaged with cross-nation work on ACEs, which provides a collaborative forum for sharing evidence and best practice on how to effectively address ACEs. The Justice Directorate has recently reviewed the evidence on childhood adversity in relation to criminality and victimisation and published a short summary paper on the Scottish Government website which was published in May.

Over the past ten years, the Scottish Government has conducted and drawn from an established evidence base on child well-being, health inequalities and early intervention. Some key sources of evidence that have and will inform Scottish Government policy on preventing and mitigating childhood adversity include:

• Longstanding research on early intervention and prevention which has informed preventative programmes such as the Family Nurse Partnership programme and the Universal Health Visiting Pathway. This includes work by the Glasgow Centre for Population Health on child wellbeing e.g. Health and early years, children and young people: a GCPH synthesis (2016) which emphasises the importance of emotional attachment, safety and building resilience.
• The Scottish Government is funding a robust evaluation of the Family Nurse Partnership. The findings will be published in late 2019 and continues to monitor the impact of Scotland’s Baby Box.
• Research on child poverty and inequality such as Annex 2 of Every Child, Every Chance: The Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan 2018-22 which includes a summary of the evidence on the drivers of child poverty, and the groups at highest risk of child poverty.
• The evidence on whole school nurturing approaches which focus on wellbeing and relationships and research which is informing the National Improvement Framework. For example, the Scottish Government published A Research Strategy for Scottish Education (2017) which highlights the importance of evidence in delivering the Framework – a key priority of which is improvement in children and young people’s health and wellbeing.
• Recent evidence informing the Child Protection Improvement Programme such as the Centre for Child Wellbeing and Protection’s Tackling child neglect in Scotland 3: rapid review of legislation and policy (2018)
• Other relevant research underway includes research relating to substance use (Scottish Schools Adolescent Lifestyle and Substance Use Survey (SALSUS)), and alcohol misuse (and the Monitoring and Evaluating Scotland’s Alcohol Strategy (MESAS).

The Scottish government works closely with the NHS Health Scotland based Scottish ACE Hub to learn from good practice and explore how parents and families can be better supported to address ACEs. The Scottish ACE Hub in partnership with the Scottish Government is hosting a research seminar on ACEs on 19th June 2018 to bring together research experts on ACEs, identify priorities for future research and build a network to share evidence.

Housing is a priority for this Government and we firmly believe everyone should have a home that meets their needs. We are already taking action to ensure everyone has access to a home that is the right size, in the right location and flexible enough to suit any requirements they may have in the future.

While local authorities have the responsibility of assessing housing requirements within their local community, we are currently refreshing the Local Housing Strategy guidance to make sure realistic targets are set at local level for the supply of wheelchair housing reflecting local needs and priorities.

As part of our action plan to 2021 we will ask local authorities to report annually on the supply of wheelchair accessible housing in their area.

We are working with health and social care partnerships, disability organisations, and the housing sector to ensure those in need of any adaptations to their home can access those services as and when they need them.

The Scottish Government firmly believes that everyone should have a home that meets their needs. Whether that is a home that is the right size, in the right location or flexible enough to suit any requirements they may have in the future.

Under the powers of the Housing (Scotland) Act 2006, tenants in privately rented accommodation can apply for a grant to carry out adaptations to their home. While permission for adaptations must be sought, a landlord cannot unreasonably refuse permission.

Our minimum standards and guidance for accessibility in new homes are the best in the UK. The guidance that supports the Scottish standards is based on the principles of Lifetime Homes Design Standard and Housing for Varying Needs. There is currently a review underway into compliance and enforcement of Scottish building regulations which will strengthen this further.

In our action plan, A Fairer Scotland for Disabled People, we set out our commitment to ask local authorities to set realistic targets in their Local Housing Strategies for the supply of wheelchair accessible housing and to report annually on progress. These targets apply to all new housing, including those in the private sector. The requirement to set and report targets will be included within the revised Local Housing Strategy Guidance.

We will continue to work with private sector housing providers to identify solutions that meet the needs of disabled people.

The Scottish Government does not hold any information relating to the tendering process for the construction of the proposed new Forth Ports Training Academy in Grangemouth. This is a private sector initiative being taken forward by the company.

The Scottish Government regards the practice of blacklisting in any form as unacceptable and, despite employment law being a reserved matter, has legislated to help eradicate blacklisting from public contracts.