Equally Safe: final report

Governance and Monitoring Progress

When the Delivery Plan was published in November 2017, the focus of the Scottish Government and COSLA shifted to ensuring effective implementation of the actions within the Plan through collaboration between partners and key stakeholders. In order to ensure we took this forward effectively, we instituted fresh governance arrangement to identify emerging issues, drive progress, scale up participation, and maintain rigorous accountability. This has included:

• Establishing a refreshed Joint Strategic Board co-chaired at Ministerial/ Spokesperson level by the Scottish Government and COSLA. This group focuses on influencing strategic direction and identifying major emerging issues in relation to gender based violence.
• Forming a Joint Delivery Group, co-chaired at official level by the Scottish Government and COSLA. Its main focus will be to ensure that every agency and organisation are delivering their commitments under the Delivery Plan.
• Establishment of an Experience Expert Panel, enabling us to build on learning from our pilot participation projects to ensure that survivors of gender based violence continue to influence the implementation of the plan.

A number of multi-agency groups to bring focus to specific forms of violence have been established, including on commercial sexual exploitation, Female Genital Mutilation and Forced Marriage.

Through the life of the Delivery Plan, the Scottish Government has sought and received updates from agencies and organisations in relation to their progress against the actions and objectives within the Plan. COSLA's Community Wellbeing Board has raised awareness of the need for the adoption of a holistic response to the ambitions of Equally Safe across COSLA's Boards and will continue to track and report on all linked progress. The narrative within this report sets out key achievements against some of the actions and associated objectives over the lifetime of the strategy and delivery plan.