Equally Safe delivery plan: year two update report

Governance and Monitoring Progress

When the Delivery Plan was published in November 2017, the focus of the Scottish Government 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 arrangements to identify emerging issues, drive progress, scale up participation, and maintain rigorous accountability. In doing so, we have instituted 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.

We have also formed a Joint Delivery Group, co-chaired at official level by the Scottish Government and COSLA. Its main focus is to ensure that every agency and organisation are delivering their commitments under the Delivery Plan. These groups are complemented by a Stakeholder Advisory Forum, to harness the expertise of organisations and academics in this field, and an Experience Expert Panel, to ensure that we continue to build on learning from our pilot participation projects to ensure that lived survivors of gender based violence continue to influence the implementation of the plan.

With funding from the Scottish Government, COSLA has established an Equally SafePolicy Co-ordinator. This post ensures further focus to COSLA’s leadership and implementation of Equally Safe across Local Government in Scotland.

The Scottish Government has also funded the Improvement Service (IS) to provide support to all multi-agency VAW Partnerships across Scotland to help them to measure the progress being made to implement Equally Safe at a local level and identify any areas for improvement. To support this, in May 2018 the Scottish Government, COSLA and the Improvement Service published the ‘Equally Safe Quality Standards and Performance Framework’. The key findings from the 2018/19 data returns are outlined in this report.^[1]

Through the life of the Delivery Plan, the Scottish Government has received updates from agencies and organisations in relation to their progress against the actions and objectives within the Plan. COSLA’s Community Wellbeing Board will raise awareness of the need for the adoption of a holistic response to the ambitions of Equally Safe across COSLA’s Boards and will track and report on all linked progress.

A progress report will continue to be published on an annual basis over the lifetime of the Plan until 2021.

The narrative within this report sets out key achievements against some of the actions and associated objectives. It also outlines how we intend to build on this success and move forward.