Audit Scotland has warned that The Promise — the Scottish Government’s landmark pledge to transform care for vulnerable children — is at risk of being broken due to a lack of leadership.

The watchdog said initial planning by ministers and COSLA “did not give sufficient thought to the work that would be needed to deliver its aims over a ten-year period – including the resources required, and how success would be defined and measured.”

“This has meant that public bodies across Scotland were not given a strong foundation to deliver on the care review ambitions, and work since then has been slow,” the report states.

The Promise – the ten-year commitment to transform the experiences of children and young people in or on the edges of care – was made in 2020 by the then First Minister Nicola Sturgeon in response to the Independent Care Review that was announced at SNP conference in 2016.

It was intended to transform the care system to “ensure that Scotland’s children and young people grow up feeling loved, safe, and respected, so that they can realise their full potential”.

But halfway to the 2030 deadline, Scotland’s public sector watchdog says key national plans still lack clarity, governance is “complex”, and accountability remains “challenging”, with actions taken to address problems “insufficient”.

There are also concerns over funding. The government announced a £500 million Whole Family Wellbeing Fund in 2022/23 to help deliver The Promise, but the report says it is unclear how this amount was calculated, and only £148m has been spent.

Meanwhile, longstanding problems with inconsistent recording, limited data sharing and missing information mean ministers cannot say with confidence whether reforms are improving the lives of Scotland’s 11,842 looked-after children.

Audit Scotland has given ministers and COSLA six months to act.

Its recommendations include identifying where resources should be targeted nationally and locally, clarifying roles and responsibilities, reviewing governance structures, aligning data projects, and evaluating whether the Whole Family Wellbeing Fund is sufficient.

It also says the Scottish Government must “provide clearer reporting on spending on care experience and support to delivery bodies on priorities and areas to focus funding on how best to deliver The Promise.”

The Audit Scotland report highlights widespread confusion over the roles of the Scottish Government, The Promise Scotland, the Oversight Board and the Independent Strategic Advisor.

It says these entities were “not clearly distinguished or defined from the outset – including how they relate to each other, and their respective governance and accountability arrangements”.

It describes “a confusing policy and legislative environment” which “is not enabling public bodies to deliver The Promise”.

“The landscape surrounding The Promise is complex,” the report warns. “Complex governance arrangements mean collective responsibility and accountability is challenging, and actions to address this have been insufficient.”

The Promise was first made by Nicola Sturgeon in 2020(Image: PA)

The Scottish Government established new structures, including a cabinet sub-committee and a central civil service team, but Audit Scotland said “some stakeholders are less clear on how these new arrangements are supporting delivery of The Promise.”

Children’s Services Planning Partnerships – which bring together councils, health boards and other agencies locally – are not formally held accountable for their role in delivering the reforms, and approaches vary significantly across the country.

The national plans setting out how the reforms are to be delivered have also been inadequate.

The first plan, Plan 21–24, “was not delivered in full”. The second, Plan 24–30, “has not given the clarity needed by individual bodies and sectors” and has been published in a format “which organisations have found challenging to navigate.”

“There has not been a consistent and shared understanding of what delivering The Promise would look like, and how this would be achieved, by 2030,” the report says.

Detailed “route maps” explaining what different sectors need to do will not be available until the end of 2025 – almost six years after ministers made their pledge.

The report finds that ministers were “slow to develop a framework to measure progress”. A national monitoring framework was only finalised in December 2024, and key work to assess whether care-experienced people “feel the impact of change” will not be ready until late 2025.

“Available data is not sufficient to assess if services are improving the lives of care-experienced people at a national level,” the audit says.

The absence of this assessment is described as “a significant delivery risk”.

“Given the substantial and complex programme of work identified, without an evidence-based assessment of resource requirements, it will be difficult for the Scottish Government, local government, and partners to prioritise investment to deliver The Promise by 2030,” the report warns.

Local authorities spent £1.2 billion on care experience in 2023/24, a 1.2% increase in real terms since 2017/18. But funding is “difficult to quantify and track”, and “the short-term and complex nature of multiple disparate funding streams is a barrier to effective use of resources.”

Audit Scotland says there remains “strong commitment” across the sector to delivering change by 2030. But it warns: “Further development of plans and a monitoring framework are due at the end of 2025. These must provide a catalyst for greater pace and momentum.”

In a joint statement, the Scottish Government, COSLA, Solace, The Promise Scotland and the Independent Strategic Advisor for The Promise said they were taking the report “seriously” and were “fully committed to the shared goal of ensuring that all of Scotland’s children grow up loved, safe and respected.”

They said: “Keeping the promise will transform the lives of Scotland’s families, children, young people in care and care experienced adults, now and for generations to come. It is an ambitious, long-term change programme requiring unprecedented levels of collaboration across different systems, organisations and sectors.

“The unified commitment around the promise is vitally important, and reflected in the unusual step of issuing a joint response to this report.

“Scotland has a responsibility to all those to whom the promise was made, to ensure that the pace of change is increased and delivery is felt in people’s lives, every day. This requires person and family-centred approaches to how Scotland provides care and support.”

Scottish Labour spokesperson for Children and Young People Martin Whitfield said the “damning report lays bare the SNP’s shameful failure to deliver on its promises to young people in Scotland’s care system”.

He added: “The Scottish Government has a responsibility to do right by these children, but it is clear there has been a lack of leadership and delivery under the SNP.”

Scottish Conservative shadow minister for children and young people Roz McCall said: “This is an absolutely damning verdict on one of the SNP’s flagship policies.

“It is five years on since Nicola Sturgeon launched The Promise to huge fanfare, but progress is moving at a snail’s pace.

“The report exposes that delivering The Promise for Scotland’s most vulnerable young people has simply not been a priority for the SNP.

“Their plans lack any detail, and it is astonishing that there was never any assessment put in place to define if the policy had been a success or not.

“SNP ministers are also presiding over chronic under-funding of what is needed to meet their ambitions, despite claiming £500 million would be spent in relation to this.

“The Promise was supposed to make a real difference for vulnerable young people, but in typical SNP fashion, they have monumentally failed to deliver on their warm rhetoric.”