Scotland's Redress Scheme: combined annual report 2025

4.4 Barnardo’s

Background

Barnardo’s engaged with the Scottish Government and the Scottish Redress Scheme at the earliest opportunity and agreed to make a contribution to the Scheme. This contribution was to be an initial £1 million, rising to a potential cap of £1.25 million if determinations from the Redress Board indicated it was required. In addition, we agreed to provide an annual statement of our wider Redress Activity hence this report.

Scheme Participation

In 2023, there was an increase in the number of determinations in respect of Financial Redress and we engaged with the Redress, Relations and Response Division about how to respond. We agreed from April 2024 to increase our annual contributions to ensure our contribution rose to the level of the £1.25 million cap. The first increased payment was in April 2024 and future payments will bring it in line with the increased contribution.

We have been asked to provide one letter of apology in the past year, and we have reiterated our offer to provide such letters if any recipients of Redress would like us to do so.

Access to Records and ‘After Care’

Barnardo’s was at the forefront of making records of children-now-adults that were in our care – providing such a service in advance of the legal obligation. The Organisation has, from the outset, retained records on all of our former children in care, including an extensive collection of photographs. These were and continue to be digitised for ease of storage and retrieval and are also backed up to avoid them being lost.

We continue to provide a dedicated Access to Records Service for those children-now-adults who were in our Residential Homes and Foster Placements. In addition to supporting the Redress Scheme by confirming applicants were in our care and timescales, we stand ready to provide any applicant or former resident details and records of their time in our care. This sharing is undertaken in a trauma-informed way, with those receiving their records being prepared as much as possible for what they may find, and indeed in some instances may not find, in their care records.

In addition to providing records, we offer any former residents of our Children’s Homes and other interested parties the opportunity of receiving a quarterly newsletter of stories, features, articles about aspects of our history and archive and so on called The Guild Messenger. We also have contact each year with a number of our “Old Boys” and “Old Girls” (as they like to be known) and offer such support and information as we can, including attending reunions and helping some who have decided to write books and articles about their time in our care. We are very conscious that these children-now-adults were told they were joining the “World’s Biggest Family” and therefore it is perfectly understandable that some of them will come back to us from time to time for a variety of reasons.

A small number of individuals who have requested their records, seek our assistance in tracing ‘lost’ relatives and we have had a couple of examples in the past year where we have been able to introduce people who have lost contact. This is always done with a great deal of care and ensuring informed consent on both sides.

The Making Connections Service was able to access some training in the past 12 months from a renowned genealogist around the technology and potential implications of DNA tracing. There are now a number of services offering a service whereby people can upload and potentially trace relatives through DNA, and we have worked with the genealogist to develop a guide around this fast-developing technology to advise and assist people who ask about it.

We continue to maintain a Family History Service which allows the direct descendants of our deceased former residents to also receive information from their records, photographs, etc of their parents, grandparents and so on who were in our care. We receive a number of such requests from family members based here in the UK, but also from Australia and particularly Canada due to our historical involvement in Child Migration.

Funding for emotional, psychological or practical support

We do hold a small fund that we are able to use to offer practical and other support to our “Old Boys” and “Old Girls”. We try to be as flexible as possible if we receive requests or are made aware of such needs.

Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry

While we have had no requests for evidence for the Inquiry in the past year, we stand ready to contribute to any future case study.

Richard Simpson

Head of Safeguarding and Quality

February 2025