“A house is not a home because the plans exist – it becomes one when there is food in the cupboards, heat in the radiators and people who know they are safe, loved and belong. That is what delivery looks like in real life, and it is what Scotland now must make happen.”

(Oversight Board to The Promise, Report Four, 29 September 2026, p. 7)

There’s a lot been said and written about The Promise in the past week, following a pretty ferocious but welcome report published by its Oversight Board last Tuesday (29 Sept). If you are short of time there is a great summary here, or even better have a wee listen to this excellent Scotcast episode with David Anderson, Chair of the Oversight Board. You can hear his frustration and exasperation in every sentence, but also his resolve (‘The Promise: government hamstrung by bureaucracy?’, BBC Scotland).

I read this report, and listened to the podcast, with that feeling that the Oversight Board and its Chair must surely be inside my head. (And that is never a very relaxing place to be.) So many words and phrases had me shouting, “Yes, Yes, Yes!”, “Absolutely – that!”, and “What he said!”

Their report made so many on-the-money points, with my top picks including “Activity is not the same as action”; “Too much … remains on paper, not in practice”; and “A right that Parliament creates must become a right people can use.” It also leaned into one of my top rants, that providing more platforms for the voice of lived experience has provided little evidence of change as a result. Or in their words “… being asked for a view is not the same as having influence. People should be able to see what changed because they spoke.”

Yes, I can hear you yelling now too.

Crucially, the Oversight Board reminds us that the intent of The Promise was not “so the country could become better at describing failure” (for that has become a national pastime, right enough), but the aim was of course to create better lives now, and in the future, for care experienced people. That laser focus on outcomes (or ‘results for people’ as the late, great Colin Mair helpfully defined them back in my community planning days) is so often lost in translation, as we move from planning into implementation.

The report reminds us right at the start that “Care experienced people told Scotland the truth”. Yes, they did. And Scotland listened, and Scotland heard. The Promise was published in 2020 saying all the right things, a beautifully crafted narrative with the confident language of love/loved/loving flowing through its pages. As my colleagues know, I have a very unscientific, low-brow way of analysing and assessing documents through the simple power of the word count. There are 104 mentions of these three words in the 124-page Promise document (I mean that is nearly one on every page!). So unusual in any ‘official’ document. It looked different, felt different and sounded different.

The Independent Care Review wore its heart boldly on its sleeve (also threading this through its graphics), and we felt that surely this time change must now happen. Over 5,500 people had shared their views and experiences, over half of whom had direct experience of the care system as children, young people, adults and families. The Promise really did have voice at the centre of everything, not just its logo. And unlike many a national plan which lacks time and money, The Promise came with a ten-year timescale, and then a £500 million financial commitment for the Whole Family Wellbeing Fund alone. Not too shabby, as they say.

So how have we come to this point, with only a few years left until its original deadline of 2030? (Although more than once in the past week, I have heard “Oh it’s the end of 2030”, thereby adding what feels like a cheeky, but maybe essential, extra year to the original timescale.) It is painful to accept that Scotland’s ambition to #KeepThePromise has moved at a glacial pace, and we are running out of time.

Nowadays we endure endless chatter, to the point of obsession, about ‘whole family support’, which everyone suddenly seems to be providing, even if they are not, and don’t even get me started on the people who think it’s just been invented. If I had a pound for every time I heard the phrase ‘the right support at the right time’, I’d already be a millionaire, yet the more it is said, the less it seems to be evident.

Families need everything, from walk-in, reach-in early help with whatever really matters to them, through every form of support up to and including the most intensive community-based and residential options. This is what keeps families together safely and helps them to thrive. Yet in reality very few areas in Scotland have all of this on offer.

Meaningful, community-based early help remains thin on the ground. At the other extreme, the criteria for referral-based services is becoming tighter and tighter, bizarrely meaning families need to be on the cusp of breakdown, and their children on the edges of care, before the support they desperately need is offered. Public authorities are stressed about the ‘care crisis’, whilst spending £500m a year on fostering and residential placements for babies, children and young people – many of whom could have remained safely with their families with earlier, intensive, high quality (and let’s be honest substantially cheaper) support.

I definitely don’t remember this picture being recommended by the Christie Commission, and it is certainly not the vision of The Promise. Yet the babies, children, young people and families we support at Aberlour Children’s Charity are steeped in this reality every day.

I am famously obsessed with Scotland’s implementation gap between our progressive, well-informed, and widely supported plans, policies and strategies and what real life is like for real people. In the third sector, we may delight at our occasional seat at the table to help influence and shape the words, but (hang on a minute!) we don’t get the chance to influence where the money goes, or indeed how much money is in the pot in the first place. We are criticised if we call out the attitudes and cultures which thread through many so-called ‘helping services’, supposedly there to support children and families and uphold their rights, but too-often experienced by them as judging and diminishing.

As the Oversight Board has reflected, too often when we move into implementation we end up monitoring and reporting on busy-ness, not change for people. I’ve sat on oversight and scrutiny groups where I have felt nothing short of gaslit listening to reports of ‘progress’. I’ve read mounds of paperwork which would make your eyes bleed without actually saying very much. This includes some real classics where those doing the reporting have invented more shades of the rainbow on top of the traditional Red-Amber-Green (RAG) status than you would have thought humanly possible, just to give themselves a bit more wriggle room.

So where does this leave us as we approach the home straight for The Promise? The Oversight Board is clear that it is time to focus on delivery over all else. There are clearly articulated calls to action. But this is where accountability for delivery feels a wee bit more fuzzy. If “The Scottish Government and local authorities must …” or “The Scottish Government and those responsible for national delivery must …” or “The Scottish Parliament, Scottish Government and local authorities must…” who exactly is doing what by when? Who should we check, chase and cajole to get things done? Who do we pick up the phone to, to see how it’s all going? This is not so clear.

And of course all of these expectations are being directed at a public sector which (if the Scottish Government’s plans come to pass) is now facing the biggest structural shake-up for decades. From past experience, this is about as big a distraction, resource drain, and brake on progress as you can imagine. There is of course no evidence that structural change improves results for people, but it is repeatedly treated as the go-to fix, when all seems broken.

I love the words and intent of The Promise as much now as I did when it was first published. Its Oversight Board have done Scotland’s babies, children, young people and families proud by continuing to shout loudly and clearly that the status quo is absolutely not OK.

For the rest of us, it’s time to ask, for every meeting, for every report, for every decision, for every action and for every investment – will this improve results for people? For we have no more time to waste.