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From BBC England today:
An 11-year-old boy who had both legs amputated after being assaulted by his birth parents has won his campaign for a new child safety register. Parents guilty of neglect will face similar monitoring to sex offenders following an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill, which the government said it expects to table “shortly”.
Does Scotland also need such a register?
Currently in Scotland, child protection operates differently:
There is a Child Protection Register (CPR), maintained by local authorities. This is a confidential list of children (not parents) identified as at risk of significant harm from abuse or neglect. It supports inter-agency Child Protection Plans to safeguard those specific children. Neglect is a major reason for inclusion (e.g., around 40% of cases in recent stats), but the register focuses on the child’s status and risks, not on registering or monitoring offending parents long-term like a offender database.
Before deciding to follow the English register of offenders idea, we need to establish the relative scale of the problem which has clearly triggered the perceived need in England.
From Open Democracy on 25 June 2025:
An exclusive investigation by Open Democracy has found that 377,000 children in England and Wales have been identified by local authorities as being at risk of domestic abuse in the past five years. Perhaps even more shockingly, 396 of these children have died in the same period.
From March 2025:
The Scottish Government has today (26 March 2025) published the latest official annual Children’s Social Work Statistics for Scotland regarding child protection. This uses data collected from all 32 local authorities in Scotland on child protection processes from 1 August 2023 to 31 July 2024.
During the 2023-2024 year, 3,167 children were registered onto the child protection register, a decrease of 2% from 2022-23 (3,234). The figures show that a total of 2,129 children were on the Child Protection Register on 31 July 2024, an increase of 3% since 2023 (2,077).
The most common concerns identified at child protection planning meetings for children registered during the 2023-24 year were: domestic abuse (45% of children registered), neglect (42% of children registered), parental substance use (39% of children registered), parental mental ill health (37% of children registered), and emotional abuse (33% of children registered).
All things being equal, you’d expect the figure for England & Wales to be around 11 times larger than the roughly 1 500 (45% of 3 167) reported as being at risk of domestic abuse in Scotland, or 16 500 but it’s around 75 000 (377 000 over 5 years), more than 4 times higher.
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Talking-up Scotland 