Campaigners vowed to fight on after Scotland’s highest court rejected their concerns over the Scottish Government’s controversial Named Person scheme in early September.
In a written judgment, the Inner House of the Court of Session ruled that the legislation does not conflict with human rights or data protection laws. Responding to the judgment, Simon Calvert, spokesman for the campaign group No to Named Persons (NO2NP), said that they will be appealing.
Mr Calvert said: ‘We do not believe that the judges engaged properly with the arguments we put forward so we will take them to the Supreme Court. Ultimately we may even have to go to Europe. If the nature of the Named Person scheme was as the court described then we would not have brought this action in the first place. But the legislation gives a Named Person broad powers to interfere without parental consent.’
Mr Calvert felt that the judges presiding over the case failed to see the distinction between how the court describes the scheme’s aims – the promotion of child welfare – and the term ‘wellbeing’, used in language surrounding the scheme.
‘Welfare approaches use “significant harm” as the threshold for emergency state intervention in family life, whereas government-funded guidance on the Named Person scheme says wellbeing is just another word for “happiness”.’ He also reiterated the argument that named persons will overburden an already struggling network of social workers and health professionals, leading to vulnerable children being missed.
Letting children down
‘Tragic cases in recent years have proven that the system cannot cope, so letting down children it was supposed to defend. The safety net will be stretched more thinly than it already is and more at risk children will inevitably fall through it as Named Persons swamp the caseload of social workers with tittle-tattle about perfectly normal families.’
£61 million of public money has been allocated for the Named Person scheme, a sum with which the Scottish Government could fund 450 front line social workers or 370 front line police officers for four years.
