New bill gives victims of child abuse access to their records

CHILD abuse victims should no longer have to struggle to discover details about their troubled pasts, MSPs have said.

MSPs yesterday backed the Public Records (Scotland) Bill, which stemmed from a review of historic child abuse cases in care homes that found weaknesses, gaps and inconsistencies in the records of more than half of the public authorities surveyed.

The findings of the report evolved into a more wide-ranging bill to tighten up record-keeping in all of Scotland's public authorities, not just care homes.

Culture minister Fiona Hyslop, whose remit includes the National Archives of Scotland, said it was "essentially a technical bill" to address "the human cost of record-keeping failures". She said the bill did not mean authorities needed to keep everything, but identify records that were "important and had long-term value".

Labour's Ken Macintosh said public and voluntary organisations initially viewed the bill with "alarm", fearing that it might add "additional burdens and unwanted bureaucracy", but said the final bill represented "partnership rather than diktat from above".

He added: "While it is not on par with the trauma suffered by the survivors of child abuse, the importance and impact of good record-keeping have been captured many times by the BBC series Who Do You Think You Are?

"Even a character as sure of himself and his own identity as Jeremy Paxman broke down when confronted with documented evidence that his Scottish great-grandmother lost her poor-relief when she had an illegitimate child.

"I could be wrong, but I think he was already feeling emotionally vulnerable because of evidence that proves he's half Scottish."

The Tories' Elizabeth Smith said the education, lifelong learning and culture committee was "very sympathetic" to the bill's aims.

She added: "The former residents of children's homes and special schools and their families were able to put on record their immense difficulty and sometimes very harrowing experiences in accessing the records they required."