Landmark year for Disclosure Scotland
Disclosure Scotland's transformation that will protect Scotland’s most vulnerable.
2025 marked a pivotal year for Disclosure Scotland, delivering one of the most significant shifts in safeguarding in years.
On 1 April 2025, new Protecting Vulnerable Groups (PVG) legal requirements came into force, followed by offence provisions on 1 July 2025.
The transformation was supported by Disclosure Scotland's first national public information campaign, which ran from March 2025. The campaign raised awareness of the new PVG legal requirements, reaching 3.8 million people.
With customer experience at the heart of service development, by the end of 2025 Disclosure Scotland was operating a fully functional online service.
These changes follow a series of improvements, including enhancements to the barring service in 2021, updates to the offence lists in 2022, and the launch of an online account service in 2024.
Together, these developments have strengthened safeguarding and focused on protecting the public, while balancing the need for people to move on from offending.
As Disclosure Scotland moves into 2026, the organisation remains committed to building on this progress, continuing to protect vulnerable groups while delivering an improved experience for customers across Scotland.
Notes to editors
About Disclosure Scotland
Disclosure Scotland are an executive agency of the Scottish Government. They help organisations make safer decisions when they are recruiting people. They manage the Protecting Vulnerable Groups (PVG) scheme, which helps to ensure that people who are unsuitable to work with children and protected adults cannot carry out a regulated role with these vulnerable groups. The Disclosure (Scotland) Act 2020 will make the PVG scheme a legal requirement in Scotland from 1 April 2025, for those individuals who are to carry out a regulated role.