The Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland has published its strategic plan for 2026–29, with independent advocacy and collective advocacy given a more prominent place. The Scottish Independent Advocacy Alliance (SIAA) contributed to the consultation process that shaped the plan. For SIAA, the strategy represents both a meaningful step forward and a call to action.
What the strategy says
The Mental Welfare Commission’s new three-year plan contains an explicit commitment to “further develop working partnerships with independent and collective advocacy services to ensure systemic human rights concerns are identified and addressed.” This underlines independent advocacy’s role in upholding human rights and being part of accountability and access to justice.
The strategy also commits to working with collective advocacy groups as a practical route to improving how the Commission engages with the people it visits. It plans to “improve ways to engage with those we visit including use of technology, questionnaires and working with collective advocacy groups.” This is a structural role for collective advocacy groups in shaping the quality and depth of the Commission’s on-the-ground work. If successful, this could become part of the groundwork for achieving the recommendations around strengthening collective advocacy from the Scottish Mental Health Law Review (SMHLR).
The strategy names independent advocacy access, alongside restraint and seclusion, as a subject for dedicated thematic reporting, and commits to improving its visibility in monitoring data, including tracking uptake trends over time. This means the extent to which people can actually access independent advocacy will become a more visible, measurable element of how services are scrutinised.
The Commission’s plans for advance statements also give independent advocacy organisations a central role. A proposed “advance statements accelerator” would be delivered in partnership with independent advocacy organisations, third sector bodies, and people with lived experience – treating advance statements as a rights safeguard rather than an optional extra, and aiming to drive a step change from what the strategy acknowledges is currently a low baseline.
SIAA’s contribution to the strategy
SIAA participated in both rounds of consultation that informed the new plan, responding to the Commission’s 2025 survey and its December 2025 draft strategy consultation. Across both, SIAA made the case that independent advocacy and collective advocacy must be understood not as services that complement the Commission’s work, but as essential infrastructure for realising the human rights framework that underpins it.
Responding to the first draft of the strategy, SIAA welcomed the inclusion of collective advocacy and the strengthened human rights framing, while encouraging the Commission to go further, in particular by making an explicit commitment to address the funding pressures currently threatening the sustainability of collective advocacy organisations. SIAA noted that if collective advocacy expertise is lost before law reform implementation begins, there will be little infrastructure to build upon when SMHLR recommendations are enacted.
SIAA is encouraged to see these themes reflected in the published plan and looks forward to working with the Commission and SIAA’s member organisations as the strategy develops.
The bigger picture: SMHLR and the right to advocacy
The 2026–29 strategy is set against the backdrop of the Scottish Mental Health Law Review, whose far-reaching recommendations include expanded rights to independent advocacy including collective advocacy. The Commission has signalled its intention to work with advocacy partners to jointly deliver relevant SMHLR recommendations, and has committed to collaborating with organisations such as VOX Scotland and independent advocacy organisations to learn from their expertise.
Crucially, the SMHLR itself underlined the significance of collective advocacy in terms that resonate strongly with SIAA’s own position: that collective advocacy groups are “at the heart of starting to redress the power balance between services and the people who receive the services,”. Collective advocacy is central to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) requirement for the meaningful participation of disabled people in decisions that affect them. The Commission’s new strategy, with its commitment to deepen these partnerships, is a step towards realising those UNCRPD rights and SMHLR recommendations.
There is also a wider international dimension. SIAA’s earlier response drew the Commission’s attention to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights’ recommendation that UK and devolved governments strengthen community-based mental health support and implement targeted measures for groups disproportionately affected. Coordinating the Commission’s monitoring work with this international framework recommendation could strengthen accountability.
What’s next?
SIAA welcomes the new strategy as a positive development and is committed to supporting its delivery. The inclusion of independent advocacy and collective advocacy in visiting practice, monitoring, advance statements, and systemic human rights work marks an encouraging shift in how the Commission articulates its relationship with the independent advocacy sector.
SIAA will continue to engage actively with the Commission, including on benchmarking independent advocacy provision, supporting intelligence-gathering between visits, and helping build the Commission’s connections with collective advocacy groups across Scotland, including groups that may not yet know they form part of a wider independent advocacy movement.
The funding pressures facing collective advocacy remain a live and urgent issue. SIAA will continue to make the case that sustaining these groups through the period of law reform is not optional, it is a precondition for the rights-based mental health system that Scotland is working towards.
Read SIAA’s 2026 joint report with VOX, Advocating for Collective Advocacy.
