Current status: Answered by Jenni Minto on 11 November 2025
To ask the Scottish Government what action it is taking to improve breastfeeding rates across the country.
In June 2025, we published our five-year Breastfeeding and Infant feeding framework 2025-2030, which incorporates recommendations from the Becoming Breastfeeding Friendly (BBF) 2019 report, our longer term aims and sets out our detailed delivery plan over the next year.
This framework sets out our ongoing commitment to the Unicef UK Babyfriendly accreditation, and we continue to fund Achieving Sustainability Assessments, foundational training, and the Scottish Lead post.
In 2023-24 the Scottish Government permanently transferred funding to Health Boards for Maternal and Infant Nutrition as part of the Outcomes Framework funding, which covers a wider range of outcomes. The published Scottish Budget for 2025-2026 includes £72.2m within the NHS Boards budget for the Outcomes Framework. It is up to Health Boards to decide how much of this funding to allocate to each outcome. In 2025-26 territorial Health Boards received an overall cash uplift of 3%.
From 2025-26 the Scottish Government is permanently transferring over £0.8 million further investment into the baseline budgets of NHS Boards to provide a sustainable basis for funding for interventions to support breastfeeding, which can include peer support, following an additional investment of over £11 million since 2018.