Getting emotional over my work is not something I’m prone to, but I did shed a tear when the Scottish government confirmed all the remaining children detained in Polmont had finally been transferred to secure care.

Having broken the story of the suicide of 16-year-old William Lindsay in the Young Offenders’ Institution near Falkirk almost six years ago - and having covered the fall-out ever since - I know how hard campaigners have worked to achieve this result, and how much suffering has been endured while they pushed for change.

Linda Allan, whose own daughter, Katie, 21, killed herself in Polmont four months before William, has been relentless in her pursuit of reform and in her demands for the Scottish Prison Service to be held accountable for the deaths which take place in its jails.

It was Linda who, in collaboration with researchers from Glasgow University, compiled a database of those deaths; Linda who exposed the fact that - as an arm of the state - the SPS is immune from prosecution for breaches of the Health and Safety at Work Act; and Linda who made sure the voices of those young people who had taken their own lives in the YOI — ten since 2012 — were finally heard.

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It was Linda, too, who phoned me on the night of July 16, her voice shaking, to tell me that, in the three-month gap between the Children’s (Care and Justice) (Scotland) Act receiving Royal Assent, and the regulations being enforced, another child, 17-year-old Jonathan Beadle, had added himself to the grim toll.

Jonathan’s suicide — so close to the arbitrary finish line, and at a point when there was no obvious reason why the last remaining children could not already have been transferred — seemed gratuitously cruel, though the Scottish government barely acknowledged it. How devastating for Jonathan’s family first and foremost, but also for those involved in the Independent Care Review, which led to The Promise and the Scottish government’s commitment to the new legislation.

I will never understand why it took 1,672 days from the ICR’s conclusion to reach this point, nor why, in the last year, the number of children in Polmont went up instead of down. But now let’s be positive.

Ever since the Kilbrandon Report ushered in the Children’s Hearing System in 1964, Scotland has congratulated itself on its enlightened approach to child welfare/justice. It has not always deserved the credit it took. But that no Scottish child will ever be jailed again is something to be proud of, as is the incorporation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) into Scots law.

Former support worker Niall Cahill is right: it is William’s legacy, and we should be glad of it.