Victim Support Scotland is set to offer families enhanced counselling and help with duties such as arranging funerals

A new £1.2 million service for families of murder victims has been set up.

Victim Support Scotland will support families through counselling and help with arranging funerals.

The Support for Families Bereaved by Crime service (SFBC) is designed to support families, including when they have to attend court, handle the media and arrange finances.

The service was set up after pressure from the Moira Fund, founded by Bea Jones, the mother of Moira Jones who was murdered in Glasgow in 2008.

Kate Wallace, chief executive of Victim Support Scotland, said: "I am pleased we have reached this point in the journey of delivering this much-needed service to families across Scotland.

"What's been critical in the development phase is involving people like Bea, and others, who have lived through difficult and traumatic experiences.

"This has allowed us to understand their experiences and ultimately helped us to start the process of shaping better services for the future."

Bea Jones said she was pleased that the service - established after the Moira Fund published a report in 2017 highlighting what it said was a "service provision gap - would be able to help heartbroken, traumatised Scottish families now and in the future.

She said: "Strong links are in place to ensure a streamlined system of help is available to desperate families who need much support and will surely benefit from feeling cared for at the very worst time of their lives."