Under our next item of business, we will continue our pre-budget scrutiny of the Scottish Government’s 2024-25 budget. I am pleased to give a warm welcome to Karyn McCluskey, who is the chief executive of Community Justice Scotland, and to Chris McCully and Bill Fitzpatrick, who are also from Community Justice Scotland. Thank you for your comprehensive written submission.
We have about 45 minutes for this session. Given the range of questions and responses that we had this morning, time has slightly caught up with us, so I propose that we drop items 3 and 4 from our agenda, which are our private discussions following the public session? Are members content with that?
Members indicated agreement.
As usual, I will open the questioning with a general question. Can you outline the main spending challenges relating to either Community Justice Scotland’s budget or the sums that are allocated for community justice more generally?
Most of what I will say will be self-evident to committee members, who will have heard this from almost every person who has presented evidence.
Community justice is a broad church. We are still experiencing huge difficulties following the pandemic. You will be aware of the challenges relating to remand, the number of people getting released into the community and high costs.
We rely hugely on people in the third sector, who are often the lowest paid. They also work on year-to-year funding so, every January, people get notice that they might lose their jobs, yet we rely on them for the delivery of community justice—they are essential. They are the unsung heroes in lots of the work that we do in every community in Scotland. There have been real-terms cuts to those organisations’ funding. Members will be aware of recent media reports about the 218 service. For the whole of Scotland, we have only 68 bail accommodation places in the community.
The situation is vastly challenging. You would expect me to say that, but the community justice services that we provide are some of the solutions to what we experience right now in the prison service in relation to the custodial sentences that women get. Such services can achieve, and have achieved, a great deal with limited resources, but we will have to fund them differently.
The core CJS budget that funds our activities currently sits at a shade under £3.4 million. In the current environment, we have been encouraged—in fact, we have been directed—to realise efficiencies. Our total budget is a shade over £4 million, because the activities that we carry out with the Caledonian system central team in restorative justice are funded from other parts of the Scottish Government. It is really difficult to drive efficiencies across an organisation when its budget sits in three separate parts, and there were more parts than that recently.
Consolidating the budget and making it simpler would assist us in driving cash efficiencies, because efficiencies could be driven across the line. That would help because the activities that our organisation takes care of in the sector are those for which there is maximum demand. Training is one such area for which demand is almost endless, and it is proving to be increasingly difficult to meet that demand and to fully satisfy the sector’s requirements.
The efficiency measures to which we have committed include further collaboration with other organisations. We talk to other sector partners including the Risk Management Authority. The Scottish Government and child services organisations are involved in those conversations to see whether we can establish the quantum for the training resources among and across the organisations. However, it is difficult for us to fully contribute to that effort and to do what the Government asks us to do without having full control and sight of the total budget that we have available. That is quite a minor thing, but it is important in enabling us to play our part in driving efficiencies through the system, particularly in the bit of the system for which we are responsible.
What I will say will be in line with Bill Fitzpatrick’s comments. The opportunities that could be provided through additional resources for Community Justice Scotland would support us to do a range of activities. As a result of having to find efficiencies and being so close to capacity, we have not been able to make progress over recent years in, for example, changing the diversity of the training offer and broadening the training outputs and the number of courses that we offer. For example, training is required for those who work with people who have sexual offences convictions, and there has been considerable growth in that area in relation to court business and sentences, so new work in that regard would be beneficial. We highlight in our submission how justice could be done better through different interventions, disposals and ways of working in the justice system, so additional funding to support the pilot approaches, innovation and development work that would be required could be very beneficial.
Thank you. Your submission sets out the impact of reduced resources, particularly due to the increase in your statutory functions. For example, you highlight the expansion of arrest referral services, increases in the number of diversion from prosecution cases and a number of other areas. If that is the case—I am sure that it is—that will be at one end of the system, so what are your concerns about the impact that that will have on the preventative work that we want to be developed? That contemporary effective work is well set out in “The Vision for Justice in Scotland”.
I am concerned that we will retreat to our statutory functions—what we are required to do statutorily—and will not work on preventative aspects such as arrest referral. Some spectacular work is going on in that regard. We have talked about the work relating to diversion from prosecution and the expansion of electronic monitoring, and the Bail and Release from Custody (Scotland) Bill will require additional resources. None of the options involve low costs or no costs.
The third sector is involved in some of the work to address homelessness. About 55 per cent of people who are released from prison do not have plans on their release—they are often released with no place to stay, without a liberation grant and even without some of the medication that they might require, so they land in our homelessness services. There is almost a cliff edge. Those cases are urgent, but the capacity of organisations to deal with them as an emergency is severely restricted. The whole area is under real pressure right now.
12:15
Okay. I will open this up to members and bring in Russell Findlay to kick off.
The submission is extremely helpful and detailed. The most striking and, perhaps, shocking statistic in it relates to funding of criminal justice social work. The Government appears to have decided not to increase the budget by a single penny for three consecutive years, which of course means a substantial real-terms cut. The money dictates everything that you might want to do, as you have already told us. We have the new Bail and Release from Custody (Scotland) Act 2023 coming into force quite soon.
The Scottish Government places a great deal of emphasis on greater use of community disposals and moving away from imprisonment and so on, which seems to be at odds with that statistic. Are you confident that that will change? What can you do to persuade the Government to put its money where its mouth is?
That is a big question. You are right. If it matters to us, it will need to matter when the budgets are set. We are, in a way, not visible: you cannot see and touch us, as you can a prison service. Sometimes we lose out by being quite hidden.
Work can be long term. The Caledonian system, for example, is delivered by justice social work, and provides complicated skilled services. It takes two years to get each person through that programme. That needs to be funded so that those people do not have other cases coming in that bring them to their knees. It is a stressed service, as are our third sector services.
There will never be enough money; I understand that. I am a realist, but we need to look at what is happening. I looked earlier: of the overall justice budget, 2.5 per cent goes to social work and 1.47 per cent goes to community justice. Those amounts are minuscule, in the overall scheme of things. We are on a burning platform at present in terms of the Scottish Prison Service and the number of people who are going into prison. If we want something different, we will need to fund it.
Going back to the Caledonian system, I note that 19 of the 32 local authorities are able to provide that training but 13 are not, purely because of money. What difference would it make if all local authorities could do it?
I am slightly in love with the Caledonian service. I could go on for the rest of the hour about it. It is the only programme in Scotland that is accredited by the Scottish advisory panel on offender rehabilitation. It is detailed and it needs skilled women’s workers and skilled children’s workers because domestic abuse affects whole families and communities. Extra social workers are needed if we are to be able to do it.
The Scottish Government provides £4.1 million a year to fund Caledonian in 19 local authorities. Other local authorities have brought in their own programmes and six local authorities have nothing. That is not to say that they do not do anything with people who are convicted of domestic abuse, but they do not have full-time programmes, and nor do they get anything extra. In some of those local authorities, domestic abuse is incredibly prevalent and there are big challenges.
Is it a matter of public record which six local authorities they are? Do they have large populations, for example?
Some of them are large. Would you like me to read them out?
If you have them, yes.
They are Argyll and Bute Council, Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, East Renfrewshire Council, Inverclyde Council and Orkney Islands Council. We also had West Dunbartonshire Council, but it is funding the process itself and we are in the process of training right now.
The question will follow up from what Russell Findlay was asking. The submissions that we had from the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities and Social Work Scotland expressed concern about there having been no increase in funding, and talked about how there would have to be an
“increased focus on ‘core’ functions at the expense of more targeted, preventative services.”
What do you understand that to mean?
It refers to what they need to deliver. You will understand that lots of the functions of social work go beyond what is statutory, which includes community payback orders, supervision orders and so on. They provide a huge amount of other services, such as some bail support services, and they extend into diversionary work, but their priority will be to focus on CPOs and other statutory work. Bail supervision is provided by almost every local authority in the country, but such things are hugely resource intensive. I cannot speak solely for justice social work because I represent broader community justice, but we have increasingly to deal with complex people: 41,000 people who came into police custody last year had designated mental health issues, which translates into the groups whom we look at. Many of the people whom we work with require huge amounts of additional services; justice social work will not be able to provide them all.
The reason why I asked the question was that I am not sure about your quite stark statement. When I saw it, I thought that it was a cry for help to the committee in some respects, but I am not sure how that would pan out. I am considering my experience: part of the work would still carry on—people would not hang up the phone or not go out and do the work. I know that this is not for you fully to answer; I understand that, so this is to get your view. Would it have been better if the submission had looked more at how much extra money you could do with and where you would put it to support all those functions?
In practice, we already see that the statutory throughcare and voluntary throughcare that are provided by justice social work services have decreased over recent years to where they are now, which is, according to the most recent figures, 1,800 cases a year down from the maximum.
On the statutory functions that we refer to, in that context social work legislation gives justice social work a general duty to provide advice and assistance, but there is no statutory definition of throughcare. There is also no strict statutory definition of their duties in relation to diversion and supervised bail. You will see the biggest impact on and reduction in those services if other workloads increase but resources do not increase commensurately. We can see already what things are resource intensive—good things to have that have a positive effect, but cannot be prioritised.
We see that being passed on to the voluntary sector. COSLA and Social Work Scotland’s submission mentions, and you will hear this from the criminal justice voluntary sector forum, that the section 27 money for justice social work budgets is frequently used to fund the voluntary sector to provide externally commissioned services across the various areas. Those services now have to be cut consistently because councils have to prioritise in-house delivery because of their statutory responsibilities. Such effects are happening and are of concern now, and not just for the future.
Justice social work is having to reduce the focus of its work. We saw that in the submission from COSLA and Social Work Scotland. Recent research from Social Work Scotland, in the “Setting the Bar for Social Work in Scotland” report and various follow-ups, has shown that social workers have to focus on the core functions and move away from some of the more in-depth rehabilitative person-centred work that, in their opinion, might make more of a difference in people’s lives.
I cannot comment on the COSLA and Social Work Scotland position and what they should have written, but their experiences and what they say about the difficulties in delivering services in the current financial environment are certainly backed up by what we hear from local community justice partnerships.
This is a challenging environment in which to deliver justice services, partly because justice is, if you like, the final funnel. If you look at research like the “Hard Edges: Mapping Severe and Multiple Disadvantage in Scotland” report, you can see that all the failures in other systems—health, housing and employability—bring people into the justice system. The people whom we work with in community justice face a wide range of issues that compound and multiply; they frequently need a lot of help and support. There is a lack of resources that would allow that to be done in a flexible and long-term way, so instead we have to focus on delivering CPOs or certain amounts of hours, or doing court reports, which is bound to have an impact.
I tend, for obvious historical reasons, to steer clear of an awful lot of budget discussions, but I am struck by two things about the submission and what you have said.
First, your slice of the pie is small—even your share of the justice pie is small—but what you do has the potential to avoid much greater cost. In the previous panel, Sue Brookes from the Scottish Prison Service made the point that the Scottish Prison Service is, ultimately, the destination for all failure, but it is an expensive destination for all failure. You offer a much cheaper alternative to that. That is my first observation.
My second observation is that money is incredibly tight everywhere. Nowhere in the Scottish public finances is doing fine, and everywhere is under pressure.
That takes me to the challenge for reform. I accept that you have a small part of the pie, but others have big resources and they would also say that they are under pressure. Within the justice family, is a reform conversation going on about shifting the balance in favour of preventative and—forgive my crudeness—lower-cost interventions, and are there conversations with the wider public sector? You made the point a moment ago that a large proportion of the prison population has mental health challenges. Where is the health service in all this? Given how tough things are for everybody in the public sector, are conversations happening that would enable some tilting of the balance, which might—I contend that it would—end up with better outcomes being achieved for everybody?
You do not have to persuade me about the importance of prevention. I absolutely agree with you.
Are such conversations happening? Yes, they are. Is there enough space for them to be translated into action plans? No, there is not. People are so busy now. There is no capacity to give people space and thinking time to consider what else things could look like.
You are right that we get only a small slice of the pie, but the people whom we support touch the national health service, family support services, education services and everything else—the whole gamut of public services.
We have said that we would like to do some human and economic costing. That was done within the Promise. Less than 1 per cent of young people go into care, yet those people are 30 per cent to 40 per cent of the prison population. We should not be proud of that statistic because it tells us that we need to think about more prevention. How do we stop people getting into the system and how do we get people into sustainable jobs, paying tax and looking after their families with family support? We could do much more on that.
12:30
You say that the conversations happen, but people do not have the thinking space to think differently. I have to say that I am not persuaded by that argument—people will always be busy. I am trying to probe whether serious heavy thinking is going on about changing the model. This is not just about you. I am a huge admirer of what you do and the emphasis and focus on prevention, but I accept that, without tilting the balance more in favour of prevention, we will not get more prevention. I will not sit here and say that there is a pot of money somewhere else, because I know full well that there ain’t.
I am interested in how that focused and hard discussion can happen to realign budgets and approaches to shift the focus of our system away from picking up the pieces—which we do in a lot of cases—and towards avoiding the person being broken in the first place.
My personal view is that we need a long-term policy and plan; not something that is delivered within four years, because that does not work and has not worked anywhere, even internationally. We need a long-term plan about how we will reduce the prison population and shift money into prevention. We do not have that yet. I do not have a clear idea of the direction of travel. How many people is too many in our Prison Service? What do we want for the people who enter the justice system? What does that look like for Scotland?
The Christie commission started this off many years ago, and we have had iterative reports that have told us about the direction of travel. James Heckman, a Nobel laureate economist, came here and said that for every £1 that you invest in the early years, you have to invest £15 to £16 in a different way to get the same outcome. He talked about dollars and not pounds, but I am sure that it is equivalent.
We have not managed to do that in any meaningful way that will stop people coming into the system, although, on a positive note, if you look at what has happened to the number of people in the youth justice system, there has been an amazing transformation. In 2009, we had 921 16 and 17-year-olds in the prison system. In 2019-20, we had 149 and, this year, it is even lower. That will eventually translate through the system, as we prevent more people coming in, but we need to do much more and we need a coherent long-term plan.
I will stop speaking after this, because I am going to end up sounding defensive. I do not think that the situation is due to a lack of policy focus or attention from ministers. I was one of them, so I sound super-defensive here. The experience that you have recounted about youth justice gives me hope, as that is an incredible transformation in performance that is long overdue. I am interested in why we have not been able to get a necessary focus on shifting the balance across the wider public sector. Is it because there are too many players involved? Are we too stuck in the groove of what we have aye done.
It is all of the above, perhaps, Mr Swinney.
I will give you my perspective. Your question asked whether there is any serious discussion about effectively rewiring the justice budget. There is not—that is not happening in any substantial sense. The police get funded with just over £1.4 billion. We are on the criminal justice board with the police and other bodies, and is there any indication that they would be willing to surrender some of that to community justice? No. If I was the chief constable, I would not do that, either.
Let me stop you there, Mr Fitzpatrick, because that is an interesting observation. You sit on the justice board with all these players and there is no serious discussion of that point. That makes my point that, somewhere, there has to be an impetus and a priority to realise that the model has to change. I appreciate that others will say that the police budget cannot possibly ever be less than a certain amount plus some more. This committee hears those representations but, ultimately, there has to be some conversation if we are to shift that balance.
I agree, not only with your direct question but with the implications that flow from it. At some point, there has to be a discussion about what we want the justice budget to do. An uninformed reader of “The Vision for Justice in Scotland”, which was published last year, and the national strategy for community justice would think, “My goodness, the Government is putting full strength behind community justice.” Then you look at the budget. The whole community justice element of the justice and veterans budget—not just the bit that we control—is 4 per cent, and 96 per cent is spent on preventing crime, patrolling the streets, prosecuting people and locking them up in jail. The famous Joe Biden once said, “Show me your budget and I’ll tell you what your values are.” That is where we are at the moment.
I do not say that with any animus. I was a police officer for 30 years, and I was a senior police officer, so I know the pressures that the police are under, but my sense is—you have alluded to this—that everybody in the justice sector is holding the line. That is the reason why we get a retreat to statutory duties—that holds the line. People think, “I have to do that, so that’s what I’m going to prioritise and do.” We are not moving forward. Karyn McCluskey might disagree with me—she will probably give me a row after this—but the serious discussions that you think might be happening are not.
That is helpful—thank you.
My questions were going to be similar to John Swinney’s, so I will take forward that point about the disconnect between stated policy and reality on the ground. According to the Scottish Parliament information centre, the community justice budget is flat in real terms. You will know that this committee spent a considerable amount of the past year looking at the bail legislation that is coming through. It is clear from Angela Constance that the Scottish Government’s long-term strategy is to shift towards more community justice disposals as an attempt to reduce prison numbers or even keep prison numbers where they are, because the direction of travel is up, as we know.
Surely it is the politicians and the Government who drive change. Who else can possibly drive change if not the politicians who are put there to do it? Who else in the system is in a position to do that? What discussions have you as an organisation had with ministers about what they expect from you? If the money that the sector gets does not increase, are you being asked to do more? Is that being made explicit to you? Surely the courts will use community justice disposals only if they are there. Is that not the major factor that determines that our prison numbers continue to go up and, from what you say, that the sector is shrinking rather than expanding? Is that fair?
It is fair. Last year, the Scottish Sentencing Council stated:
“one of the greatest challenges to judicial confidence in community-based disposals concerns limitations of resources to support their management and delivery. A more consistent approach to the development and funding of these disposals to support their more consistent provision, robust management and successful completion would enhance judicial confidence and might be expected to support an increase in the use of community-based disposals”.
I have been involved in judicial training over the past weeks, and I must have spoken to around 100 sheriffs. We still have about 5,100 short-term sentences. I know that we hear about really difficult people. I say to sheriffs, “Why are you still using those sentences?” I cannot speak for them, but I will paraphrase. Some 20 per cent of people will not comply with community sentences, and we all know who they are—I dealt with them when I was in the police and the violence reduction unit. However, 80 per cent of those people cannot comply. You tell them that they have to be at drug services at 2 o’clock, that they have to be at homelessness services, and that then they have to be somewhere else. They do not have diaries—they are chaotic. We need something different.
In our written submission, we said that we need to look at other types of community sentences, because things have changed. People are more complicated, and we need to think about how we manage them in communities. This is primarily about reducing victimisation.
Are you saying that sheriffs and others do not make community-based disposals because they think that the offender will not comply with them?
Or that they are not available. It is not that they will not comply because, in the majority of cases, we get compliance.
Are you saying that the Scottish Government needs to put its money where its mouth is?
We need to have consistent provision. In fact, the community justice plan that we have says that we need to have consistent provision across Scotland. We mentioned the Caledonian system, which is available only in certain places. It is not right that someone might get one sentence in Inverness and a different sentence in East Dunbartonshire. There should be parity of services, although what is there already is good, and 74 per cent of people complete their orders.
If those alternatives were available in every part of the country, would they be used by the courts?
Yes, I think that they would be used by the courts.
Underlying that question is the fact that it is easy to point the finger at the Government or nod your head, but we have a role in this. We are an advisory body. We are meant to advise ministers and to contribute to the conversation. We need to be better at that.
Our submission is one of the first times that we have produced a detailed analysis on this level, but we need to convert that, because part of our mission is to not only advise ministers but inform the public. We need to make sure that that sort of compelling information is in the public and political discourse. Part of the problem is that we still have a way to go to be convincing about that. As things stand, we know what decisions policy makers think are their priorities, and most of them may be right, but we need to be a better and more active part of that conversation.
It is no surprise that John Swinney would like to come back in.
At the risk of appearing as the spokesman for the Government, the important point here is about the political discourse. It is not all about the Government. Colleagues know that I am not in any way personalising this, but there is a limit on the amount of money available. In that context, how do we try to reshape outcomes by the better use of money? For simplicity’s sake, let us say it that the split is 96 per cent to 4 per cent. If we keep on with 96:4 for ever, the chances are that we will get roughly the same outcomes or perhaps, as Katy Clark has rightly said, worse outcomes, because the numbers incarcerated are rising exponentially. The 96:4 might inevitably become 97:3 or 98:2, because we will get worse outcomes.
I have worked in the Scottish Prison Service, and my colleagues in the Prison Service work incredibly hard. There would still be a need for prison places in Scotland—
Of course.
—but we would need fewer places. The prison staff and the people who work there need the latitude and ability to intervene with people, get them on programmes and work to rehabilitate them. They cannot do that if there are 8,000 people in prison. We have to be the solution for the problems in Scotland. We have to have some hard conversations with everybody, including members of the committee, around what we want and how we will pay for it in the future.
Obviously, we are part of the community justice sector—we are the only national body for community justice, although we do not have line authority. However, if I was the Government, I would not give us a penny more until we justified spending that penny on community justice and why it will deliver the benefits that we think it will deliver. We need to be much more convincing about what the change that needs to happen will deliver for Scotland. Will it make it a safer place? Will people rehabilitate? Will people stop reoffending? Why would that be good? In the absence of that convincing case, I would keep spending money on the police, the courts and the Prison Service, because I would have no alternative.
Bill Fitzpatrick has touched on my point about outcomes. Going back to John Swinney’s last question, he mentioned figures for youth justice and the lower number of youths in custody, but I certainly get a lot more complaints in my inbox about the rise in antisocial behaviour and crime on the streets. It seems that the police say that their hands are tied in the action that they can take. What role would community justice have there? What action needs to be taken? Where are we failing in that respect? We say we have good measurements because we have fewer youths in custody, but crime out on the street seems to be on the rise. As far as outcomes go, that is not a good outcome.
12:45
If you look at the stats, you will see that crime is coming down.
I argue that that is because it is not reported.
Absolutely. I have family who have been affected by online crime and they probably did not report it, but generally recorded crime is coming down. I do not have anything to do with antisocial behaviour on the streets. That is a question for the chief constable.
The majority of people do not commit crime while they are on bail, but some need support. The challenge for us right now—and in fact for the whole of the justice system—is that court cases take much longer to be arranged, so people are on bail for substantial amounts of time, which increases the risk that they might reoffend or breach their bail conditions. That is what we are dealing with right now.
On delivering a change, the reconviction rate for people on CPOs is 25 per cent generally, but if they are sentenced to less than three months, the reconviction rate is 61 per cent. For six months it is 54 per cent, and for six months to a year it is 41 per cent. It is not working. Every year 10,500 people go to jail and 8,600 come back within a year. We are much more effective at preventing reoffending than short-term sentences. If some of the work that is done in communities was enhanced, we could drive that even lower. That has not quite answered your question.
No, but it was about focusing the resources that you have on the right areas.
Absolutely, and people need wraparound services. We often deal with complicated people who have committed numerous low-level crimes, and they are often enslaved by substances. We need to get them into substance misuse services and recovery. That takes a long time, and it is technical work.
Okay. I go back to Bill Fitzpatrick’s point. Some of the organisations need to give us more evidence on the outcomes.
I trained as an intelligence analyst, and data is everything. When I have been in front of the committee previously, it has said that it lacks some of the data around community justice. I agree. I would have a data hub in my organisation in a heartbeat. I would try to get the stats that show what is happening and where improvement is being made because you cannot take my word for it that things are getting better. I can give you some broad stats, but I need to give the detail underneath that to the committee and the Scottish Government. We do not have that detail right now because we have prioritised other data sources.
I heard the previous panel talking about some of the data needed for the Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Bill. That is probably one of our biggest data gaps. If we want to look at some criminal issues as public health issues, the first part of that is surveillance. What do we know about the issue and how do we know whether we are getting better and not worse? We do not have that, Ms Dowey.
On the point about outcomes, my comment will sound flippant, but it is not meant to be. It is real and from experience. Folk always complain about weans, as they have done for the whole of history. Every generation of weans has been a problem. They are running riot, they are uncontrollable and they are not like us. However, the serious point is that the vast majority of that is not about criminal justice. It is about children feeling secure and supported, being under the positive influence of education and being in family or carer groups. It is about that.
It recurs all the time. When I was a divisional commander a million years ago, the most letters I ever received were not about murders or rapes, but about weans causing bother and gang fights. It was not to be ignored.
The direction of youth justice in the country is the best example that we have. Take children out of the criminal justice system, except the extreme cases, which are obvious, and treat them in the care system. Make sure that they are supported and that support is available for them.
Community Justice Scotland is tangentially involved in youth justice issues as a particular specific responsibility: we are on the youth justice board. I am the representative on it and have been for the past five years. A rights-based approach to youth justice is the right way to go, and it will help, but it is a typical wicked problem. Children will always present everybody with an issue.
Thank you. A few more members would like to come in and then we will have to call the session to a close. Rona Mackay and then Pauline McNeill.
I will be brief. We are having an interesting discussion and it has been an interesting session. We are learning that if we keep doing the same thing budget-wise, things will not get better. In fact, they will get worse. It goes back to the points that John Swinney and Bill Fitzpatrick made about the sector getting together to discuss how we can do things differently. You know that if we cut the Scottish Prison Service budget in the next budget, there would be an outcry, because the preparatory work for that has not been done.
Is it possible for you and the Government to effect change in the way that is needed? As Bill Fitzpatrick said, quite rightly, it has not happened, and people are protecting their own areas. That needs to change. Being a bit simplistic about it, if we put fewer people in prison, which we aim to do, prison should not need such a huge budget and that money could be put into community justice. I am certainly no economist but until we start having the conversation about change, nothing will happen. Am I right?
You are absolutely right. It is not about simply taking money from the Prison Service and putting it into community justice.
I get that.
Health, homelessness and so on are all impacted.
It is all interlinked.
It is a broader Government cake. I know that we have a lot of people in prison right now, but there are not that many in community justice. If we are talking about 15,000 or 20,000 people, we can almost imagine them and we can start to think about who are in the most need and who need extra services, or who have come in once but will not come back in. We could start to cost that out. We need to look at costing outcomes and how much it will cost us to deliver. Then we need to look at it a bit like a start-up company; we need start-up money to effect that change.
We can absolutely do it. I am incredibly optimistic about it. I bang on all the time about preventative services and about preventing people coming in. We need to set the direction of travel and that is about long-term change. Politicians will need to do that. I cannot make up the strategy or the policy. We need to set the direction of travel and then go forward relentlessly to try to achieve it.
It has been done in other countries, so it is possible. In the 1960s and 1970s, Finland, a lot of other Scandinavian countries, Belgium and the Netherlands decided to fundamentally shift how they approached justice, and focus more on community interventions, keeping people out of prison and supporting their reintegration. They did it, and we can also do it through these discussions.
In some senses, the discussion about different justice partners’ budgets being cut is not necessarily right, because part of the issue is about how the resources that are deployed to the police, the prison service, the courts and the Crown Office are used differently, and there are levers for shifting that. The Community Justice (Scotland) Act 2016 puts a duty of collaboration on the part of those national partners to engage in community justice and think about how they can do it differently, but we have a complex system with lots of different levers for change and lots of different bits that interact with one another to produce all kinds of different outcomes. The evidence on how to shift a system like that says that you first agree a clear direction of travel and get a sense of partners’ shared values, and then try to drive that.
That is happening to a degree. There are discussions. There are clear ideas in the Government’s vision for justice and national strategy for community justice, but how they translate into practice is the big gap. Implementation is the challenge. Additional money will help that if you can target it at specific things, but it is more about how we use the resources we have to do what we know makes a difference.
My colleagues in Police Scotland—and I will give a shout out to Police Scotland here—have been hugely thoughtful about diversion and trying to get people in the custody cells to support people when they are brought into custody. I always used to say to my policing colleagues that the most important Peelian principle is number 9, which is the absence of crime and disorder. It is the litmus test of great policing. That principle fundamentally moves into the preventative space. We always focus on detection and how quickly we can get people to court, but it is about prevention. We seem to have slightly forgotten that as things have become more challenging, but it is completely possible.
There is a cost of change but there is also a time lag for effect to take place, and we need to be patient about that. It is not a competitive sport. We do not have to be first across a line and have people lose. We probably have the best police force, the best prison service and the best prosecution service in the world. If they are not the best, they will be in the top echelon. That is a hard place to be in and say, “We need more money to do what we do”. We should not cut those budgets because those are excellent services. We need to make space for something else to happen and we need to be patient enough to let it have the effect that we think it will have.
It has struck me that, if we are being honest, successive Governments and Parliaments have tried to get a shift into community justice. That is my view.
We do not have time for you to answer my question, so perhaps you could follow it up with the committee. It would be helpful for our report, given the good evidence that we have had from you. First, what exact numbers are you dealing with? We do not have any sense of that. Secondly, and to wrap up, what I am hearing is that if you had even £250,000 or £500,000 more, you could do something with that. To quote Bill Fitzpatrick, you should not be given a penny more until you can justify it. I agree with that because public and judiciary confidence are essential to move it forward.
Could you follow up with the committee on the numbers and also give us some indication of whether, if you had the additional budget, you could hit the ground running with the things that would give the public and judiciary confidence that, instead of sentencing people to prison, they can sentence them to community services?
I am happy to do that. I have lots of numbers here. We could be here for the next hour if I started to go through them all and what that looks like.
However, it is not just about £250,000. We are talking about services all over Scotland, so the figure would be a bit more significant than that. At the moment, we commission throughcare in Scotland, and the budget for that has been about £3.8 million for the past five years. Yet we have many more people coming through and we have to support them. If we adjust that for inflation, it is probably around £5 million. We have not adjusted it for inflation, so we are trying to do more with less.
We need to look at and fund whole areas of that justice journey where community justice services are involved. Part of our evidence submission talks about some of the economic costings and where we should perhaps put our money for greater effect. We will get back to you on the numbers.
Thank you.
Thank you. I have to bring the session to a close. I am sure that we could spend at least another hour on this. Thank you very much to our panel members for your time this morning.
At our next meeting, next week on 8 November, we will continue our pre-budget scrutiny when we hear from the Scottish Prison Service and then the Cabinet Secretary for Justice and Home Affairs. That concludes our meeting. Thank you.
Meeting closed at 12:59.