Chamber and committees

I will bring the session to a close. I thank you very much for attending. There will be a short suspension to allow us to have a comfort break and to allow Gill Imery to leave.

I cannot speak on behalf of the Government in relation to the preparation process for the bill, but I absolutely acknowledge your point. I am pleased that we have now highlighted the issue and that some work is under way on it.

You are right that no specific date is included in the response, but my interpretation of

“We will publish a final report later this year”

is that it would be by the end of the year. However, we can monitor that.

The Scottish Sentencing Council is independent, so the matter is more about tracking the policy on sentencing for domestic abuse and violence against women. I assume that that will be included in the further response that we get.

That concludes our business in public. Next week, we will begin our stage 1 evidence taking on the Victims, Witnesses and Justice Reform (Scotland) Bill, and we will hear from the Cabinet Secretary for Justice and Home Affairs.

Absolutely. It is interesting that you say that, in your view, some of the recommendations should not have been particularly problematic to implement. Do you have a view on why progress was not made with those ones?

Our next item of business is to decide whether to take items 6 and 7 in private. Do we agree to do so?

Members indicated agreement.

Under the next item of business, we are to review the progress that is being made on improving the response to deaths in prison custody. I welcome Gill Imery, who is the external chair overseeing implementation of the independent review of the response to deaths in prison custody.

I refer members to paper 2, which contains background information on Gill Imery’s work and a short summary setting out her views on the progress that is being made in response to the recommendations that are contained in the review report. I intend to run the evidence session for about 60 minutes, although we have a little bit of time in hand.

I invite Gill to make a short opening statement.

Thank you very much. I will open up the session to members and hand over to Russell Findlay. Other members can indicate when they would like to come in.

The aggravator is clearly an operational issue and whether it is appropriate to include it would be at officers’ discretion, but I note your point.

My recollection is that we were quite keen that something like a public awareness campaign be explored because there are previous indications that that would be quite effective.

That is fine. We can check that.