Chamber and committees

Indeed. I have one final question about the feelings of families, as things stand, in respect of the slow pace of implementation of the recommendations. You clearly have close contact with families. What do they feel about where we are now?

Thanks for that—I remember that we raised that valid point. Consideration of that model is, potentially, quite a big piece of work to undertake, but we can ask more questions, because it is a valid point.

Thank you very much. Before I bring in other members, I will ask a general question about the expectation around timescales. There was one key recommendation and a number of other recommendations. Given that the recommendations apply across a system rather than across just one organisation, was there an expectation of how long might be considered reasonable for the recommendations to be implemented?

Good morning, and welcome to the 22nd meeting in 2023 of the Criminal Justice Committee. We have received apologies from Katy Clark.

Our first item of business is to welcome Sharon Dowey to her first meeting of the committee. I look forward to working with her. I invite her to declare any interests that are relevant to the committee’s remit.

I refer members to my entry in the register of members’ interests in relation to agenda item 7, which is our approach to the Police (Ethics, Conduct and Scrutiny) (Scotland) Bill, albeit that we will discuss it in private. I am a former police officer.

I know that members will be looking more deeply into that aspect.

I am keen for our session to focus on progress on the recommendations, but it might be helpful to step back a bit first. As you said, given the size of the prison population in Scotland, it is, sadly, inevitable that there will be some deaths in the prison estate. It might be helpful if you were to outline a bit of context regarding the experience of mortality in prisons. What are the common underlying reasons, for example?

Our next item of business is to review the Scottish Government’s response to our post-legislative inquiry on the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018. I refer members to paper 3. I invite members to come in with any comments or points that they would like to make on the Scottish Government’s response, or to give any suggestions for further follow up.

I am happy to go back and stress that we are keen to ensure that that issue is incorporated in the report.

Are you referring to paragraph 3 in the paper?

We are just about up to time. I will stay with the key recommendation on an additional independent review process. I note in the review report the context around the needs of families, which we have discussed robustly this morning. I noticed in the review that there was reference to the fact that that change—creating another independent process—

“would bring Scotland into line with practice in other jurisdictions including England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.”

I know that it is not just a case of taking a model from somewhere else and slotting it into our policies and processes, but I wonder whether any work was done to look at that practice and whether there was a feeling that there was good learning from that that could realistically form part of a new process in Scotland—bearing in mind what we have discussed about the other option of, potentially, looking at the existing processes and making some changes to them?