Chamber and committees

Perhaps I can—

We are just about coming up to time, but, in recognition of the importance of and interest in this issue, I am happy to bring in a couple of final questions. I will start with Russell Findlay, who I know has a question, and then I will bring in Pauline McNeill.

I will shortly invite the cabinet secretary to make any further comments as he wishes. However, I will stay with the issue of revealing the whereabouts of a victim’s body. The cabinet secretary specifically referred to some of the circumstances where there are ECHR rights considerations. Would that include a situation where, for example, an individual who has been convicted of a murder is unable to disclose the whereabouts of a body? That could be because of a health condition that that person has, or, as the cabinet secretary mentioned, because they cannot remember: they might remember the broad area, but they cannot be specific about it because of the passage of time. Essentially, including a requirement to reveal the whereabouts of a victim’s body as part of the parole hearing process is akin to having two bites of the cherry, given that the refusal to reveal the whereabouts prior to sentencing would have already been taken into account when the sentence was imposed.

Our next item of business is consideration of the committee’s action plan. I refer members to paper 3. I intend to go through the paper section by section, just to confirm whether members have any comments, wish to make any amendments or, in fact, disagree with the assessments of progress to date.

The first section is on “The impact of COVID and recovery”. Do members wish to flag anything?

As members have no comments, we will move on to the section on “Prisons and prison reform”. It might be worth mentioning or including reference to the Promise, particularly in the part on women and children. In March 2022, there was an update on the Promise. Given that it is supporting young people who are care experienced and, ultimately, seeks to reduce the number of young people in care, it might be worth including that for reference.

Thanks. We have taken a note of that suggestion so that we can follow that up.

Thank you. Could you move your motion?

Thanks. Those are all relevant updates. I think that there is support from members for facilitating a visit to Cornton Vale once it is ready to receive visiting groups. We will pick that up.

This is perhaps not totally relevant to this section, but it is relevant to the action plan. I recently attended a meeting of the cross-party group on health inequalities, at which Wendy Sinclair-Gieben provided an update on the work to address health inequalities in prisons. She made the point that, in relation to the inspection work that she undertakes, her desire is that there will be an opportunity to undertake a review of the healthcare model in prisons, which members would agree is highly relevant to women. That is something to note.

The Scottish Drug Deaths Taskforce has done quite a bit of work on recovery cafes for its report, but I do not see an awful lot of specific reference to recovery cafes. We should monitor progress on that action.

Thanks. That is noted.

We will move through the action plan. We are on page 10.

On that note, I bring the session to a close. I thank all our witnesses for attending the meeting.

There will be a short suspension to allow for a changeover of officials.

Perhaps we will just pause for a moment.