Chamber and committees

Last year, the committee visited a prison and saw for ourselves the challenges that exist around caring for the cohort of prisoners who have dementia and other physical medical conditions. From a capital budget perspective, what might be the implications for your ability to improve and reconfigure the prison estate to ensure that their needs are met?

We are discussing correspondence to the committee. If you do not mind, just park that thought and we will come back to it.

Good morning and welcome to the 27th meeting in 2022 of the Criminal Justice Committee. We have apologies from Katy Clark.

Our first item of business is pre-budget scrutiny of the Scottish Government’s forthcoming budget for 2023-24. I refer members to papers 1 and 2. We will hear from two panels of witnesses. I give a warm welcome to our first panel: Eric McQueen, chief executive of the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service; and John Logue, interim Crown Agent with the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service.

We will move straight to questions and I will kick off with a general opening question. Before we get into more detailed questioning around the specific implications of the indicative flat cash settlement, I am interested to hear your initial reaction to the Scottish Government’s proposal that there may be a flat cash resource settlement for the next few financial years.

Thanks. We will move straight to members now.

What would be the potential impact of that recruitment freeze?

Before we move on to other areas of questioning, I will stay with Mr Logue and pick up on Mr McQueen’s point that the bulk of the budget is taken up with staff costs. I assume that the position is similar in the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service. I am interested in the options or scenarios that you are looking at in the budget, however difficult they may be. Are there implications of maintaining staff costs but having to adjust things such as recruitment, or having a pay freeze or that type of scenario?

That brings us to the end of the session, so many thanks for your attendance this morning. If there are any other issues that members want to raise, we will follow those up in writing.

We will have a short suspension to allow our witnesses to leave.

I was quite heartened to read that it sounds as though the release process has improved. However, as the Wise Group articulates in its letter, the difficulties outwith prison gates seem to be the challenge and, as you have all articulated, access to GPs is an issue.

I am aware through contact with NHS Grampian in my constituency role that there is an endeavour to encourage the general public to embrace new ways of working in terms of their not necessarily always requiring to see a GP for a health concern. There are other options, such as nurse practitioners, that the public can be signposted to and can access. In the context of this issue, might that be considered so that people who are vulnerable, have addiction issues and are on release from prison can similarly be signposted elsewhere?

On that note, as per the recommendation in the committee paper, should we write to NHS Scotland? We could copy the Wise Group’s letter to it and raise some of the concerns that we have discussed this morning.

Absolutely. We could perhaps also keep Angela Constance, the Minister for Drugs Policy, informed as well.

Do members agree to that approach and to share the information with relevant committees?

Members indicated agreement.

That completes our public business for today. Our next meeting will be on Wednesday 9 November, when we will continue taking evidence as part of our pre-budget scrutiny process.