Chamber and committees

Thanks very much.

Thank you very much.

I would like to come back to a comment that you made in your opening remarks, Ms Medhurst. It relates to the growing proportion of the prison population who are vulnerable in terms of age, complex medical and personal care needs and so on. I am interested to hear more about what the likely impact of that might be on that group of prisoners in terms of resourcing the necessary staff, training, case management and trauma-informed approaches. I am interested in a bit more commentary on the implications of pressure in that regard.

When we visited the Lilias centre, I think that it was mentioned that an evaluation process was potentially going to be undertaken. I suppose that that would be to monitor outcomes and to look at the effectiveness of the unit. Jamie Greene raises a good point. I am certainly keen to understand the cost benefits arising from the two new units.

Welcome back, everybody. I welcome our second panel of witnesses: Teresa Medhurst, the chief executive of the Scottish Prison Service, and Gerry O’Donnell, its interim director of finance. I invite Ms Medhurst to make an opening statement.

The second letter is from the Wise Group on the issue of medical prescriptions on liberation. Would members like to make any comments?

Our next item of business is to discuss correspondence that the committee has received recently. I refer members to paper 3. You will see that our clerks have suggested some ideas of how we may want to take forward the various issues. I will open it up to members to raise any points or make any suggestions.

I will take the letters in turn. The first is correspondence from the Scottish Prison Service on the cost of the women’s estate.

That brings us nicely to the end of our allocated time. I thank you both for attending. If any members have follow-up questions, we will send them to you in writing.

We will now have a short suspension to allow for a changeover of witnesses.

In essence, I mean the impact on service delivery.

I am mindful of the time and the fact that there are other members who want to come in on this topic. I will bring in Katy Clark, who has not yet asked any questions of our fire service witnesses, and then Pauline McNeill. If there is time, I will bring in Russell Findlay.