Chamber and committees

Good morning and welcome to the 11th meeting in 2021 of the Criminal Justice Committee. No apologies have been received.

Under agenda item 1, the committee is invited to decide whether to take items 2 and 3, and any subsequent draft reports arising from the committee’s recent round-table evidence sessions, in private at future meetings. Is that agreed?

Members indicated agreement.

It would perhaps be helpful for the committee to be kept up to date on that.

I am conscious of the time, and I want to move on to some questions on the prison estate and the Scottish Prison Service.

Although we acknowledge that there is a strong case for reducing the use of imprisonment as an option after conviction, we have a pressing situation with overcrowding, the changing demographic in prisons and buildings that are no longer fit for purpose or that do not meet the needs of the prison population.

Following the discussions that you have had with the Scottish Prison Service about making improvements to the prison estate, can you give some indication of timescales for replacing some parts of the current estate that are no longer fit for purpose? If there is a need to provide funding earlier to facilitate that, would that be feasible and possible to do?

Have you finished your questions, Jamie?

Welcome to the 10th meeting of the Criminal Justice Committee. Apologies have been received from Pauline McNeill.

The first agenda item is to decide whether to take in private items 4 and 5, which are consideration of today’s evidence and our work programme. Do we agree to take those items in private?

Members indicated agreement.

Thank you, cabinet secretary. We will move straight to questions. I ask that members keep their questions as succinct as possible, given that we have a fair bit of ground to cover. Russell Findlay has questions about Covid recovery.

That was helpful. I will bring in Katy Clark, who has some follow-up questions on COP26.

I will bring in Russell Findlay, and then Katy Clark can come in briefly.

I am watching the time, but we have two or three final questions that we would like to ask. Fulton MacGregor will ask about community sentences.

I thank the cabinet secretary, Mr Rennick and Mr McGillivray for their attendance. We appreciate your time.

We will take a five-minute break before we move on to the next agenda item.