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.

My constituency of Aberdeen South and North Kincardine is home to a range of businesses, many of which are family run, that have been part of the oil and gas sector supply chain for many decades. Many have a skilled workforce, established suppliers and a knowledge of the energy sector. What support will the Scottish Government provide to ensure that opportunities in the renewables sector will be available to such businesses in order to protect jobs and support the local north-east economy?

I welcome the launch of the consultation, which has been a core part of the discussion in the Criminal Justice Committee this session. The need to prevent indefinite imprisonment via remand has been mentioned on several occasions. Will the cabinet secretary expand on how the consultation will tackle the issues of prison population and remand?

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.