Chamber and committees

Is there any information on how often the maximum fine has been used? My reason for asking is that £300 to £500 is a significant jump. That maximum has been in place and you are asking the committee to support its extension.

Good morning. It is interesting to note that the use of fiscal fines has fallen. Is there any information on the levels of fiscal fines that have been used? How often have the maximum fines been used? In the pandemic period, the maximum fine was increased to £500, and you propose to extend that.

You said that sheriffs like to give those sentences because some people cannot

“be at a drug service”—[Official Report, Criminal Justice Committee, 1 November 2023; c 61.]

at a specific time, simply because they lead “chaotic” lives. I think that that means that they cannot complete the requirements for a community sentence, so sheriffs give them a short-term prison sentence. When you said that last time, I wondered whether there was a way around that so that sheriffs can award community sentences if they can get around the challenges.

It looks as though some progress is being made in relation to the pleading diet. Forty-three weeks is 301 days—I have just used my calculator—and the legal limit without the extension is 110 days. You want to extend the time limits significantly, but how confident are you that progress will continue to be made if you do that, given that, as you know, the system was not meeting the time limits by quite a long way even before the pandemic?

I welcome that. However, as you know, I share Russell Findlay’s concerns about the impact on remand in particular. I know that you cannot answer this question, but I have questioned quite closely the Crown’s continual pushing for the indictment process to be 180 days, and I still do not have an answer as to why that would be necessary. However, I understand that setting a pleading diet is more difficult.

Do you want the national jurisdiction to remain in place under the SSI that is before the committee? Before the pandemic, the principle in Scots law had always been that a person would be tried in the particular sheriffdom where the crime was committed. The reasons for that were that the sheriffs who serve in a sheriffdom will know the area and that that approach makes sense for the accused and those who attend court for the case. Is the problem with the national jurisdiction not that, for example, someone in the sheriffdom of Glasgow—forgive me, but I cannot remember its full title—could end up in court in Aberdeen? It concerns me that you intend to make the measure permanent. The committee has no information on where people are being tried under the provision. We accepted that it was necessary and proportionate during the pandemic, but I question that provision, too.

Good morning. Lynsey, I will continue by asking a follow-up to Ben Macpherson’s question. In answer to his question, you said that there is a level of intensity required to pull together teams. Is one of the key issues that it is expensive to have the intensity to pull teams together?

The reason why I ask that is that when we first created drugs courts, I assumed that anyone who had a drug addiction would go to the drugs court, but I was told that they would be for the people who it was felt had the most difficult problems. That is because of the cost of pulling teams together, and their being resource intensive. Has the situation ever been better than it is now, or do you envisage that it is always going to be a problem because of the intensity of the resource that is required?

Does a drug treatment and testing order get around the problem of not applying a community sentence? In my understanding, a community sentence is an alternative to prison. You do something for a specific length of time, and if you are a drug user you cannot do that because you have to go and do that thing. Does applying a drug treatment and testing order get around that?

I am not sure that I understand the answer, to be honest. In case I was not clear, I will note the reference again. Karyn McCluskey said that 80 per cent of people whom sheriffs would like to give community sentences to cannot comply with them, so they give them short-term sentences.

That is fair enough. I presume that, when you lay the new bill before Parliament, you will let the committee see some detail on use of the maximum fine and what offences it has been used for. The problem is that we are being asked to accept something in the dark, because we do not really know how it is used.

I welcome the progress that has been made, but I remain concerned about the extension of the time limits and a number of other things in the SSI. I might have considered the national jurisdiction differently, but I accept that it all has to be in one SSI. I am concerned about the lack of information on the use of fiscal fines. I have a long-standing concern about that. I was concerned about it even when the previous Government was in place, because we must be clear about the range of offences that the fines are used for and how well they are used. I note that there has been a reduction in their use, which is interesting. I would have liked to know whether sheriffs are using £300 or £400 fines and what tariffs they are using for the fines. In the absence of that information, I cannot vote for the SSI.

I expressed my deep concern about the issue in meetings that I had with the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service before the pandemic. As the cabinet secretary will recall, the Parliament took a lot of pride in the time limits that were established, which were unprecedented. We extended the time limits because we felt that they were far too tight. Now, they have been relaxed to such an extent that it is having an impact on the prison population, and particularly on the remand population. Sharon Dowey was quite right to make the point about the restrictions on what we can do with someone who is on remand while they are in prison, and the proposal would prolong their situation for another year. Katy Clark and I argued that time limits could have been extended case by case. Although that would have been more cumbersome, we felt that it would be a better alternative.

For those reasons, I cannot vote for the SSI.