Chamber and committees

Do you have the right climate and are you getting the right response to the effort that you are pursuing? Are partners responding in a helpful way?

That helpfully gives the committee a sense of how you will proceed on issues in connection with Police Scotland. I am interested in your earlier evidence about your interactions with other bodies that have an effect on the operational efficiency of Police Scotland, and I am interested in understanding how you intend to pursue those questions, because they strike me as falling into different categories. In relation to the welfare of vulnerable citizens, for example, there is interaction with the health service and the third sector on how the mental wellbeing of individuals can be supported more effectively in order to try to reduce the crisis intervention of calling the police. I have seen that at first hand in my constituency experience, and that has been appreciated. There will also be examples of, frankly, your officers having their time wasted by the inefficiency of the court system.

I am keen to understand how blunt your conversations with others are about how they must get their house in order to help you to improve efficiency in the police service. What is the dialogue like with other parties—the Crown, the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service and health boards—to ensure that a combined public sector resource is used to its maximum level of efficiency, which can help to reduce the budget asks of Police Scotland in the years to come?

If you do not mind, I will write to you after the committee meeting with a suggestion of a venture that you might wish to visit in my constituency in the city of Perth, which absolutely ticks the box that you just set out. However, I am interested in how you are pursuing a systematic conversation, because that will involve local authorities, third sector providers and health boards to ensure that that actually happens on the ground and in a more systematic way, rather than having the occasional island of excellence, if I can put it that way.

That would be helpful. In the communities that I represent, there is a particular proposal on the co-location of police and local authority services, which I am keen to encourage. I will use my opportunity at the committee to try to nudge that along a little bit, convener. There are significant opportunities for the release of sites that could be of enormous strategic importance in, for example, the fulfilment of social housing objectives that many of us would want to be taken forward. Therefore, that analysis would be very helpful.

That takes me to my final point, which is about the urgency and necessity of advancing the agenda. I have read too many submissions in my time—some have come to the committee in the short period during which I have been a member of it—that basically say, “We cannot possibly make any more savings, because we are absolutely up against it. We need to have more money, because we have exhausted all the savings”. However, today, I have heard that Dalmarnock is 20 per cent occupied. The exercise that you are going to do, which I welcome, will probably throw up quite a lot of data of a similar nature.

I simply come back to where I started, which is about the necessity of viewing this year as one that has given the police service the time and space to redesign. To be frank and candid, the idea that the only answer to the challenges is more money is just not going to fly in the years to come, because public finances are under such pressure. I hope that the exercise will help to inform public debate about some of the realities that must be confronted.

Forgive me, but there is also an important point about partnership in this exercise. Our view might be that all of those solutions have to be found from within the police capital budget, but the dynamics of budget changes will never provide for that.

At the same time as Police Scotland is getting whatever its capital budget is—£64.6 million—I would think that local authorities will be getting ten times that in capital budgets. It is fundamental to this exercise that we try to find some ways through this by collaboration with local authorities. It has to be thought through in a broader context than by looking only at the police capital budget and asking how we can enhance it.

Deputy Chief Constable, could I pursue that a little further? Am I right to understand from your comments in response to Katy Clark’s question that your officers will go with the grain of the Lord Advocate’s guidance but keep a watchful eye out for anything that is not consistent with it? I will spit it out: I take it that, given the Lord Advocate’s position, Police Scotland will give the proposal a fair wind?

Part of what underpins the question that Katy Clark puts, which is my view as well, is that we understand, accept and do not in any way question the proper role of the police in upholding the rule of law, but that must, on this issue, be done in a manner that gives the policy intent of the proposal the maximum opportunity to thrive, if that is possible.

In essence, you have covered the internal changes that Police Scotland can make to the operating model. I would like to explore that a bit further. In some circumstances, those changes will relate to working practices and approaches to the management of the estate. Am I right in concluding that there is, within the design of that model, a recognition that we are living in a society that has, relatively speaking historically, a very low level of crime? I accept that that has to be continually suppressed and prevented, but the nature, level and character of crime, with the best predictions that we can make about the contents of the approach, should inform the construction of the police force that we require for the future.

If we were to address Pauline McNeill’s point about the perennial discussion of the not proven verdict, it might help us to understand exactly what “not proven” means. I am struck by the reference in the faculty’s written submission, which describes not proven as a “measured means of acquittal.” I would be grateful for an explanation of the thinking behind that description of the not proven verdict. What does it actually mean?

A matter of emphasis about what?