Chamber and committees

An element of this will be about project planning and all that stuff, but there is a deeper element of cultural and attitudinal change. How do you manage and drive those two distinct elements of the practical project plan and the cultural and attitudinal change?

Thank you.

Would you allow me to ask one question of Chief Superintendent Frew in the light of what has just been said there? I was struck by how you articulated that point about somebody being released through the parole system. However much you engage with people, it will be a traumatic event. A lot of what we are talking about is trying to reduce the effect of that trauma. Is that a fair representation of the point that you have just made?

In trying to work out what the Crown contributes towards the delivery of trauma-informed practice, is it part of the Crown’s thinking that it must be constantly looking for ways in which it can adapt or reform the whole process of preparing for prosecution, to try to minimise that effect?

You say that the conversations happen, but people do not have the thinking space to think differently. I have to say that I am not persuaded by that argument—people will always be busy. I am trying to probe whether serious heavy thinking is going on about changing the model. This is not just about you. I am a huge admirer of what you do and the emphasis and focus on prevention, but I accept that, without tilting the balance more in favour of prevention, we will not get more prevention. I will not sit here and say that there is a pot of money somewhere else, because I know full well that there ain’t.

I am interested in how that focused and hard discussion can happen to realign budgets and approaches to shift the focus of our system away from picking up the pieces—which we do in a lot of cases—and towards avoiding the person being broken in the first place.

That is helpful—thank you.

Of course.

That would be helpful. Thank you for that.

I will move on to the issue of trauma-informed practice. The way in which Mr Fraser articulated his personal commitment to embedding that practice has, in a sense, answered one of the questions that I put to Dr Bruce earlier about where culture is in all this. Will you develop some of the points about what is necessary to ensure that an organisational culture is able to accommodate and deliver a trauma-informed approach in all its practice?

My last question is on resistance. I imagine that there are 101 practical reasons why some of this is difficult. Is that what you are encountering, or are you encountering almost philosophical resistance to the type of approach that is being taken?

You have just made a very interesting observation about other very practical procedural approaches that can be taken. I was also interested in Mr Watt’s point about the nature of the Parole Board hearings being more inquisitorial, which relates to some of the questions that the committee has considered—indeed, my colleague Katy Clark has led this very line of questioning—whether trauma-informed practice is almost incompatible with an adversarial court system. I do not take that view, because of solutions such as evidence by commission, but it opens up the necessity to think about the process of interrogation and scrutiny that goes on within the court system.