Chamber and committees

I understand; thank you very much.

Good morning. I would like to follow on from where Pauline McNeill left off and ask about the interaction between the proposed investigation that would take place and a fatal accident inquiry. Has any thought been given to whether it is possible to have the type of comprehensive independent investigation that has been proposed—I completely understand the rationale for it—while a fatal accident inquiry is pending? We often rub up against the necessity of leaving things until the statutory process that, as you quite correctly say, has to take place in relation to a death in custody has taken place. Has there been any interaction between the group and the Crown on the sequencing of all this?

Thank you for that. I was struck by your remark that you were cautious about relying on the data about, to summarise what you said, 50 per cent of deaths in custody arising from what one might describe as illness or natural causes. I understand your point about being cautious about that data, because it opens up a discussion about the extent to which being incarcerated exacerbates the decline in individuals’ health and, therefore, what society must do to address that point. Am I correctly understanding the substance behind the point that you make in that observation?

I want to move on to the composition of the deaths in prison custody action group. Do you think that everyone is rowing in the same direction?

I listened to what you said in your responses to Pauline McNeill in particular about the perspective of families. Quite understandably, families want early information. A period of 24 months seems to me to be an awful long time to wait for information.

Has that perspective been the subject of discussion at the custody action group, given that you have the Prison Service, the national health service and Healthcare Improvement Scotland, among others, around that table?

But it still seems like an awful long time. What are the timescales for the scrutiny processes that are undertaken by the Scottish Prison Service and the national health service? Are those processes swifter than an FAI?

As you properly said, the arrangements for a fatal accident inquiry are entirely matters for the Crown, as FAIs are carried out independently of the Scottish ministers. Notwithstanding the issues in relation to those arrangements, I am interested in whether a pragmatic adaptation of the processes that are undertaken by the SPS and the NHS could be carried out timeously so that families would get early, prompt, thorough and courteous engagement on the circumstances of the death of a loved one.

That is not quite what I am asking. Is everyone on board?

Does the improvement of those two processes provide you with sufficient confidence that, in theory, they would substantively address some of the early issues that families may have in the absence of a fatal accident inquiry being able to be undertaken in a timeous fashion?