Chamber and committees

Good morning. I welcome everyone to the 22nd meeting in 2023 of the Public Audit Committee. The first item on our agenda is a decision on whether to take agenda items 3, 4 and 5 in private. Do members agree to take those items in private?

Members indicated agreement.

Thank you. We will come to your relationships with the victims support organisations a bit later on. Notwithstanding what you have told us in the first 10 minutes, there are some quite direct criticisms of your failure to engage sufficiently with those organisations. However, we will come on to that later.

Mr Rennick, may I ask for some clarity on the answer that you gave? You said that there is £48 million for victims support organisations. Is that additional money that has been put into the system? Over what timeframe has it been put in? We often hear about figures such as £48 million, but is it over a year, two years or three years?

Can I go back to a fairly fundamental question? Do you accept the findings of the Auditor General’s report?

Yes, of course, Mr McQueen.

Mr Rennick, you will have heard the Auditor General’s evidence to the committee on the report that we are discussing this morning. He said that Victim Support Scotland and Rape Crisis Scotland

“were not used to the extent that we might have expected”.—[Official Report, Public Audit Committee, 8 June 2023; c 9-10.]

Have you reflected on that over the summer and are you redoubling your efforts to address that shortfall?

Finally, let me turn to another related aspect. The report is quite critical of your approach to considering the equality impact of decisions that you have made and of the transformational change programmes that you have.

At paragraph 79, the Auditor General rightly points out the “unequal impact” of the court backlog. For example, he points to three categories of people. One is young children who are going through a formative experience in life. If they are witnesses or, indeed, victims, those delays will have a disproportionate and potentially devastating impact on them. The Auditor General’s conclusions were that he did not see enough evidence that those issues were being sufficiently taken into account.

Secondly, women disproportionately are caught up in the court backlog system, again as witnesses and, unfortunately, often as victims in the system. What account has been taken of that in addressing where the resources need to go and where the priorities are?

Thirdly, the Auditor General points out—this goes back to earlier questions that we had this morning—the situation that we have with people on remand in our prisons. You described how we have both the highest prison population and the highest proportion of those in the prison population who are on remand of almost anywhere but, even within that, there are great inequalities. The Auditor General points out that 25 per cent of males in prison are on remand, 30 per cent of women in Scottish prisons are on remand and 48 per cent of young people in Scotland’s prisons are on remand.

Why have you not sufficiently built equality impact assessments into decisions on the work that you have been doing, that you are doing and that you will do in the future?

Just so that we are clear, at the end of paragraph 81, the Auditor General concludes:

“we found very limited evidence that equality impact assessments were developed in a timely manner for most of the RRT workstreams and initiatives, with only two equality impact assessments prepared.”

That is a very poor result, is it not?

Is it not the case that equality impact assessments and equality considerations, rather than being some bolt-on at the end to check how you did, should have been built into the foundation of the work that you were doing?

Okay. On that note of agreement, I draw this morning’s evidence session to a close. I thank Mr Rennick, Ms Dalrymple and Mr McQueen for their time. We have quite a lot to consider in the evidence that we have taken. We will certainly consider what our next steps are. Thank you very much once again for being here with us this morning. I will now move the committee out of public session and into private session.

Okay. I take you back to my original question. To what extent is that currently fully costed?