Chamber and committees

Thank you. That would be helpful.

We speak about the expansion to 1,140 hours, but they are not mandatory. Do you have any data on, or have you done any work to understand, why parents and carers may exercise the right not to avail themselves of the 1,140 hours?

Okay. Thank you.

I have one final question before I bring in Willie Coffey. In paragraph 25 of the report, you refer to satisfaction surveys of parents in consideration of the flexibility of the arrangements and so on. If I have read it correctly, there was a much higher satisfaction rate among parents or carers when the children were living in households in which parents were not at work, for example. There also seemed to be a higher satisfaction rate in the more deprived areas. Do you have any rationalisation of that? Could you enlighten us as to why you think those are the results?

In the report, you mention other weaknesses over and above the failure to carry out equality impact assessments. You set those out in paragraph 83. Again, they stand out as areas of significant concern. You say that the Scottish Government and the criminal justice board

“did not agree clear plans, outcomes and success measures”

for the recover, renew, transform programme; that

“the RRT advisory group was not given the opportunity to be sufficiently engaged”

in that programme; and that the advisory group did not seem to get full access to decision making.

You also say that

“wider public reporting of the programme was limited”;

that there was inconsistency; that minutes of the criminal justice board meetings were not produced; and that the results of a lessons-learned exercise appear not to have been adopted.

We would expect such rudimentary elements of operation to be met but, according to your report and findings, that was simply not the case. Will you elaborate a bit more on why that was?

Has work begun on addressing those weaknesses?

Thank you. We might follow up on that as well, as we consider our next steps.

Craig Hoy has a final series of questions.

I will bring you back in later.

I call Craig Hoy to put some questions to the witnesses.

The report addresses the response during the pandemic and the lockdown, and all the restrictions that were in place at that time. Willie Coffey has a series of questions on that, but I will ask one before I turn to him.

One of the things that happened during that time was that the sheriff court system was consolidated into 10 hub centres and the JP courts were also incorporated into that. We had 10 hubs and they were asked to consider essential business. Could you tell us how essential business was defined?

Thank you; that statement set the scene very well. You mention at the start of the report that you have a plan to monitor progress against the report’s recommendations. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you plan to do that monitoring work?

One of the issues that you have alluded to, and which jumped out at me from the report, was what you describe as a failure to consistently apply equality impact assessments. You have mentioned the recover, renew, transform advisory group, which I think you said included organisations such as Rape Crisis Scotland and Victim Support Scotland. Why were they not involved in equality impact assessment work? Was such work simply not carried out at all?

Earlier, we spoke about the prioritisation of cases. When the number of hub courts went from 39 to 10, some prioritisation had to be exercised. Was there no equalities impact assessment, or was no equalities sieve applied to the prioritisation work at that point?