Chamber and committees

Good morning. I welcome everybody to the seventh meeting in this parliamentary session of the Public Audit Committee. I remind members and guests that the Parliament’s rules on social distancing should be observed, and it would be greatly appreciated if you could wear a face covering when moving around, entering or leaving the room.

The first item on our agenda is to invite members to decide whether to take items 4 and 5 in private. Is that agreed?

Members indicated agreement.

We are in our final few minutes. If other members want to come back in for another go, they are welcome to do so.

Going back to the overall outcomes and where we began, it struck me that, although we have a national strategy that has been in place since 2016 and an act of Parliament that provides for a new institutional structure to deliver community justice, the conclusion of the Audit Scotland report was that little progress appears to have been made in the intervening period.

I understand the points that Mr Griffin made at the beginning about the total volumes and how that has changed. However, as the Public Audit Committee, one of our maxims is follow the money. The Audit Scotland report states:

“Community justice funding makes up less than five per cent of overall justice funding, and there has been little change in recent years.”

If we are following the money and this is a priority and everybody wants to see a change in the balance between custodial and non-custodial, why is that so static?

I want to move on. I will bring in other committee members shortly, but one thing that stood out in the briefing, which other members will address, is the quite significant geographical variations in community sentencing—for example, by local authority areas. What is your understanding of the reasons for such wide and marked variations, depending on where someone is in Scotland?

We will look forward to that.

Will you confirm whether the costings in the briefing cover the booster vaccination programme that has already started for some categories of the population? Do you have any sense of the projected costs for vaccination programmes in future years? Has your work on this year’s vaccination programme given you any sense of where things are with the booster programme and what any possible future vaccination programme might look like or what it might cost?

That is helpful. Are you saying that the figure does not include the cost of the booster programme? Have I picked that up correctly?

Thank you. Mr Beattie will ask questions about the governance structure later on.

I turn to sentencing, on which I invite Willie Coffey to ask his questions. An interesting report has been published today by the Scottish Sentencing Council that goes to the heart of some of the committee’s questions and areas of concern.

Two things arise from that. Would it be possible to get that information or data into the public domain? If the point that you are making is that 5 per cent does not capture the full extent of the additional resources that are now going into community justice, it would serve your argument and the case for your department’s performance to demonstrate that more resources are going into that. As I said, quite an important maxim is follow the money.

The other question that arises for me is whether you have any targets. We asked that question in the session with Audit Scotland on the briefing. I mentioned the proportion of non-custodial sentences going from 59 per cent to 56 per cent to 59 per cent. Do you work towards any formal or informal or internally or externally set targets for that number?

Thank you very much. The briefing is wide ranging, and we have a wide range of questions to ask.

I will get us under way with a couple of questions. The briefing is broadly positive, as you said, but there are challenges that lie not behind us but ahead of us. We know that there will be increasing pressures on the national health service, which we normally see during the winter, and that there is a considerable backlog of treatment. There is also the continuing pressure of delivering the vaccination programme. Are there adequate structures, leadership and governance in place to withstand those pressures and to meet those challenges?

Thank you. Of course, we will come back—it might even be next week—to the PPE report that you produced, which is on part of this terrain as well.

As I said, we have a wide range of questions. I begin by asking Sharon Dowey to come in on an important area for us.

I am reminded just how important these questions are by the evidence in your briefing paper. Exhibit 2 shows us in very clear terms the difference in outcomes for those who are unvaccinated and those who have received the double dose. For the record, the number of unvaccinated cases recorded is almost two and a half times the number of fully vaccinated cases, and the number of hospitalisations is three times more for the unvaccinated than it is for the fully vaccinated. Sadly, the mortality rate for people who have not been vaccinated is five times higher than the rate among those who have been fully vaccinated. Matters of inequality, ethnicity and deprivation feed into those outcomes. Do you want to comment on that?