Chamber and committees

Mr Jones, I want to ask you about another piece of correspondence—the letter that was sent by Cat Boyd of the Public and Commercial Services Union to the Cabinet Secretary for Justice on 14 December. I am going to go into a new area that we have not covered, because I am looking for your response to what is said in that letter.

The bit that I want to concentrate on—I am sort of looking at Mr Redmond here—is the communication element. In her letter, Cat Boyd from the PCS, on behalf of her members—that is, people who work in the court service—makes criticism of the

“Lack of communication/accurate communication. If custody hasn’t arrived in the building it is very difficult to find out where they are”

or an estimated time of arrival. She also says in the letter:

“GEOAmey will unilaterally put courts down when they do not have enough staff to cover them. This is usually done without consultation”.

How do you respond to those charges?

I have a couple of quick questions before I invite Willie Coffey to wind up the session.

In answer to Graham Simpson’s questions, you mentioned that the new hourly rate of pay from 1 May this year would be £13.25. At the point at which the chief inspector described the situation as being “shocking”—that is, presumably prior to October 2023—these heroic front-line staff would have been working through the pandemic. What was the hourly rate of pay back in 2020?

Okay. I take it that staff do not have a no-strike clause.

Okay. Fine. If you want to furnish us with more details on that in writing afterwards, that would be helpful.

Thank you. We are right up against the clock, and I think that we have broken any cap that we might have set ourselves, so I will draw proceedings to a close at that point. I thank David Jones, James Huntley and Gavin Redmond for their evidence and for making themselves available today; we very much appreciate that and wish them well in the future.

We will now move into private session.

I think that Graham Simpson has some more questions in line with that.

No—

But what is your view of the fact that we have been told that the only institutions that were considered for this course were Harvard, Stanford and Yale?

You “have not come across” it. Okay, that is interesting.

As I understand it, mentoring programmes and such things are part of the fabric of personal development in the civil service. Is that right?

Maybe that was another facet of the business case that was drawn up by the chief operating officer.