Chamber and committees

One of the particular risks that is attached to Barlinnie is the impact of the conditions on prisoners’ mental and physical health. In turn, that could potentially lead to litigation that is linked to human rights and equalities issues. Have you made any assessment of that? Is there a risk of a judicial review or some kind of litigation against the Scottish Government?

Auditor General, a couple of times this morning, you have used the expression that many of the issues that we have discussed cannot be resolved by the SPS alone. How would you see collaboration among the SPS, other affected public bodies and the Scottish Government working in practice?

Good morning. I welcome everyone to the fourth meeting in 2024 of the Public Audit Committee. The first item on our agenda is for committee members to consider whether to take agenda items 3 and 4 in private. Are we agreed?

Members indicated agreement.

That is a useful thumbnail sketch of the three principal themes in the report, which we will consider in detail this morning. I will hand over to the deputy convener, who has questions about the courts custody prisoner escorting service.

You have drawn a parallel—a wage comparator—with supermarkets a couple of times. However, the genesis of the contract is that it was outsourced work that was previously carried out by prison officers and Scottish Prison Service staff. Given the nature of the work that is involved, would a better comparator not be with the pay rates that the Scottish Prison Service pays its own staff?

We are quite pressed for time, so I will move straight to Willie Coffey.

I have a couple of questions to finish up this morning. Touching on that last subject, you are right, Auditor General, as always. You gave evidence to the committee back in September 2021 about the briefing that you had prepared on where we had got to with the Government’s stated policy of shifting to more community justice options. The evidence that was set before us at that time was that it is hugely less expensive for the state, and that the reconviction rate was noticeably different. Of those people who had served a sentence of a year or less in prison, 49 per cent were likely to reconvict within a year, whereas, in comparison, those serving community-based sentences had a reconviction rate of 30 per cent, so there was quite a marked contrast in the outcomes.

At that time, you told us that there was a lack of progress in shifting the balance in sentencing. Two years or more on, where do you see that? It obviously has a direct effect on the prison population.

Our second and main agenda item is consideration of the Auditor General for Scotland’s section 22 report on the Scottish Prison Service, which was released in December. I welcome our witnesses. We are joined this morning by the Auditor General, and alongside him is Michael Oliphant, who is an audit director at Audit Scotland, and Tommy Yule, who is a senior audit manager at Audit Scotland.

We have a large number of questions to ask you about this morning’s report but, before we get to those, I invite the Auditor General to make a short opening statement.

I invite Colin Beattie to put some questions to you.

Colin, we are short of time. You have had about three last questions, so I will have to ask that we move on and invite Graham Simpson to put some questions.