Chamber and committees

Thank you for that comprehensive answer. I guess that the difference is that the inability of solicitor firms to undertake their duties or even to survive as going concerns affects members of the public very differently from how the impact of Covid on other types of commercial business affects them.

In the correspondence from the Law Society that we received yesterday—we have just had time to digest it—there was a paragraph with key questions. They are posed to us for us to pose to you. I request that you review those key questions and respond to the committee so that we can forward that response to the Law Society or make it public.

I get the impression that the Law Society is not confident that there is sufficient capacity in the defence bar to address the backlog of cases. That is a key point, irrespective of the argy-bargy over fees. Are there physically enough people in the system or, even if you increased capacity in the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service and the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service was able to increase capacity, would the inability to increase defence capacity at the same rate mean that you would not get through the backlog at the rate that we all want? Is that a concern for the Government?

I guess the answer is to improve retention and to stop people leaving the profession.

It is a matter of getting new entrants in, too.

Remand is a much wider issue, which the committee is looking at. Everyone is acutely aware of the sad inevitability that some people spend more time in prison on remand than they would have done in serving their sentence, if they had been proven guilty, but we can talk about that another day.

I know that Audrey Nicoll has questions on this subject. My other question is on the next topic that we will discuss, so I will save it.

Thank you.

I have a final question on an issue that has cropped up a few times and on which we took evidence in the early part of the committee’s existence. It relates to salaries.

When we posed the question to the Lord Advocate, her response was that people take a pay cut when they go into public service from the private sector. However, I get the impression that the Law Society thinks otherwise. There is a sense that good-quality solicitors are being poached from the private sector into the Government—the civil service—or public bodies that require legal assistance.

Do you have any indication as to where the truth lies? Is it somewhere in the middle? Are average salaries much higher in Government agencies than they are in the private sector, for all the reasons that we have talked about and because of the financial issues that private sector firms have faced?

I do not mind. It was a tough question.

They are not just challenges. It sounds as though they are almost breaching international law. I refer to the paper from HMCIPS, which stated:

“Staff prisoner relations and the tolerance of prisoners to the very restricted regime has been ... positive to date”—

perhaps not in every case, but that is the overarching situation—

“but the continuation of heavy restrictions risks an adverse reaction.”

That is a very real reaction, and we have already seen the consequence of that. We already know of attacks on prison officers, for example, and there is a distinct possibility that the levels of tension could rise. Is there any sense of the prison population questioning why the wider population of the world is moving forward while they are still under the restrictive measures that were imposed under the emergency?

On the correspondence from the SPS in response to our questions, my understanding is that the service gave us figures only for the four weeks following the changes to the rules on 13 December. That is only one month of data, so we should request continued updates. Also, because that was the Christmas period, there would have been abnormal volumes of mail throughout the month.

It is notable that 48 per cent of correspondence was photocopied and passed on. I do not know whether that is good or bad. I guess that some people understood that all mail would be photocopied and others thought that it would be selected depending on the evaluation of risk. It is hard to gauge whether the figure is good, bad or indifferent, so it would be helpful to have some context.

The more interesting figure is on how many pieces of mail tested positive. Because 12 per cent of mail that went through the Rapiscan machine tested positive, it sounds as though it would be a wise move on our part to push for photocopying. I would be keen, as we move forward, to see what effect that has on the number of items that test positive over the months, and whether the number goes down as people reduce the risk that they take in sending substances through the mail.

Equally, it would be naive to think that a reduction means that drugs are being eliminated from prisons. Will there be a change in the type of drugs that get into prison or the methods of getting them there? It is probably too early to say, and I appreciate that the Government needs more time, but when we hear from the Government—perhaps before the summer recess—it would be interesting to hear whether people in the illicit sector have found new and innovative ways of getting drugs into prisons, and to hear what those drugs are. As we know, methods and products have changed over the years. It is fair to say that that will continue to be the case, so we should keep a watching eye on that.