Chamber and committees

Good morning, gentlemen. Let us go back to where we started. If we look at page 11 of the Auditor General’s report, paragraph 17, the opening line states that

“The Director General for Economy is the accountable officer for delivery of the NSET.”

I appreciate that your brief opening statement claimed that progress has been made, but you are yet to convince me. As the accountable officer in charge of the delivery of NSET, in what way have you made progress?

Before we come on to targets and metrics, because they are important and it is an area of questioning that we do want to go into, at what point did you, in charge of the strategy, not flag with either the First Minister or someone senior in Government to say, “Guys, you have to sit around the table and have a meeting”? How can two years pass and colleagues who sit next to each other in the parliamentary chamber not sit next to each other in a civil service room somewhere and ask what progress is being made on the strategy? Is it just that they had meetings, but you were not party to them? Did you not flag to them that this was important? Were you not chasing them for meetings? At what point did you say, “This is not working.”?

Page 10 has is a nice visual version. In the middle we have dotted lines between the NSET delivery board and the economic leadership group, which we know has been a failure. However, below that, there is the relationship between the NSET portfolio board, the programmes and the economic strategy unit, then with the Scottish Cabinet and corporate governance within various directorates-general. The bit in the middle, in the dotted square, says:

“No formal connection set out in NSET Accountability Framework.”

That is the missing link—the key missing link—but you are saying that it is not.

Can you indicate how much?

There have been penalties of around £5 million. However, a recalibration of the contract seems to suggest that GEOAmey is receiving £4 million over a number of years in payments additional to the original contracted value. Is that correct?

Wow—you are weeks away from hitting your absolute capacity. What happens when you hit that point? Do you say to the courts, “Please do not send us any more people. We cannot take them,” or do you say to ministers, “We have to start releasing prisoners”? Which of the two is preferable?

Here is what I do not understand. In your opening statement, you said that we are sending fewer people to prison each year, but the prison population is rising—it is at its highest level in nearly five years.

The Parliament has made a number of legislative changes, some of which have been mentioned, such as the Management of Offenders (Scotland) Act 2019, and there is the presumption against short-term sentences, the changes in sentencing guidelines for under-25s and a massive shift in alternatives to custody. Whatever your views on those policies—for or against—some of which were rather controversial, we have made such changes already, and yet the prison population is going up.

Are the courts simply not following the guidelines and are sending too many people to prison, or does the nature and profile of those prisoners mean that we are sending the right number of people to prison, but the Scottish Government has simply not built the capacity to deal with that?

Or, potentially, those other countries have less serious organised crime or sexual offences.

Both of which are delayed, of course.

I will wrap up my line of questioning here. Is that not part of the issue? We would not be hitting this crunch point, people would not be living in inhumane conditions, you would not be threatened with litigation, and we would not be sitting on the precipice of mass riots in our prisons if you had built the prison capacity in the first place. HMP Greenock was described by HMIP as needing to be “bulldozed”. Barlinnie was described as being at risk of “catastrophic failure”. The list goes on and on. At what point over the past decade did the Government realise that it should have built capacity and replaced those prisons way before we hit this crunch point?

My final question may be more fundamental. What is the point of prison? Is it simply to lock people up and keep them away from the wider populace or is it to make sure that, if and when they come out of prison, they do not reoffend and they come out better people than when they went in?

I am concerned by what we have heard this morning and over the past couple of months and years. We are simply not rehabilitating people in prison. We are chucking them in there, locking them up for 23-plus hours a day, potentially breaching their human rights and then, at the end of their sentence, putting them back into society and expecting them not to reoffend. We are, clearly, failing in this.