Chamber and committees

My question is obvious—what is the point of fining GEOAmey if you simply hand the money back?

You can see how it looks, though. We are talking about public money and a company that paid over £1 million in dividends to shareholders. It has a stench of unfairness about it.

In the scenario in which it walked away from the contract because it was making a loss, you would be left in quite a precarious position—how on earth would you manage prisoner transportation?

Those were her words.

Do you feel that you are not able to properly rehabilitate people?

Have there been further fines since then?

Thank you, and good morning to the panel. I will start with a supplementary to close the GEOAmey line of questioning before I move on to my main lines of questioning—it is really in response to Willie Coffey’s questions about the penalties. I understand that, over the past couple of years, GEOAmey has been fined around £4 million for breach of contract. Is that correct?

And receiving public money and being fined—simply being given more money in return for failure.

I am sure that there are other providers out there that would have doubled their rates overnight in such a scenario.

I would like to come on to my main line of questions, which are about the wider prison estate and population. Some of those have been covered, but some important issues have been raised. Teresa Medhurst, I was particularly concerned by some of the language that was used earlier in the session. The phrase that the Scottish Prison Service used was “on the brink”—on the brink of what?

It sounds to me that we are not getting to a point of danger—we are already in the danger zone. Seven prisons in Scotland are coded red, which I presume is quite serious. We have heard that you are reaching capacity and in some cases are over capacity in prisons. Overnight, this could bubble over into serious conditions for staff and prisoners. That sounds to me like the worst possible scenario. What could get worse in our prisons other than rioting and mass insurrection?