Chamber and committees

Thank you. I will perhaps come back in later.

It was more in relation to somebody, for example, commuting from their temporary place of residence to the conference centre and something happening in that environment, whereby they could argue that they had immunity. However, that is fine.

The other question is more general. What discussions has the Scottish or UK Government had with Police Scotland about policing the event? Has there been any analysis of the resourcing levels that will be required, or has there been a finger in the air on the financial cost? That is not an issue as such, but it is important for the committee to keep a watching eye on such things.

Thank you—you make an interesting point, which touches on the one that Stuart Allardyce made about the language that we use and the need to not put young people off coming forward when there are actual issues, as opposed to day-to-day behaviour that they do not deem to be inappropriate, for example.

Who is best placed to get that message across? Should teachers do that in the classroom? Should it be done peer to peer? Is it a case of educating parents on how to have very frank and normal conversations about these things without being embarrassed? Given that, as you said, we are in an integrated world where Snapchatting in the playground to someone who is 3m away is normal behaviour, when we are putting together all these wonderful strategies and getting Governments to come together and legislate for change to improve things, surely a grass-roots approach that involves talking to young people on the ground at the earliest opportunity is the best way to get positive messages across on how to deal with problematic situations.

I will bring in Joanne Smith, because she probably has a lot of experience in this area.

It is fascinating and we could probably have a whole-day symposium on that subject alone.

I have one final question. I feel a bit like an audience member on “Question Time” with this one. What does the panel believe would be an appropriate level of sentencing for someone who is charged and prosecuted for possessing indecent images of children? I will start with the police.

That is very diplomatic of you. The reason why I ask is that the last time a survey was done on public perception of sentencing—it was pre-Covid and I do not know whether there has been one since—77 per cent of the public believed that someone should receive a custodial sentence for a crime of that nature. Very few believed that something such as a community payback order or some form of educational mandatory statutory treatment would be an appropriate sentence.

I am not putting forward a view; I am simply asking for your opinion. I appreciate that it is difficult for policing to comment on what are independent guidelines by the Scottish Sentencing Council, but I am sure that others have a view. Stuart Allardyce, you must have a view on this.

I will try to rattle through the letters. On the SPS letter that we have just discussed, I have the same question as Russell Findlay on in-cell telephony.

My second point is about purposeful activity. There seems to be a bit of confusion around what the reality of that is versus what the law says. The letter gives the impression that purposeful activity is available to all prisoners. That point was reiterated during last week’s scrutiny of the Bail and Release from Custody (Scotland) Bill, when the cabinet secretary said—I am just checking the Official Report:

“Prison rules do not exclude remand prisoners from work or purposeful activity, and the Prison Service will, where possible, offer access to work and educational opportunities to those on remand.”—[Official Report, Criminal Justice Committee, 17 May 2023; c 57.]

I wonder what the reality is on the ground versus what it says in the letter and what we were told. If nothing else, there seems to be a perception that remand prisoners participate in much less purposeful activity, including education, counselling, training and work. I appreciate that, when it comes to forcing someone to work, there is a difference between someone who has been sentenced and someone who is on remand, but we need more clarity around that because the situation is a bit unclear. The perception and the reality seem to be two different worlds.

We cannot look at the correspondence without noting the letter from COSLA, in conjunction with community justice partners. It is quite detailed and a lot of work and time have obviously gone into it. The letter is quite stark and makes clear something that we already know through budget analysis, which is that almost every aspect of the justice sector received more money in the 2023-24 budget than in the 2022-23 one, with the exception of criminal justice social work, which had a flat cash settlement despite pre-budget scrutiny that warned of the consequences of that.

The letter goes into great detail, which I will not go into, about what the consequences might be. In effect, we are talking about a substantial real-terms cut, year on year, in the criminal justice social work budget. The letter makes it clear that that cut makes it incredibly difficult for COSLA and its council partners to deliver the Scottish Government’s national strategy for community justice and that it widens

“the existing ‘implementation gap’ between national policies/legislation and local delivery”.

I know that that sounds like technical jargon, but it is a really important point. It is all very well having a national ambition, but if the people on the ground who are tasked with implementing that are saying that they cannot do it with what they have been given, there is an issue. I would like the Government to respond in detail to this specific letter from COSLA and local criminal justice social work. It is the kind of letter that the Government ought to reply to, and its response should also come to us. The conversation is not just about money: the letter goes into workload and the issue of people retiring.

My last point is about the letter from the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, which was short and sweet. I note that the deputy assistant chief officer writes that

“50 per cent of all operational staff ... have voluntarily completed the training”

on overdose awareness. It is not quite clear from the letter how many operational staff actually participate in the scheme or carry pouches of naloxone to administer. There must be some difference between the number who have done the training and the number who actively hold the product. The letter just says that

“there has been limited progress”,

but 50 per cent does not sound like limited progress. There is clearly a difference between the number doing the training and the number carrying the product, and it would have been helpful if the fire service had been more explicit about that.

I feel slightly nervous about language that says that a delivery plan will be in place once

“broader agreement to deploy is confirmed”.

Agreement with whom? I presume that that means front-line workers or their union representatives, but it is a bit unclear and I can only read between the lines. It would be very helpful if the fire service could keep us up to date.

I am sure that that will become clear when I get to visit. Thank you for that.

That is fair enough; thank you for that.

My second question follows Pauline McNeill’s line of questioning around Scottish solicitors and the regulation around that. Obviously, the Government has introduced other legislation—the Regulation of Legal Services (Scotland) Bill. What is the Scottish Government doing, given that Scotland and England and Wales have different legal and regulatory systems around the judiciary and legal services, to ensure that serious organised criminal gangs that work across borders do not see one particular environment as an easier place to do business than the other? That is a more general policy question.

The response is dated 6 April, so it is six weeks out of date. I know that the committee has not been able to consider it until now because we have had a lot on in terms of legislation, but there might be things in it that have been updated since then, so I apologise to the cabinet secretary, if she is watching.

I have a query on the court backlog. We have spent a lot of time over the past year or so talking about clearing the backlog, but my understanding of the response is that “clearing the backlog” essentially means returning to what is an acceptable backlog rather than getting to a net clear scenario.

The response says that the aim is to return to the point where the number of cases across courts is approximately 20,000, which I presume is deemed an acceptable pre-Covid level of backlog. I want to query that. I guess what I am asking is whether the Government is therefore stating that a normal backlog would be 20,000 cases, and whether the ambition is to get to that level rather than to clear the backlog in any shape or form. All we are doing is clearing the delta between what was already a backlog before Covid and what it increased to over that period.

I just want to set expectations, because we talk quite openly about clearing backlogs, but I do not think that the public fully understand that the Government is not trying to clear the backlog but is trying simply to get back to what it thinks is an acceptable backlog of 20,000 cases in the system, which is still a lot. There were lengthy delays in the system before Covid, so I do not think that that is an acceptable response. We should be pushing for a slightly more ambitious approach from the SCTS and the Government.

I cannot pre-empt the outcome of what it will say, but I understand that an Audit Scotland report on this is due out imminently. That will give us an update on the situation since 6 April. One of the things that I am quite keen to see is where there has been improvement in the clearing of cases. We should look carefully, perhaps even as soon as in the next couple of weeks, at what that data shows us about the clearing of solemn and summary cases, and the cases that are still deemed to be difficult to clear quickly.

I suspect, although I have not seen the report, that it will tell us that the most serious cases, including those of serious violence, murder and sexual crime, are still taking a considerable period of time. I will be looking to see what the updated expectation is for clearing those cases. That was my first point.

I will jump ahead to a point that Russell Findlay raised on the number of young people being held in adult institutions. The cabinet secretary’s response on 6 April said that there were eight under-18-year-olds held in a young offenders institute, but a couple of paragraphs down, it states that there is occupancy in secure accommodation. The statistics are helpful, but the wider question is, why are there under-18-year-olds, seven of whom are on remand, in YOIs, when there are places in secure accommodation?

I may be misreading the information that we have been given, but that does not add up if there are spaces in the independent secure accommodation network or elsewhere across the network. Why does the Government not want those under-18-year-olds to be in those places? I know that it changes on a daily basis, but there seems to be a pattern there that needs to be addressed.

The next page, which is page 6 of our papers, is on misuse of drugs and the work on the drug treatment and testing orders. The Government talks about the review and the final report on areas for consideration, and it says:

“We expect to report to be published in spring 2023.”

I wonder whether that report has been published since the letter was produced. Perhaps we have missed it or it is due shortly. My worry is that spring 2023 in the language of Government could be as late as the last week of June, which is technically when summer starts, which leaves us no time to look at the report as a committee between now and September. I would be keen to get off-the-record knowledge of when that might be published and, if we could look at it before summer recess, that would be very helpful.

The next point that I want to raise is on deaths in custody, which are dealt with on page 7 of the paper. The Scottish Government said that it has

“no intention to create an online centralised system where delivery of the recommendations can be tracked”.

There is a short response from the Government on that, but it is clearly sticking to that position. The problem that we have with that is that the families of those who have sadly lost their life in custody are looking for much more than one paragraph of a review, with respect to Ms Imery.

There cannot be lessons learned if there is no centralised system. There is a centralised system to track committee recommendations and any progress made on them, but it seems to me that, every time there is a fatal accident inquiry or an investigation into a death in custody, many of the same recommendations are made, time after time and year after year. We are quite good at tracking the Government’s progress on whether it is doing what it has said that it would do, but the Government’s response will be disappointing for the families who are asking for the Government to do more and for lessons to be learned. I am hoping that the Government will expand on more of the work that it is doing in order to give some comfort to those families.

Lastly, I will address legal aid reform and the legal aid reform bill. The Government has said that it is

“committed to reforming the current system of legal aid”

and that it will do so

“within this Parliamentary Session.”

In my conversations with solicitors, they have said that they cannot wait until 2026 for that reform. There are some temporary measures that are in place on fees, but that position is not sustainable and it does not provide any long-term comfort to people who are in the legal profession. I am hoping that the cabinet secretary could elaborate on what “this Parliamentary session” means from a timetabling point of view, given how busy the Parliament and our committee are already—assuming that the legal aid bill will be discussed by this committee. I am hoping that the bill will be introduced sooner, rather than later, in the parliamentary session so that we can do it justice and give stakeholders adequate opportunities to get involved in the process.

I apologise for being unable to make the visit. I wonder whether the SPS would be willing to host members of the committee who were unable to make that visit. It would be very interesting to get a proper tour of the prison, perhaps once it is operational. I know that that would make it slightly more difficult, but there is certainly a willingness among members to go back or to attend for the first time.

Obviously, the SSI is a legal instrument, which means that the site can be used only for a prison building. Has the Government indicated what its plans are for the old building or the wider site? That question might have been answered yesterday—it probably was, as I imagine that someone will have asked it.