Chamber and committees

My final question is on firework control zones, the introduction of which you mentioned is imminent. How many local authorities will introduce firework control zones? I recall that that was quite a meaty part of the legislation and much of the feedback from local authorities and their representative bodies was that it would come at a cost to them. I appreciate that you will introduce that legislation before summer recess and I am sure that we will have time to talk about it then, but that is not far away. What preparatory work has taken place in conjunction with local authorities to assist them financially to set up the zones and to run any local public awareness campaigns? Do we have any idea how many fireworks control zones there will be this coming year and where they might be?

Just to be clear, the financial memorandum also states that there will be no effect on business. I know that we are drip feeding the instruments to commence the legislation and that the restriction on the sale and purchase will not be until, I presume, 2025 or thereafter. There will be no compensation scheme in place until then. Is that correct?

I will try to rattle through my questions. Welcome to the committee, minister; congratulations on your appointment.

I want to first address the issue of pyrotechnics and flare misuse at sporting events, particularly football matches, which are clearly the most high-profile events that have been reported in the media. The existing legislation—the 1995 act—makes it illegal for pyrotechnics to be taken into sporting events, but it is clear that it is failing, otherwise we would not need to afford the police more powers. Can you explain the difference between what is already legal in football stadiums and what will happen in June, for the benefit of people who attend such venues?

It is not difficult to see who is letting off pyrotechnics. They are on camera and there are security guards around the stadium. The police must have a fair amount of intelligence on the individuals who are routinely responsible for that. I mention that because it is not only individuals; there seems to be a concerted and collective effort to let off flares at specific points during or before games. We have also seen the unfurling of banners related to the pyrotechnics issue.

What consultation has the Scottish Government had with football clubs, the Scottish Football Association and supporters organisations? Clearly, there is an underlying problem that is not limited to individuals breaking the law; events are clearly co-ordinated. How on earth will the police tackle the sheer volume of people who are letting off pyrotechnics?

Before you do, we are interested in why the clubs themselves not facing any penalty or liability if their supporters are routinely breaking the existing law and will clearly be breaking the new laws that we have passed. It seems to happen endlessly and there seem to be no consequences for the clubs. Is that conversation with clubs taking place?

Mary Hockenhull, I am looking at you. I am sorry; that is unfair.

It is quite a strong deterrent for a person—knowing that they might end up in a prison cell.

Not on that issue, but I think that it is a very good suggestion from Rona Mackay to challenge that and keep the pressure on.

I do not know when the committee is next due to have the SPA in front of us, but it is probably not for some time. Obviously, we are already within that financial budget year and will be looking ahead to the next one. I am not a forensic accountant, and I wonder whether someone—either the SPA, the Scottish Parliament information centre or others—can help us to understand the overallocation that it talks about, because it is quite significant. Again, I am not an accountant, but in effect the SPA is saying that this year it will spend more than it has by about £30-odd million, but it is a bit unclear how that all pans out in the books.

Again, we do not want to start pre-budget scrutiny for the next financial year straight off the bat with 30-odd million quid off the bottom line that has to come out to fund this year’s investment. Very few public agencies can overspend in this way. The SPA has obviously found a clever way of accounting for it, but I would like to understand it a little bit more.

Good morning, colleagues. First, I read on page 1 of the Police Scotland response, which is page 5 of our papers, that the anticipated implementation of body-worn cameras will be spread across three financial years, taking us up to 2026-27. Realistically, that is four years away from now. In the current age of technology, I struggle to see how body-worn cameras being implemented in three or four years’ time is realistic.

I do not know whether Police Scotland is having to spread the costs over three years purely on the basis that it does not have the money to do otherwise or whether it will take that long to find the technical solution. I am pretty sure that there are providers that could implement a solution much more quickly. Perhaps that would be best achieved if Police Scotland collaborated with other forces that are already using second-generation, or even third-generation, technology of this nature. Surely, there must be something out there in the market that would allow body-worn cameras to be rolled out more quickly. I am less focused on the costs and the numbers—we all know the arguments on that, which my colleague presented—and more focused on the timescales.

Body-worn cameras also feed into a system of further information and communications technology transformation. Information from those assets can be quickly fed into a system that can process that data as evidence, which can allow cases to be turned around more quickly. It is not just that cameras are worn, although they act as a visual deterrent; the important part is what is done with the information from them. Only if that happens will improvements be delivered, and it is unclear whether the cameras will be accompanied by significant investment in what happens at the back end in relation to case management and evidence handling. I would therefore like a bit more information on that from the SPA or Police Scotland at some point.

I will not comment on the blue-light collaboration programme. “Collaboration” is always a positive and welcome word, and we see some very good practice in that regard. For example, on my way into the office this morning, I saw an ambulance driving out of a building that is shared with the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service. That is very welcome but, under our next agenda item, we will talk about police mental health. In relation to collaboration, we are interested in whether work is being done across emergency services and with other public services to reduce the strain on, and the workload of, front-line police officers, because, ultimately, that will help to free up time and speed up processes.

On the budget, which is the important matter, I have tried to raise the issue of the barnahus model in recent parliamentary questions. In a previous committee evidence session, I might have called for a longer-term plan for the roll-out of the model and for some analysis on its success or otherwise. That is all very positive, and I look forward to the new Cabinet Secretary for Justice and Home Affairs furnishing us with that information.

My big issue relates to the budget itself. We would be missing a trick if we did not refer to the responses from Police Scotland and the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service on the budget. It is welcome that, since our initial pre-budget scrutiny, the Government has been forthcoming with more cash. I know that times are tough and that money is tight, but we must acknowledge the response, and that extra cash.

My issue relates to the wording and language being used, particularly in Police Scotland’s response. It estimates that the £53 million of capital funding that it will have for this financial year will not be

“sufficient to meet our basic needs of our asset rolling replacement programme”.

Police Scotland also talks about “slippage management”. It seems that, in the current financial year, it is, in effect, drawing down money from future budgets. The effect of that will be stark. Police Scotland is explicit in saying that it needs £85 million in this financial year to be sustainable. That is somewhere in the middle of the £80 million to £100 million that it needs per year to be sustainable.

To manage the shortfall of £32 million, Police Scotland is playing with the numbers as best it can, but all that does is take money from capital budgets in future years—it just compounds the problem. We can see the problem with that by looking at what happened as a result of the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service’s historical capital underfunding. Down the line, we end up with hundreds of millions of pounds of capital underfunding, with the problem being compounded year after year, and no Government will ever have the money to backfill. My concern is that the problem starts small but then grows.

I am also concerned that Police Scotland seems to be sending the message that it will do just the bare basics, which would include, for example,

“A reduced workforce with an operating model of”

around 16,500 officers. It seems now simply to be accepted that we will be working with a reduced workforce as a result of the resource and capital budget issues.

I am concerned that there is still a massive shortfall, as the budget is still way below what Police Scotland is asking of Government. It has been explicit about what it needs—not what it wants, but what it needs—to be sustainable and supply the bare minimum, and it has not got that.

The resource budget is another point of concern. Many of us raised this point when we undertook pre-budget scrutiny. An additional £80 million has been announced, which is very welcome but, all the way through the submission, Police Scotland warns that any additional money that is allocated for resource will simply be swallowed up by inflationary pay increases, so it is not actually additional resource budget.

Police Scotland confirms that by saying that £37 million of the £80 million will simply be meeting the 5 per cent pay award. Thankfully, that has been accepted by the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, but Police Scotland is looking at 7 or 8 per cent or perhaps even more. There is an issue in that the additional cash has simply disappeared into the ether for pay increases. We know the percentage point cost of every pay increase; that in itself raises issues, which we have flagged with Police Scotland.

On capital funding for the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, I am concerned about that, because the capital funding of £32.5 million that has been announced is, in the words of the SFRS,

“not sufficient to meet all the Service’s needs.”

We know about, and we have rehearsed, some of the issues around access to facilities for firefighters. Basic personal protective equipment, decontamination and proper dignified spaces should be in 100 per cent of fire stations, and far too many are in poor condition. This budget is clearly not going to chip the surface of any of that, which I think will be a source of disappointment to firefighters.

Overall, we asked for more money, and there was a bit more money and that was welcome but, on the resource side, much of it will be swallowed up by pay increases; on the capital side, much of it will be swallowed up by inflationary pressures; and across the board it is far below what is needed for standing still, let alone for improvements and investment.

I will not take too long. I commend the committee for spending a lot of time on the issue. The story from Russell Findlay was interesting, and it reminded me of the session that the committee held in private and anonymously with people who had similar experiences. All committee members sat in on various groups and listened to some of the stories, so we have already heard such points from others—the similarities are striking. To this day, I still have strong thoughts about the couple of individuals who I met and the sorry state of affairs that they were in. They were grown men who were broken as a result of the system.

There are lots of warm words, as I would expect to read in such a response from Police Scotland, and I do not doubt for a second that there are senior staff in the organisation who want to do something about the issue and who take it seriously—nobody wishes ill on their employees. However, what has come through is that a lot of buzzwords are being used but there is nothing that addresses some of the underlying factors and recurring themes that the committee has heard about and that I would like to be addressed.

There are some specific and clear issues. I said that I was not going to be long, but here I go with lists, convener. The first, which is important, is the churn of higher ranking officers, which seems to lead to huge issues around change management in the organisation. We heard direct experience of the effect on officers when someone new comes in with a new direction of travel and says, “It’s my way or the highway.” That has an effect on junior ranking members of staff, who not only do not have the confidence to challenge it but are in an organisation in which that is actively frowned upon—it is a hierarchical organisation.

The second issue is the poorly organised human resources support and processes. That has emerged in some of the protocol failures that we have heard about around disciplinary matters.

The third issue is the management of long-term sickness. Some officers feel that they are just seen as problematic, especially if they do not have a physical injury. People with physical injuries are perhaps dealt with more positively by their peers or by management, because the injury can be seen and it is perhaps seen as a sign of bravery and service. However, being off for mental ill-health, which is an injury in its own right as a by-product of the job, is somehow seen as a weakness. That is affecting people and the mental health support is clearly inadequate.

I notice that there is to be a retendering for the employee assistance programme, which will kick in next April, so it is about a year away. However, that is just a phone number, with someone in an outsourced call centre at the end of the line. I think that they need to up their game on that. However, it really comes down to the point that I made in the first part of the meeting: the fact that they are working with reduced officer and resource levels clearly adds pressure.

We know that we are losing people with experience at the top end, so we have a lot of younger officers who feel that they are getting chucked out on the front line to deal with traumatic situations much more quickly, which was confirmed to me when I went to the SPF event across the road recently. Of course, the officers will have to deal with some horrendous things as part of the job, but they are doing that in their first couple of weeks—they have been in training and suddenly they are dealing with suicides and turning up to other horrendous situations.

It is about both the volume and the type of workload, which has massively changed, as we know. I do not think that anything has been done to address that problem, which goes back to the collaboration issue and the need to remove some of those tasks from front-line officers. You will not solve the problem until front-line officers are able to just do what they are supposed to be doing. The problem is that they are spending their whole day, every day, dealing with quite severe mental health situations that they are clearly taking home with them.

Until we have a much more fundamental and honest conversation about the workload, the volume and the type of work that they are asked to do, I do not really think that we will fix the problem—all that we are doing is tinkering around the edges of how we support police officers when they do have a problem. It is always better to prevent than cure, convener.

I feel that there were welcome words in the responses, but not enough detail.

I have a question that someone can come back to me on.

At the moment, the process seems to be that an inquiry into the unfortunate suicide of a serving officer—I am talking about the police in particular, as opposed to the other emergency services—can arise only if the Crown decides to hold an FAI. Is there another, perhaps legislative, top-down solution, that would mandate some other form of automatic inquiry into such a situation? I do not know what the situation is in England and Wales, which is a different legislative landscape. I am not saying for a second that we should mandate the Lord Advocate to do X Y or Z—although that is always a solution; laws can do that. However, there might be some other form of investigation that could take place or that would have to take place that could be followed by a full-on FAI, if that was what the Crown so decided. In the meantime, it seems to be all or nothing and in far too many cases it is nothing.