 Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the seventh meeting of the Criminal Justice Committee. Apologies have been received this morning from Katie Clark. The first agenda item is to agree whether to take items 4 and 5 in private, which is consideration of today's evidence and a discussion about our work programme. Are we all agreed? The next agenda item is the first in a short series of evidence-taking sessions on the spending priorities in the justice sector for 2022 to 2023. I refer members to papers 1 to 3. I welcome our panel of witnesses this morning, whom I am delighted to see in person for a change. We have with us Mr David Page, Deputy Chief Officer of Police Scotland, Mr James Gray, Chief Financial Officer for Police Scotland and Mr Chris Brown, acting chief executive and accountable officer of the Scottish Police Authority. We very much appreciate the time that you have taken to join us this morning. I thank the witnesses for their written submissions, and they are available online. I intend to allow about an hour and 15 minutes for questions and discussions. Just before we move to questions, I would like to put on record on behalf of the committee. Our best wishes for Ms Lynn Brown, Chief Executive at the Scottish Police Authority, and we are all wishing her a very speedy recovery. Please can I ask members to indicate which witness you are directing your remarks to, and we can then open the floor to other witnesses for comments. If other witnesses wish to respond to a question, please can I ask you to indicate to me or to the clerks that you want to come in, and I will bring you in if time permits. If you are merely agreeing with what a witness is saying, there is no need to intervene to say so. We will now move directly to questions, and please can members and our invited guests keep your questions and comments as succinct as possible. I plan to structure the discussion around a series of broad themes. I would like to start off, if I may, by looking at budget requirements around that return process from Covid and, in particular, returning to pre-Covid levels of working. In the Police Scotland written submission, there was specific reference to the implications on the service arising from the anticipated increase in court delivery, including witness scheduling and the broader summary justice reform. In the context of budget scrutiny, I am quite interested in how, if you can outline a little bit more detail on that and what opportunities there might be to offset some of those costs. I am particularly thinking about the implications on police officer time committed to court attendance. I will address that question to First Lady, Mr Page and Mr Gray. I can start on that. We are working closely with our operational colleagues to understand what the future requirements are going to look like. We have funding in this financial year for additional overtime costs, because that is generally what the costs are for policing, for officers who are abstracted from their duties to go to court. We know that the backlog will have implications, so we are still working with the team to understand exactly what the financial impact will be. We cannot quantify it at this point, but it is something that we will be working on over the next number of months to get to a position where we set the budget next March. Depending on the approach that is taken, the costs can vary significantly. Obviously, the time to attend in person is an awful lot more time involved than that. Evidence that could be provided through a system like an online platform would certainly reduce the financial implications for policing, but that is something that we are working with operational colleagues to understand what it will look like and then we will cost it. Fundamentally, from a cost perspective, that is the big differences around whether it is in person or whether it is online. Obviously, as has happened in the past, I am sure that things will continue to happen. Things move and change, and quite often officers may attend court and they are not required. That is the time that is being lost by being abstracted from whether they are in local policing or whether they are national services to go and spend the time there to find out that they are not required. Now, if it was an appointed time using an online mechanism, if it does not therefore happen, there is not as much time lost. For me, I think that that is a single biggest element. As I said, I do not know yet what that will look like to be able to tell you what the financial implications will be, but it could be minimised by maximising the amount of online evidence rather than in person. I do not know whether you want to come in on that, Mr Brown or Mr Page. I think that what I am thinking about in terms of post-Covid recovery is an opportunity for reform and using it as a platform perhaps for reform. That brings me on to issues around changing demand, so it is that balance between how we promote reform but also in the context of changing demand on the police service. If I can touch on that for a moment, in the five-year financial planning report, you talk about changing demand arising from changing nature of crime, changing community expectations, community needs and so on. We recently visited the Scottish Crimes campus and we had a helpful discussion on the challenges of recruiting specialist staff, for example, in the context of tackling cybercrime. I am interested in bearing that in mind. What might be the budget re-implications around changing demand but the specialist nature of some of that new demand and how that might impact on budget re-considerations? There are a number of considerations there. One is that we have to obviously operate within the budget that we have. Another one is that we are committed to maintaining the officer numbers at the moment. The workforce that we have has a set of inherited skills from the legacy forces that we have now. We are looking at changing the workforce mix, as the strategic workforce plan says, and a key component of that is creating additional capacity around those key skills such as cyber that we are talking about. There are a number of ways that we can get there. One is through the transformation programme and reform funding, which is absolutely critical to us. If we continue to get to reform funding, we can continue, supported by capital, to do transformational activity that creates capacity and creates space for us to then recruit new specialists, if you like. The other way is changing the workforce mix. Some of the cyber skills are, as you say, very specialist but do not necessarily need a warranted card or a warranted power to discharge the duties. It might well be that it is rebalancing the workforce at this point so that we perhaps have more civilian staff with those types of skills rather than warranted officers who do not need a warranted officer in some of those key roles. The other side of it is the recognition of the marketplace at the moment, because those types of cyber skills are in massive demand across the UK and the world. We need to think about growing our own effectively. That is things such as apprenticeships and things about how we can attract people in perhaps how we can do work with the private sector to have people coming in to us and going back out to them. We have to be innovative in the way that we are looking at recruiting those people because it is a new area for us and we will have to develop some new skills. Ideally, we want them to stay with us for a while. What we do not want is people coming in to policing and getting a cyber badge, if you like, and then leaving to get a salary that is two or three times greater than that. There are a number of different factors around that. Transformation to create capacity and capability, which gives us money effectively, changing the workforce mix and different ways of hiring people and trying to attract and retain people. That is really helpful. I will hand over now to Rona Mackay to look at a little bit around balancing the budget. I think that you were interested in exploring that. I think that this question might be for you, James. Last year, the Scottish Government provided a cash injection in order to eliminate a structural deficit in the policing budget. I understand that the budget has now been balanced. Given all the challenges that we are presenting to maintain that balanced budget, I think that that is absolutely correct. The structural deficit has been eliminated as a result of the uplift in funding. We welcome that the ask that we had made last year that that had been heard and corrected the deficit. We have a balanced position and a five-year financial plan. That plan sets out a path to maintain that financial balance throughout the period and therefore remain sustainable. I think that there are a couple of things around that. The first one is that 87 per cent, or their abouts of our budget, is in payroll. It is in police officers and police staff. Given the size of the organisation, it means that we have over £1 billion worth of people in our organisation. We are sensitive to any changes in that more than anything else. The planning assumption in the five-year plan is a plan that will change and will update it every year. However, the current planning assumption is that the workforce size will be retained. In the short term, that means that police officer numbers beyond that may be about the mixes, as Mr Page was saying. What we have asked and what we have set out in the five-year financial plan is that, with regard to the commitment to real terms protection for the policing budget, that will be based on unavoidable pay pressures. It is pay awards, any pay awards, things such as the national insurance employer contributions that will be coming through. Anything of that nature that we are not able to meet through reducing the workforce would require that real terms protection, the increase in funding each year, to reflect what the pay awards look like with regard to non-pay. That is the aspect where we know that we are going to have considerable pressure coming through in ICT costs in particular. That is happening across the public sector and the private sector. Traditionally, ICT costs were capital. You were buying things, you were having server rooms, but now it is moving more towards purchasing a service, which is a revenue cost. We are expecting to see quite significant revenue costs coming through for ICT, both because of the switch from capital to revenue and the new capability that is looking to be developed over the coming years, such as rolling out body 1 video, if that is to go ahead, and creating a new unified communications platform and other such things over the coming years. The way in which we plan to manage that is predominantly through our fleet strategy and a state strategy. On the fleet strategy, we are looking to move from having a 100 per cent or what was a 100 per cent diesel and petrol fleet to move into electric. There are two aspects around cost saving. One is the cost of powering the vehicles that is a lot cheaper using electricity. Our fuel bill, which annually is somewhere in the region of £8 million, we would expect to see quite millions of pounds of savings there with electricity. We operate a number of garages around the country and we outsource work. We are expecting it to be a lot less requirement for mechanics because of electric parts. There are millions of pounds of savings there. In the estates, we are looking to move to a co-located model wherever possible so that we have a first assumption when we look to look at a property in a particular area where we need to do something different is to move in with a partner. A great example of that, which you may be aware of, is in the north-east in Aberdeen, where there are three big headquarter buildings—Grampian Police, Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire, Queen Street—is being vacated and we are moving into Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire accommodation. There is a million pound a year saving to the taxpayer just in that one property. We are looking at 100 projects across the country, so we think that there is a potential for very many millions of pounds worth of saving around estates rationalisation. One thing I would say about that and it is a point that we have made when we have spoken to the Cabinet Secretary for Finance is that those savings do not necessarily come to policing. The cost of Queen Street might be £1 million a year, but we are not paying—we are now paying the council's rent. We are not making £1 million, but the public sector is. If there is going to be more collaboration and asset sharing, we need to look at the model of which we capture savings. By and large, the fleet and the estates savings will compensate for the increased costs in our other areas of non-pay, and we are seeking real-terms protection to mean that pay pressures are met. If they are not, we would have to look to reduce the workforce, and that is not our current planning assumption. That is really interesting. If I could go back to the part about the cars, replacing the electric cars, that is presumably coming from your capital budget. Is that going to mean a big uplift that you are looking for in that? Thank you for prompting me, because I should have said that in my answer. The five-year financial planning that is clear in the document is dependent upon the capital investment that is required. What we have said is that on the current level of capital investment, we estimate that we would only get to about 40 per cent electric fleet, because by the time we have managed to get to 40 per cent, the first ones that we bought need to be replaced. The alternative is effectively what we have been doing with the diesel and petrol cars, as they are just getting older and older. We will be trying to break out of that cycle of seeing that I have walked down the mile here today and passed an eight-year-old police car. We really should not be having cars, particularly marked cars with blue light bars on them, that might need to go out on response with vehicles of that age. They are safe, because they are maintained, but the cost of maintaining them is quite significant, because they are old. Thank you all for coming today. In respect of pay that you suggested earlier, it makes up something like 80 per cent of the overall budget. The last pay award ran until April of this year, and I think that talks are on-going in respect of a new award. I think that there will be talks tomorrow, in fact. Can you tell me if that was agreed anytime soon, it would mean that the award would not likely happen until much before the end of the year, possibly until next year? What stage are the talks at? How confident are you of agreement? Given that those officers have faced the pandemic and are now facing COP26, is this apparent delay not risk demoralising the rank and file? Thank you for the question. Tomorrow is the police negotiating board, so we will be talking to the police. We have been very clear from the outset, both with police officers and with civilian staff, that we want to ensure that we treat both sides with parity. They are both really important to the policing family. Secondly, any pay award that we put on the table has to be affordable. We have just had a significant investment from the Scottish Government to address our structural deficit, and it has taken us a long time to get to that point. The last thing that we want to do is having just reached a balanced budget is to then break our own budget by offering more than we can afford. We have been very clear, both with the staff unions and with the police federation and ASPs, that any offer that we make has to be affordable within our budget. Effectively, our guidance is going to be public sector pay policy. That is our position going into any negotiations. We have been very clear from the outset when we laid our budget last year—or this year, I should say, sorry—that that would be the approach that we would be taking. A skill of one to ten, how confident are you of being agreed by the end of this year? I cannot comment on how the federation will react to the offer. They know what we can do, but I cannot comment on the position of the federation. I am afraid that you would have to ask that. I want to take a step back and look at the wider budget. I am going to drill into your submissions, specifically in some of the numbers that are in them, because this is pre-budget scrutiny. You talk a lot about your submission, both submission 1 and 2, about the five-year capital investment plan. The £466 million number crops up quite a few times, but the same paper goes on to say that the Scottish Government's capital spending review seems to suggest that there will be a shortfall of £218 million over the next five years. That is quite a jump from what you are asking. You partially set your case as to what would happen if the 466 is not met. In other words, you say that you will not be able to modernise your asset base to the minimum level set out in our strategies. Could I elicit from you that, if you do not get the 466 million capital budget five-year ask, what will you not be able to deliver? If you look at it from what we have asked for, our assessment is of what the police service of Scotland needs to meet the tasks that it is given versus what we think is going to be on the table. The first point that I would make is that we are not gold-plating anything. We are not being hugely ambitious in our ask. What we are trying to do is just lay out very clearly what is required. In that requirement, there are two major components. The first component is that we have to spend an awful lot of money maintaining the service as it is. Our health and safety statutory regulatory requirements consume an awful lot of our capital ask, replacing police cars, maintenance for buildings, specialist policing weapons and equipment and so on. We need a core base level of capital. To be honest, what has been indicated in what we think might be available is going to fund that. The additional monies are the monies that we are looking for to invest in policing to move it from where it is today to try to move it into that 21st century police force. Not just the 21st century police force, but the 21st century police force that is green that reduces its cost base because, as James has already said, we can move our officers into better accommodation, which is better for their welfare. We can provide them with vehicles that are green and more efficient. We can provide jobs that are jobs that people want to get into, but they are not backward looking jobs. They are jobs where the new economy is going to go and we are operating in that space. More importantly—or as important, I should say—a lot of the capital links into transformational activity alongside our reform capital. Back to the point about how do we maintain a balanced budget. If we have capital and reform, that allows us to invest in transformational activities, which means that we can in body warm video other technical capabilities that creates capacity to meet new demand. If we get the money, we can continue to push forwards and we have been doing a good job of that so far in trying to be a leading public sector green organisation. We can reduce our cost base because it will be more efficient. We can provide better working environment for officers and staff. We can provide better tools and better innovation to consume our own smoke in terms of absorbing demand, because we can use technology and innovation to do that, but also in keeping up with threat, harm and risk. We know that, on the opposite side to us, there is investment going into technology. As the kidvene has already said, cybercrome is growing at a huge rate, so it gives us the ability to try and keep up with that, so it has a double whammy effect. It is just kind of reading between the lines. It sounds like off of the total ask that you have made. What you think is on offer, about half of it is business as usual, if you like. It is enabling you to perform to the current standards and levels of policing, but the extra is the extra, if you like. It is what you think more will be needed to make those transformations that you want. You are not in any way suggesting that what has been proposed will not be enough to keep things at current levels, or maintain current policing levels, or maintain current workforce levels, or maintain the existing standards of service. What we will do, if the profile is the profile that could come out as you mentioned, is move more into care and maintenance. The principal call and the money will be around making sure that we meet statutory requirements for health and safety. The committee will be aware that, at some time ago, we were in that place because of the long-term underinvestment. To be honest, I was having the budget quite tight to operate within the budget that we had. I had taken the budget down as far as I could. What was happening was that I was having overspends each year, where we were having failures on the health and safety front, and I was having to invest into that space. We do not want to be in that space. We want to basically maintain what we have and then improve what we have so that it becomes both greener and more efficient and a better place to work. If we look at, for example, this financial year to 2021-22, the total capital budget is £53.7 million. I am not sure whether I read this in the papers or from last year's budget submission, but you asked for £85.7 million. Obviously, you were given a lot less than was asked for, and we do not know what you will be offered this year. What effect did that £30 million shortfall have on what it is that you wanted to do with the business? The way that we manage our capital now is that we go out to the organisation and we ask what the capital need is. We have a rolling forward capital requirement, because every year we know that there is going to be so much money required to maintain buildings and things like that. We sort of have some default numbers that go into the capital budget, and then we look at our transformational needs and we look at additional investment needs, the green fleet and things like that. We work out what it is that we need. I have the finance team basically sent to check all the numbers to make sure that we are asking for the right type of money, bit reform, capital or revenue, but on the capital side we will work out what it is that we need. What we do is run something called a capital investment group. We run it four times a year. On the capital investment group, effectively what we do is have all the senior police officers plus Federation representatives and union representatives, and then what is important is that the allocation of capital is not driven by my corporate side, it is actually driven by operational policing because they are the best placed individuals to work out where the money is. Is there a discussion led by operational policing that says where we should put the money and effectively work out what the list is? That is our kind of ask for £85 million or £90 million. When we get the allocation, we then effectively have two columns. We have what we wanted and what we are given. The first thing that we do on what we are given is, on my side of the house, we look at the amount that has been given and then we take out all the health and safety, all the statutory, all the legislative stuff and then we allocate that straight away because that is non-negotiable. The chief counsel has made a commitment, as I have done multiple times, that there will be no compromise on spending on health and safety for our officers and staff. We allocate all that money and then what we have is a residual amount that is discretionary spend, and then what we do is look at all the ask and we say to the operational police officers where do you want the money to go? The interesting thing about that, of course, a lot of our ask, especially around the DDICT stuff, is that there is a logical build. Sometimes you have to build infrastructure, you have to put the foundations in. The problem with that, of course, is that it is not sexy, it is not interesting. People are not interested in the foundations, they all want the roof. When you have only got a little bit of money, people are quite interested in saying, I want something nice and shiny. It is a real challenge because police officers and our staff want something tangible, but what we are trying to do is build something that is long lasting and sustainable. We have a real challenge around that, but it is driven by the operational police officers. What could have an effect? What could help them to deliver the job that they do in the best way, although it might not be the most efficient way? That is what we do. Have you spent £50 million on body-on cameras? Is it something that you can see, touch and feel? People will notice the difference, but have you spent £50 million on software upgrade, which has a net benefit to the force? No-one is interested in that. No-one is very interested in that, but the issue is that data is probably the key to the future. Unless we can address properly the ICT infrastructure, our digital and data management, if you risk making mistakes at the end of the day, body-on video is a very useful tool, but, again, it is a tool for capturing data. The more money that you put into making sure that you have appropriate tools for the capture of data, for the management of data, the storage of data, the exploitation of data and putting data into the justice system so that data is correct, you are going to get better justice outcomes. If you have a shiny camera that takes nice pictures, it will take nice pictures. Is that time for one more question? If it is to the SPA, specifically to Mr Brown, and just to make you feel included in the conversation. In the very last paragraph of the submission, it says that authority will continue to make a strong case for, and you make a number of asks here, additional funding to the Scottish Government, including proposals for borrowing and up-front funding for long-term disposals and bridging finance. How much additional funding are you asking of the Government or to give us an expectation ahead of the budget, the draft that comes out from the Government? What are those proposals for borrowing that you are looking for and what will you do with all this extra money that you either are given or borrow? The first thing that I should probably say is that the authority considered both the five-year financial plan and the five-year capital plan last week and approved both of those, so it is fully supportive. On your specific question about up-front capital funding, what that really gets to is what Mr Page was describing around the investment that is required in the estate primarily. From memory, forgive me, I think that there is about £160 million of investment in estates over the next five years required. As you have already pointed out, there is on the face of it a dislocation between what the Scottish Government has published in its five-year financial plan and what our total capital ask is. We need to consider what options there are for being able to accelerate that spend in whichever way that either the authority or Police Scotland can. On up-front capital receipts, what that is acknowledging is that the authority has an estate with valuable assets in it that might not be surplus to requirements and by disposing those assets, we would be able to make a significant contribution to that funding ask. There is a bit of a timing issue there, so very often before you exit a building, you have to invest up front to have somewhere to go before you are able to release those receipts. One of the options in the five-year capital strategy is if we were to receive some of our five-year capital funding up front, that would enable the crystallisation of some of those receipts, which would then go back into the Government coffers, if you like. On the issue specifically on capital, on borrowing rather, I do not think that that is something that has pushed particularly hard, but again, if we are looking at all options, that is something that probably needs to at least be part of the discussion and the authority is supportive of that, at least being on the table for consideration. Just to be clear, to put it in picking order, you would rather get the cash from the Government to let you do what you want to do. If it is second to that, you can sell off the family silver, if you like. Worst case scenario, you can go and borrow it, is that what you are saying to us? I think that that obviously does simplify things, but I would say that what this demonstrates is at least some creative thinking in this space, so that it is not just a case of if we do not get the money then we cannot do any of this, it is just trying to come up with other feasible options for consideration. I want to follow up on the question that the convener put to you on the issue of cybercrime. We have seen the figures that it has doubled in the past few years, so it is quite a significant issue for policing. However, you said to the convener that you are looking at the recruitment of civilian officers. Whose decision is that? I suppose that the context is that I have heard this before, the idea that we recruit more civilians. I have divided opinion about where is the line between not having police officers through the job and having others. Is that the police authority's job or is it policing's job to make that decision about who would be civilian? Can you say anything about which jobs would be civilianised? It is Police Scotland's job to define that. It is an operational decision for the chief council ultimately. In terms of the individual jobs in the cyberspace, that will be driven by the nature of the role. DCC Malcolm Graham is the deputy who looks after that area. He is working with both his officers and officers outside Police Scotland, because obviously there is an awful lot of expertise in the UK that we can draw upon our own civilian staff in our P&D function. We will define the jobs that we need. We will work out the job specification and the nature of the role. If the role requires a warranted power, it will go to a police officer. If the role does not require a warranted power or it requires specific technical skills that will not sit within the police job family, we will be looking at hiring civilian staff. The thing that is quite important to note on this one is—the convener mentioned demand—demand is increasing. Our demand stats are getting more and more useful now in terms of the data that is being driven. Of course, as you have already said, the cyber is going up. What we cannot do is just keep building the police service. We cannot just add on extra bodies. This is where the workforce mix comes into it. If, for example, we needed, let us say, 50 as an example, civilian staff, in order to maintain a balanced budget, we cannot just go out and hire 50 civilian staff. We have to work out how we get the capacity to hire 50 civilian staff. That will become the only way that we can do that is through the myriad of ways that we have talked about—reducing our costs based through efficiencies, which creates money available to hire new staff, or changing our workforce mix. That might mean that some of the roles that existed in Police Scotland historically are no longer as relevant as perhaps having new cyber roles. We have to balance that judgment quite carefully. We have to engage with the unions on that side to ensure that people who are aware of the direction of travel give them an opportunity to engage in the discussion about that and then move to hire those specialist staff while operating within the budget. I have a further question, which is a question that the Scottish Police Federation has posed, which is in relation to public confidence and the pressures on police. A specific example that I wanted to ask about was that, according to the Scottish Police Federation, approximately 50,000 race days were due to be re-rosters. It is a consequence of operational demands that is stripping available resources. Beyond that, there is an additional 100,000 days that have already been re-rostered to future dates. The obvious question is, how long can we keep doing that for? Is the authority making any ass of the Scottish Government in order to programme that in? Obviously, through the pandemic, I presume that police officers have had to put public policing first, and that builds up roster days. It would be grossly unfair, I would have thought, not to recognise that that is an additional pressure on the policing budget. What is your ask of the Scottish Government in relation to that? I think that we do recognise that the RRD's trend currently is upwards, that the numbers quoted are the numbers. To provide some content, the banked RRDs equates to about three days per officer. Although 50,000 sounds like a scary number, when you look at it over a workforce, the size that we have is only about three days per officer. Having said that, we have to manage that more effectively and more efficiently. To be honest, I do not think that we would be making an ask of the Scottish Government. I think that it is incumbent on Police Scotland to manage that better, and I think that it is something that we need to do. We have acknowledged that. Before we move on, if I can come back and ask a very quick question, I am just staying on the subject of estate. I am aware that there was an estate condition survey being undertaken, and I think that perhaps that was due to be published or reported back on some time ago. I just wondered if you had an update on that. That is right. Before the pandemic, we had committed to report back to committee. Covid slowed down the pace at which we did the condition survey work. We have over 300 buildings that were assessed and many thousands of component parts. That work has now completed. The initial findings have been put into a report that has been presented internally within Police Scotland. We will soon be in a position once that has been through the authority to be able to report back here. To give you a flavour of what is in it is that there were some immediate works required that were identified as health and safety activities. A couple of million pounds, those things are either complete or are on the way at the moment. That is the stuff that was the things that had to be done immediately. However, what I told us is that there are about £242 million worth of works that need to be done over the next 10 years to get our estate up to condition B. Again, we are not looking to go plate it, we are just looking to have buildings that are of a reasonable condition B, as the term used. Our estate is current condition. It goes back to the earlier question about maintaining our asset base. When we are talking about maintaining it from the level that it is at, our estate is similar to what the school estate in Scotland looked like prior to the schools of the future programme. We are in pretty poor condition. The bulk of the buildings are at the bottom end of condition B and into condition C. We are looking to get them up to condition B. That work is currently being done to look at how we get into a planned maintenance cycle based on the 10 years of £242 million. Obviously, we would like to do as much of that in the early years as we can. However, even if it was spread evenly over 10 years, that is still £24 million a year. It goes to the point about what we are currently spending on the estate on maintenance, about £12 million. That is an awful lot more than we were doing in previous years, because our capital allocation has gone up. However, it is still somewhat short of what we need in order to get the buildings up to condition B status. We are not looking to have everything shiny and new. We are just looking for it not to have mould on the carpets or parts of the buildings that are not air and wind and water type, because we have buildings that are not wind and water type where parts of the buildings have had to be shut down. We are just looking to do that. That condition service pointed that out and identified, as I say, £242 million over 10 years to get to a reasonable condition. As a follow-up question on that, one of the issues that we have been looking at is custody provision. I know that, as a former officer, there is good custody provision and not so good across the estate in Scotland. I am interested in whether or not the specific custody provision was looked at within the survey. If you could comment on any particular plans from a budget perspective around improving some of the custody provision that needs to be improved. Custody was covered, but that was based on the current model. There has been investment over the past two or three years into custody, in particular most recently in London Road in Glasgow. However, what we are looking to develop—I could get more information from a colleague, ACC McDonald, who is the lead for this area—is to have a custody remodelling plan. To look at the custody across the entire country about right locations, right quality, because we know that there are things that we can do to improve, we have improved, but there is still some way to go. However, that custody remodelling work is under way, and the estates team will work closely with that team in order to identify what the future need will be. However, we have not published or have not got to the point of deciding what that is and publishing it. However, I can commit to bringing back more information if that would be helpful. If there is no more question specifically on capital budget side of things, I will move on to looking at Covid and COP26. I think that there were some questions, perhaps, for us all of you. Yes, please. In respect of COP26, there have been reported figures as to how much the policing will cost. The most recent that I have seen was £250 million, and that was reported at some point last year, which, putting a perspective, equates to a fifth of the entire Scottish policing annual budget. Can you tell us, either please Scotland or, indeed, the SPA, what the likely projection is now at, the latest projection? We are constantly updating our projections, especially in the lead-up, as things be crystallised when we get specifics around numbers of world leaders' locations. However, that is changing day to day, as you will be aware. We have consciously not put a figure out in regard to the cost, because it can be confusing. I could have given you a different figure every month for the past 18 or 19 months that we have been working on it. It is safe to say that the amount of funding that we, as policing in Scotland, have secured from the UK Government's spend approval board is over £60 million. That is the direct costs that we are currently aware of. That does not mean that that is what it will be. After the event, we will look at the actuals, and it is the actuals that we will be looking to get funding on. However, based on our known direct costs, it is over £60 million that has been secured. That does not include the cost of accommodation, which is significant, which has been picked up through the Home Office, and the cost of mutual aid, so the cost of police officers from other UK forces coming up to Scotland. That is a considerable cost, and that has been dealt with by the Home Office. Our direct element of it is over £60 million, but when we take the three components together, it is not as much as £250 million, as my understanding, but it is upwards of £150 million. I think that perhaps Mr MacGregor, you were wanting to come in on this. Thank you, convener. It is the same as following up on the COP26 stuff that we were out at the crime campus in Gartcosh a couple of weeks ago. We got a run-down of some of the plans for it, and it is quite incredible, and the scale of it in a fair play to the police for taking this on. I do not think that you will ever have to do something as big as this in a long time, but one of the things that Chief Constable said there, he said that he was really keen that there was no additional cost to Police Scotland. You have talked there about the £60 million, but clearly there is going to be an element of costs that we cannot currently predict. We do not know how it is going to go, we do not know where protests are going to be, etc. Are you feeling quite reassured that there will be no cost to Police Scotland in the end? Have you got that assurance from the UK Government? We have that assurance from the UK Government at the very start of the process. The finance business principles were agreed with the cabinet office on this, and the number one on the list was no financial detriment to the policing budget in Scotland. As I said, I did not want to get into specifics around what we think the cost projection is going to be now, because, as you rightly point out, it is a projection. We will not know until after the event what was required around additional overtime and so forth, and not just in relation to the policing of COP26, but because there are such significant numbers of police officers in Scotland being focused on COP26, there are the remaining officers who will have to deal with the usual day-to-day policing, and that may require higher levels of overtime because of officers who are on other duties. Depending on what happens, as you say, around protests, that will have an impact on the number of officers who will be required for COP26 on a day-to-day basis versus those who might be able to come back out and do normal business as usual activity. There are so many moving parts that we will not know until after the event. We have been clear with the cabinet office on this, and we will have a wash-up session where we look at what the actual cost was against what we had a best assessment of a forecast, and we will look to be compensated for the full cost. Beyond that, if something were to happen that would result in potential litigation against the chief constable or the police authority, we have also sought assurance that those costs that may take years to crystallise will also be covered. We have that assurance that the costs will not fall on the policing budget. I think that I will be all right to get another supplementary one. When will we have that discussion? The reason why I am asking this is because I cannot envisage a situation where there will not be some sort of long-term cost to the police in Scotland. Is there an assurance here from the UK Government that the costs can be looked at longer? I am sure that we have all been through loads. If we have a massive event, people will be working overtime, and people will need time off after that. That might reduce services a wee bit, or I am sure that it will not reduce core services, but people might be off with stress or whatever as well. We just do not know. The discussion that you are talking about, I feel quite assured from what you are saying that UK Government will fund that. What about the knock-on effect just over the next couple of years? I cannot say that we are not going to be affected by that ultimately, because it is a massive event. The first part, which is the most acute, is the thing about the re-rossed rest days. We have built that into our forecast costs up front. We do not know exactly what those will be, but we have got some financial provision being made by the UK Government for what we think they might be. However, as I said, that is true up, if you like, afterwards. We would probably be targeting the degrees of accuracy to be 95 per cent of the way there early in the new year, to probably be in 99 per cent by next June, but you are right that there is likely to be some residual, and we will do the best that we can to capture it. However, there is no guarantee that absolutely 100 per cent of things such as psychological illness as a result of the event that maybe does not happen for a period of time afterwards, to make sure that we are capturing all of that and being able to attribute it specifically. However, we have got arrangements in place and an agreement and, as I say, a position of finance business principles around no detriment. We will work on the basis that there will be that good faith there with the UK Government to work through those things with us so that, even if it goes into the next financial year, we will still be looking to pick that up. When the COP26 finance unit disbands, we have a contact that we can go to if we need to continue the conversation beyond the end of this financial year. Thank you very much. Mr Page, would you like to come in and then I will bring in Mr Brown? Just to build on what James is saying, one of the things that we are acutely aware of and part of the conversation with the Cabinet Office has been that we, from the very start, have been very, very clear on both our finance principles and evidencing what we say. One of the things that we are doing from a finance perspective is working very, very hard to make sure that we capture early what is going on, what is those affectional COP26 and we can evidence it so that, when we go back to the Cabinet Office, we do so with an evidence base. We are doing our best to ensure that our argument for recovery is supported by the best evidence that we can do. James and his team have been working very, very closely with ACC Higgins to make sure that finance is not an after-effect of that. Finance is integrated into the early planning and we have been working very, very closely to ensure that our systems allow us to capture the difference between what was a business as usual activity, there might be some protest somewhere, which might be BAU nothing to do with COP26 or there might be COP26 protests all over the country. We do not know, but we are trying very hard to make sure that we capture things early on so that there is an audit trail that allows us to make our case strongly. We follow up supplementary, something that came to me. I feel quite assured that the UK Government is going to fund what they say they will. However, I am still wondering about the long-term effect and do you think that there is some scope, I mean it might be too early to say this, but do you think that there is some scope for an additional funding maybe coming from the UK Government, either straight to the police or via the Scottish Government, if there is a role for the Parliament here in that, or some sort of additional payment to cover things over the next few years? I get the stuff that you can say this happened, that happened and there is a trail of it, but there will be just a knock-on effect. I wonder if that is something that you are already thinking about or not equated at that stage? Everything that the Cabinet Office has asked of us is evidence-based today. I think that what you are saying is true. I think that there is a really good chance that there might be something like some sort of lag, how we quantify that and at what point is the line drawn. We, as part of the COP26 finance planning side, the Scottish Government are involved in that. SG officials are in the middle of that, so that type of risk is something that they will be acutely aware of as well. What we will do as we go through the COP26 event and the immediate after-effect, if we start to see the emergence of those things, we will be engaging very early with the COP26 spending team and the Cabinet Office to put early markers down and we will be working alongside the SG officials. As much as it is incumbent upon us to do the work on the ground and do the finance work and ground build the evidence base, there is quite a political element into that as well. That is where SG officials work and be administered is just as important for us in terms of making sure that we get a fair and appropriate recovery. Mr Brown, would you like to come in? Thank you, convener. Just very briefly to provide some additional assurance. From the authority standpoint, we are comfortable that every reasonable step has been taken to protect the business-as-usual policing budget from the impact of COP26. I hope that that will come across as well. What will also come across is how detailed the planning has been for this. It is planning on a level that I do not think that we have seen from the authority standpoint, so there should be additional reassurance from that. In terms of your final point, which you picked up with Mr Page, if there is any lasting legacy, we can be confident that if there is anything that we need to pick up and make a specific case for, with whoever we need to make a case with, we will certainly do that. The objective post-event will certainly be making sure that the policing budget does not have any adverse impact from COP26. Collette Stevenson, would you like to come in on that? Thanks, convener. Good morning, panel. On COP26, it would be the accounting principles in terms of the money coming forward and how that would look within your accounts. Even from a procurement perspective, there is obviously going to be a higher spend. Is it going to be separated? You talk about COP26 spending committee and what not. It is just to see how that is realised and going forward. I know that Audit Scotland will probably be keen, and if there is any legacy payments coming forward, I would be interested to know how that is going to look. Thank you for the question. It is a very topical one. We had our annual reports and accounts signed off last week at the board. I have already started the conversations with our statutory reporting team about the presentation of next year's annual report and accounts. What we plan to do is engage with Audit Scotland early on to make sure that we have a common understanding of what is required. From a statutory reporting perspective, we will show the costs that are directly attributable, the costs that we incur directly. That will not include accommodation and mutual aid, because they will be picked up through UK Government accounts, but the costs that we have directly will be included in our numbers. It is not coming through as resource dealt, so there is a question around part of the accounts about whether we treat it as income. We reimburse them rather than funding. I have the team working on that, and they are going through the FREM and will be taking guidance from SIPFA technical and Audit Scotland. However, as a note in the annual report and accounts, we would have to set out, instead of just being in the entire numbers, we would probably separate it out to be clear about what was the business-as-usual cost and what was the COP26 cost. However, there is not a statutory reporting requirement in the FREM, as far as I understand it, to separate it out for the statutory accounts. However, for good practice and disclosure, we would probably have a note to show what was business-as-usual policing and what was COP26 policing. Just quickly, before we move on from COP26, because I know that some other members want to come in and look at individual areas of police budget, I am just looking at overtime, arising from COP26, and I know that there will be a lot. It is really just to ask if the provision will include covering overtime costs, or will that have to be managed separately? There are two elements around that. The first is directly attributable overtime for the officers that have been deployed to COP26. That cost that we have forecast has been funded by UK Government to date. Again, once we see what the actual number is, there will be that kind of truing up. However, there will also likely be costs of officers that are picking up work as a consequence of other officers being on COP26, so that is an indirect overtime cost. We have an element of that funded by UK Government, but the reality is that until we get through November, depending on what the demands are on business-as-usual policing, we will not know to what extent that overtime is required. We are absolutely aware of it. We have got funding for what we know of, and I can give an assurance that, after the event, we have got robust plans for recording the overtime, as Mr Page said. We will take that to UK Government to seek the full funding. I think that, if members are happy, we will move on from COP26. I know that there are a number of members who would like to look at specific individual areas of policing or policy. I will hand back to Rona Mackay and then I will bring in Collette Stevenson after that. I would like to ask about the planning ahead and spending on the new budget that you get. In particular, I am interested in rape, sexual crimes and domestic abuse. On a wider level, there is culture of police on corporate policies, bullying, racism, homophobia and misogyny. Are you earmarking funds for those and, if so, can you expand on it? There are two parts to the question. The funds that we allocate for crimes against women in relation to domestic violence and rape. That becomes part of our budget allocation through the different divisions. Under DCC Graham, ACC Judy Heaton, the public protection domestic violence, they set a provision or they asked to make a request effectively. That is what we put in the budget for them. Whatever is asked for in that space, we will make sure that there is a provision for it. I think that that covers that part of it. In particular, the great rise in domestic abuse cases. I just wondered if that was something that would feature. It would feature in so much as ACC Heaton and DCC Graham would look at the demand trends there. If they need to allocate more resource into that area, that would feed through in terms of our budget planning. It is a good question because if you look at the quantity of police officers that we have and that is on the rise, it is a bit like pushing the balloon. You have to move more resource over there. The money follows the officers in that space and then we would have to look at the demand pressures elsewhere. It is a balancing act. However, ultimately, the chief constable acts as the arbitrator on that. However, any requirements for additional funding there would be made by the ACC and the DCC in that area, which would then come through to us. In terms of internally within Police Scotland, in terms of our culture, the chief constable has made it very clear. The senior force executive has made it very clear. We have made it clear in statements to the board that those types of behaviours are not accepted. Issues that reflect that type of behaviour are completely rejected. We are doing our utmost to try and ensure that we improve in those areas and do not accept those areas. Obviously, there has been a huge amount of reaction to recent events. Quite rightly, we are all horrified by them. What we are doing at senior command level is looking inward at ourselves to make sure that how we provide a service that can be trusted by the public in light of recent events. There have been steps taken already by the service on that front. However, looking inwardly, how can we look at our own behaviours, our own culture and address that? It is not a topic that is not at the top of our agenda. It is at the top of our agenda in terms of public confidence, in terms of ensuring that we operate workforce, both officers and staff. It is a workforce that men, women and people can be safe to be in. It is at the top of the chief constable's list. Does that include extra training for officers in any of the areas? Where it is required, absolutely. I would like to ask about the use of non-disclosure agreements by Police Scotland. Those agreements for people who are not aware are used in the payment of compensation deals with people in order to keep the details of those pay-outs secret or confidential. It has been reported that the value of such claims has breached £1 million since 2013, and they raise serious questions about transparency and accountability around public money. Even just today, we heard of a successful tribunal claim that was brought by a female police officer called Rona Malone. Her career was destroyed by what was described as boy's club culture. Previously, she was offered to settle on condition that she signed a non-disclosure agreement. Mr Gray, do you think that those are compatible with good governance and public confidence and accountability? Non-disclosure agreements are not something that I would expect us to do. The majority of us, in the early years, I am not aware of any recent times that I have not seen or been involved in any discussion of that nature. We are not supposed to do them, I know that. However, there may be certain circumstances—certainly not in this particular case but because of particular sensitivities where they may on occasion be used, but I agree with your sentiment. In regard to non-disclosure agreements, our guidance is the ACAS guidance, which says that NDAs can be used legitimately in some cases, usually around confidentiality and protection of commercial sensitivity. We would use them in those grounds. ACAS guidance and our position is that they absolutely should not be used, where it is to prevent sexual harassment, discrimination, whistleblowing or anything like that. That would be an inappropriate use of an NDA, and it is not something that we would completely incompatible with the offer that was put to her on and on alone. Her case was one of sexual discrimination, and she attempted to use those in order to settle confidentiality, and the public would have been unaware of what transpired. I cannot comment on that case, because it is only broken this morning, but what I am showing is our guidance. There is also a contradiction between what you are saying and what Mr Gray is saying. Mr Gray is saying that those are not compatible, but there is no place as my understanding. I said that there were certain rare exceptions, but certainly in this particular case, as Mr Page said, it is in those very limited circumstances. I think that you said that those were mostly historic, but according to a media report just this week, there have been seven in the past couple of years, all females, three officers, three civilians and one member of the public. I cannot comment on those numbers, I am unaware. I am happy to write to the committee and provide some more data on that once I get the facts on that. I think that if I may ask members to confine questioning to budgetary issues, I am sure that you are going to this. I would ask if you would respectfully confine your questioning to budgetary considerations. This is budgetary. It is for Mr Brown and his respective NDAs. It is just whether you have had any discussion with the police or expectations around the use of these and how they can impact on budgets? Not to my knowledge, but I will follow up on that. Mrs McNeill, do you want to come in on this particular? No, nothing else. Okay, thank you very much. Collette Stevenson Thanks, convener. I just wanted to touch upon your procurement practices. There were several recommendations that were brought forward from the past year, albeit that you have just had your recent accounts signed off. I have not had the opportunity to look at them, but going by the previous ones, there was a recommendation about putting forward a procurement improvement plan in place and in your future spend. I just wanted to look at things like openness and transparency. You have talked about innovative and creative thinking in terms of suppliers and what not. It was just to see what steps and actions you have in place in your spend and any savings that could be made there. The other thing that I wanted to ask about in terms of spend was focusing on misuse of drugs. For instance, in terms of naloxone, officers carrying naloxone, is there a new budget going forward for things like that in order to tackle misuse of drugs? Start by addressing the point about the improvement activity. There has been a procurement improvement plan that has largely been worked through and there has been significant improvement in our procurement practices in the organisation, which has been recognised by both internal and external audit. There is still more work to be done. We still have areas where we can improve and tighten up. By and large, the spending is now well controlled and we have finally managed to roll out a P2P system across the organisation to get standardised purchasing practices across the organisation. As you will be aware, the focus in the early years of Police Scotland was making sure that the operation of police and operational policing continued to be effective. Some of the corporate improvement work that is required has taken a bit longer, so in effect we had eight different procurement teams still operating, but that has now been brought into a single team. We also had a procurement strategy that was approved by the SPA board last week. That looks to build on the previous one, which is mostly focused on compliance, which is important. That is obviously a continuing focus, but we are looking to broaden that out around looking at the environmental practices of suppliers and considering whether they should be waiting a portion to that in any kind of ITT tendering exercises. We are looking at the employment rights of people who work in organisations. We have been doing this and we have been improving over time, but we have really put more focus on it. Are our suppliers good employers and can we use our buying power as leveraged to try and change behaviours if they need changing? We are also looking at the profile of our spend and where we spend money and trying to push more money into local communities where we can, especially around supporting recovery of Covid to make sure that we are a national organisation. There are times when we have to do things at a national level, but even facilities management, where we have a national provider for hard facilities management, makes sure that we can make sure that there is subcontracting being done to local firms around the country. We are trying to put a focus on that and use our buying power to try and help to support better outcomes that are linked to the national performance framework. On your final point about misuse of drugs, I would need to write back to committee on that around the detail of it, but it is a relatively low level of spend, so I have not personally been involved in that, but I can find the detail around the procurement activity in relation to that and the cost. What is asked on the lock zone front will make provision for it. It is a relatively small number in terms of our budget, but there is no specific case come to us to ask for it, which means that it is being absorbed within the normal budgetary envelope that is available in that area of the business. Can I just come back on that? I think that there is a cost involved in the training as well that will be included in that as well. Yes, absolutely. Are you wanting to ask a follow-up question on that, Mr MacGregor, or to bring in Pauline McNeill first? It does follow up on that, but I am quite happy for Pauline to come in first. I think that she had her hand up before me. I will bring in Pauline McNeill on that. Is that okay? Is that on a different subject? Yes, that is fine. Thank you. So, I just wanted to go back. Is that a question probably to do with the capital budget, but you can tell me. Perhaps for you, Mr Brown, but again you can tell me. Again, the Scottish Police Federation had evidence in relation to co-location of police services. I am sure that there is a shared concern about the poor condition of the police estate so looking for opportunities to co-locate. What the SPF has said, in those cases, would mean that Police Scotland would be the tenant and not the landlord and that there would be increased revenue in the long run if there was more co-location of services. It tends to suggest that it is desperation rather than suitability as the key driver. Is this the principle of the authority or Police Scotland to seek co-location or is it a measure of last resort? My concern would be that there are immediate pressures, but looking to the future, I would not have thought that it would be ideal in most cases to co-locate. It has been controversial to see in the past to co-locate when there are completely different services from other services that they might be sharing a building with. It is not for the SPA authority to determine where police officers are located. That is the chief constable's decision in the first instance. We obviously, in terms of the state strategy planning disposals, need authority approval, but the driver comes from operational requirements. In terms of our estate strategy, the estate strategy has a component of prudent financial management. What is the best way to make use of the assets? As James has already said, the condition survey that we have recently carried out and the condition survey that was carried out in 2015 highlighted a very large amount of funds that are required to bring the police estate up to where it needed to be. The committee will all be aware of the multiple photographs that have been in the press over many years from the Federation of very poor accommodation, which we have been obviously with the investment challenges that we have had and we have been struggling to do. The estate strategy around co-location is again driven operationally. Although the estate strategy itself is a kind of corporate strategy, because it kind of falls under my purview, the direction of what does the police service want now and in the future from its estate is driven by the operational policing requirements. One of those key requirements was almost to recognise that the police estate as it was was basically a police station located in every village alongside the pub, the doctors and whatever. That is not necessarily what is required now. What was required was better integration of the police service with other public sector services and recognising that policing is part of a process that deals with the challenges that people have and better integration with other public bodies does a couple of things. A, it can help to improve the service delivery. Secondly, both for us and for other public bodies, shared location, shared costs reduces the overall burden on the public sector. We also make sure that we still have visibility where we need to in those co-located areas. It will still be very visible where we need it to be, a policing presence. That is very much an operationally driven requirement, principally by DCC Kerr, because that is the local policing footprint. It is not driven purely by the finance. The other issue that we have is our net carbon ambition to green our estate in line with the Scottish Government's requirements, UK Government requirements. A lot of our estate is very old. Not only do we have a very large maintenance bill associated with it, but to green it would be very expensive. We are looking at the location of the estate in the context of the ability to provide policing services to community. Our ability to make that estate fit and habitable for police officers and staff, and to get the best value for money. That is where the co-location approach has come forward. As James has already said, the feedback that we have had from the officers and staff in the north-east about the move in Aberdeen has been incredibly positive. They are now operating and working in much, much, much better conditions. It is greener and it costs me less money to run. Maybe we need to pursue that a bit further at another time, because that is quite a lot of different priorities about decarbonising the estate. I have experienced it myself in my own patch in Glasgow about the poor estate. I am glad that you said visibility because, from the public's point of view, what they will be interested in, police office is quite different from any other environment, and I would argue that it needs to be so visibility is really important. Although that would not want to think that it would be completely driven by best value, because it is a service that is quite distinct, you would agree with that. Mr Greene, do you want to come in now? Thank you. I just wanted to touch on an area that is linked to the budget, but it is about the financial sustainability as part of your medium and long-term plans. I just wanted to refer specifically to your submission to the committee on that. There is quite a lot of wording in there. I know the last question session. I asked more about the numbers, but this is more about the strategy. It just raises maybe some cause for concern that I wanted you to help to alleviate for me. You talk about your financial plan, which is your current five-year financial plan, and how you maintain sustainability. You indicate that the current plan will maintain current levels of policing, but it is dependent on a number of key factors, and you list those four key factors. That strikes me as quite key because the key factors include an increase in line with commitment to real-terms protection. I want to ask specifically what you mean by real-terms protection. I want to ask what you mean by managing the workforce size because surely an increase means higher expenditure, managing non-pay pressures and receiving compensatory funding to support income loss due to Covid. Those are quite big issues. My first question is what is the risk factor in those four key determining factors that allow you to maintain current levels of policing? The second question is, what has the Government indicated to you in response to those asks? I will start off if you do not mind, and James will come in with more specific numbers. In terms of real-terms protection, as we have already said, about 80 per cent or 86 per cent of our entire budget is people. It is a huge number within our overall budget. The biggest pressure there is pay. We have committed to operating within our budget. If pressures come into us to take us outside of that, they have to be funded from elsewhere, otherwise we cannot operate within our budget. That includes things such as national insurance hikes. The current national insurance increase, which will come in from April next year, is roughly £11.5 million into our budget. Again, £11.5 million is an awful lot of money, and if that national insurance is not covered by a Scottish Government, it will not have to be cut somewhere. That is the importance of real terms. It has to cover all the inflationary people-related costs that come in from the outside over and above our core budget. The workforce management point is a very important and very tricky one to manage, because, as you have said, you cannot just keep growing headcount because your bills go up effectively. We have already mentioned that we need to increase our headcount in certain areas, such as cyber, because there is increasing demand there and we know that we need to recruit people with specialist skills into those areas. There are only two ways in which I can fund that. Either we make non-pay savings because of the economies of scale that James has mentioned, we reduce our bills and then I use some of that surplus to fund those extra jobs, but we have already been pressing down on that budget for a very long time, so there is not that much margin there. We could, using reform funding in capital, use transformation to create capacity, so body-worn video, and other technical means that creates a gap where it means that it costs less for us to deliver a current service and the gap I can then use to push it into cyber. Alternatively, the one that is probably the trickiest of all, as long as I get the money on the capital and reform, is the workforce mix. Now, if we have a defined number of workforce at the moment, and I need, say, 50, for example, cyberspecialists, and there is a cost associated with that, and all other things being equal, I do not have the money from elsewhere, we will have to change the workforce mix, and this is where I mentioned this at the SBA resources board a couple of weeks back. At that point, we need to think about the jobs that we do in policing, because what we cannot do is recognise that demand requires new jobs, but just keep adding the new jobs to the mix, because policing will just continue to get more expensive. At that point, we have to think about the positioning of policing in terms of the services that we currently deliver. At that point, when we have done everything that we can, we know that there is no more money coming from the Scottish Government to help to fund that on top of everything else that we have. We will have to look at whether we provide the services that we currently provide, because if we do not, we need to deprioritise some of those services and redirect the funding for those services across into new jobs. At that point, we will be offering voluntary redundancy or voluntary retirement to staff in those areas that are less of a priority currently than they used to be, because that is how we will balance the budget. Can I just listen to your answer and to previous answers? Why are we resourcing the police to budget and not budgeting to the resource needs? It sounds to me like every answer that you have given me with respect is about how you meet a balanced budget, not how much does it cost to adequately police. That sounds like a very different approach to perhaps what we are used to. Two answers to that. First, on the capital side, about three years ago, we changed the way that we articulated our capital requirements. At that point, we publicly, both at the board and at committee level and in our published reports, were very explicit in what policing needed from a capital position. At that point, everyone was able to see what we needed to deliver policing versus what we were given. That is where you get that gap between. We have asked for £80 million, £90 million and we get £50 million. We have been quite explicit on that. Up until the budget that has been granted, we have been operating a structural deficit anyway, so we were having to build transformation activity with a view to reducing police officer numbers, the additional, because that was the most expensive part of our budget. The structural deficit additional funding that we have this year put us into a balanced budget position. Having said that, like all public bodies, we have to operate within our balanced budget. We will try to operate with our balanced budget by doing the things that I have just mentioned, because that is good management practice, effectively operating with any budget. There may well be a point where there is a demand on policing that we require to meet, that we cannot do it internally without compromising current service delivery. At that point, we do need to go to the Scottish Government and make a case to say that we need additional funding to meet that type of demand. At the point that we do that, it has to be backed up by really solid evidence and data that shows that we are not shroud waving. What we are doing is being very explicit about the fact that we are managing the police service as efficiently as we can, but notwithstanding that, there is an additional demand on us that we do need some support on. At that point, once we have taken it through our own police governance, we will go via the board to be scrutinised and challenged there, but then it will come on to the table for the Scottish Government. What are the savings that are required to maintain financial balance that you talk about in your submission? I can pick that part up. The savings are predominantly around the fleet and the estate that we were touching upon earlier on. An electric fleet, again dependent upon funding, will be a lot cheaper to operate than the current diesel petrol fleet. If we are able to make more use of co-location opportunities, that will reduce the cost. Having done that initial estimate around what we think we might be able to deliver, subject to funding, that would broadly meet the pressures, the non-pay pressures, that we anticipate over the next five years. To quickly come in, I have a final follow-up question that I would like to ask, but if you can be quite brief. Just drilling down further when you talk about the savings in terms of your fleet, so I am going to bring in a financial technical thing here. I take it then, you will no longer, from a capital spend, it will be a revenue spend. I think that you touched upon it earlier, so you will be leasing electric fleet, so it will be across over five years then, rather than a one-off capital spend. Is that correct? The two parts, I think that our saving will come. Our saving is a pure revenue saving in the sense of the fuel costs versus electricity costs, that is revenue saving and the reduction in the size of the workforce to maintain the fleet, that will be a revenue saving. The piece on the leasing model that you are right, that has in the past been a revenue cost, whereas buying a car is capital, but with the introduction of IFRS 16, I do not want to get into the detail of that, that is likely that it will be mostly capitalised. We have flagged this with our colleagues in the Scottish Government to make them aware of what we are planning to do and what that impact would be, and we are still waiting to hear back. I think that in turn the finances waiting to hear from Treasury around how it is going to be managed so that we understand the full implications of it, but my understanding is that there will be adjustments to Ardell and Cdell to reflect the new accounting implications of it. I do not know the answer yet until we have clarity over what the accounting treatment will be. You are waiting on clarification from the Treasury on that. We will get it from finance in the Scottish Government, but I think that they are waiting from Treasury was the last update that I had. I am just looking at our time, we have slightly overrun, but I would like to bring the session to a close with a question around your digital strategy, which we have not covered today. Obviously, your five-year capital investment plan includes continued roll-out and work around your digital strategy. Obviously, there has been criticism, for example, of the call handling side of the Police Scotland function. I am just really interested to ask a bit about what the priorities will be and the budgetary implications for making sure that that strategy continues as planned. We are in the process of, as part of the digital data and ICT, which we published a good number of years ago. There is a technical project called the Unified Communications new CCP project, which we will be pushing off into early next year. That is the project that, effectively, all blue light services and public sector services will have to address at some point, because of the analog system that BT is turning off in 2025. That is the replacement for the old analog BT lines. We will have to have digital lines. It also gives us multi-channel capability. That is part of the strategy that has been on the stock for a long time, which will introduce new technical capability and better service capability into our call centres. It is also a project and a programme that will be mirrored elsewhere across the public sector. We, as all the work that we do currently, are working very closely with our blue light colleagues in fire and ambulance to look at procurement opportunities to share, estates opportunities to share, both to reduce our cost base and improve efficiency. UCCP would be one of those things where we are being quite open and transparent with those areas to say, this is what we have got to do. We will share it. We will work with you as much as we possibly can to help all of us to be more efficient, to be honest. Picking up on the funding question, it is quite nicely linked back to the discussion on the capital ask. It is in that £466 million over the five years. It has been in our ask in the 85 when we got the 50. If you were to go back to when the strategy was published in 2018, then, had the funding been what had been asked for in the years, we would be further down the road. Again, it goes back to the speed at which we can do digital data and ICT. Will we determine, in part, by how close we get to £466 million over the next five years? I was unaware that you were wanting to come in very quickly, Mr MacDonald. Thank you, convener. I thought I'd been forgotten about there. It probably is a reasonable and unfair area to ask a last question on. I wanted to ask about it being touched on, I think, in all your answers when looking at the budget overall. It's just about where local policing sits in the budget in terms of being a priority. I can only speak for myself, but I'm sure I'll also speak from colleagues that the relationship with local police stations in my constituency is absolutely fantastic. There's two that cover the two different parts of the constituency. It's such a crucial service that they provide to the public, really good relationship with the communities, community groups and stuff like that. I wonder where that sits in terms of priority. From a budgetary perspective, all of our budgets are driven by, if you like, ground floor up. DCC Wilker runs local policing. He has a huge budget in that area. His requirements, his demands come on to the table alongside all others. What we do from a finance perspective is the technical management of that ask, if you like. The chief constable's job at that point is to balance all of the demand and risk across all those different areas. To be honest, the deputy chief constable, Malcolm Graham, Will and Fiona Taylor, for the most part agree amongst themselves what the balance of priority should be because they are all highly experienced senior officers who understand all the demands in those different areas. What comes usually through to the chief constable is an agreed operational plan or operational policing requirement, which we then wrap around the technical side of the budget. It is up there front and centre because one of the key requirements for us in setting the policing budget is public confidence. That's one of the key things that the chief constable has to balance against all those other hidden demands of policing in specialist crime and cyber, which are not as visible but are more present in some cases. May I thank you all for your attendance today? I think that that's been a really useful session. Obviously, if there are any follow-up, there may be some follow-up information that would be helpful for the committee to receive, that would be welcome, and we'll obviously take that into account. So again, my thanks for your attendance today and we'll take a short five-minute break before we move on to our next agenda item. Thank you very much, members, and welcome back to the next item on our agenda. I'm delighted to welcome Mr Colin Lancaster, who is chief executive of the Scottish legal aid board. Thank you very much, Colin, for your written submission. This is available online, and I intend to allow about an hour for questions and discussion this morning with Colin. I intend to structure this session across a number of themes, and I'd like to start with looking at administrative costs. I'll hand over to Rona Mackay to pick this up. Thank you, convener. Good afternoon, or is it still? No? Good morning. If I could ask about just the general administrative costs have remained steady for about 10 years, which I guess you could argue is a real terms cut. Can I ask you if you have sufficient administrative resources to do your job, and what could you do with more? Good morning. You're right to observe that things have been fairly static for the last 10 years in terms of the budget figure. Things haven't been static in terms of the profile of the organisation, the staffing mix, and the other costs that we incur. What you can see from a more detailed examination of the mix between staffing and running costs is that they've moved a fair bit in the past few years. Specifically, we have reduced our non-staff running costs considerably over that period, which has enabled us to maintain our staffing costs despite the fairly flat overall budget. That's really been part of a strategy to move towards digitisation, to try and drive efficiency within the organisation and in the service that we provide externally. Over that period we have managed to reduce our staff numbers because some of the processes that they have been engaged in previously were no longer needed to the same extent because of that process of modernisation. We have been able to reduce some of our other running costs that have been associated with what traditionally was quite a heavily paper-based process. Particularly over the past 18 months, digital and online barring some of our communication with the public, so all of our communication with the legal profession is based on our online systems. That's enabled us to really change the way we do our work and the costs associated with doing it. While there have been various periods where things have been tight, we have managed to adopt a number of strategies to live within our means and, as I said, to reduce the running costs to enable us to maintain our staffing numbers where they have been needed. Over the past few years, I wouldn't say that we have felt that there have been things that we should have done or would have preferred to have done that we haven't been able to do purely because of the budgetary position, but we have kept a very careful watch on all of our running costs. Our procurement processes have been improved. Some of the systems that we've adopted have given us some efficiency savings. Significantly, several years ago, we moved premises out of our beautiful and now very expensive Georgian series of townhouses into a publicly-owned building at Haymarket. That changed our cost profile quite considerably because we took effective ownership of that building and have now managed it on behalf of a number of tenants as well as our own organisation. That has reduced our cost profile quite considerably, so we can generate income from subletting that space. That's seen us through for a number of years. Obviously, those impacts peter out over time. In the last couple of years, things have become a bit tighter. You will have seen that the allocation for us this year increased for the first time by any significant amount in the past 10 years. That was really in recognition of the fact that we exploited all the usual things that you might expect a body to do to find savings in running costs to drive down expenditure and that, without some additional contribution from the Government, the PIPs would start to squeak a bit. How much did your staffing come down? How much workforce do you need? The staff number is over a long-term period. We have reduced, I think, by about 25 per cent. I can give you a specific detail. It's around about that. That's not just over the last 10 years, but over the last 15 years. As I said, the process of digitisation was one that started quite some time ago, and we're maybe slightly ahead of the curve there, which has stood us in very good stead. You've answered my second question, which was about efficiency savings, which you've explained in your first answer. I move on to the action that you're taking or planning to take in response to your work with the Equality and Human Rights Commission in regard to impact assessments. Does that have budgetary implications for you? In a general sense, we're putting more emphasis on our equalities work. We've been doing quite a lot of that over the past few years, building that up. The way that we have approached our work with the HRC is to try and really embed our work on impact assessment into other processes. Rather than treat it as a standalone issue, what we're trying to do is make sure that, as we do business improvement work, as we review our policies and our processes and our practices, we're building equalities into the heart of that. While there is some additional work that would not otherwise have been undertaken or undertaken in the way that it will be associated with that work, most of it is really an approach, so it's a way of doing the things that we plan to do. A major strand of the work is reviewing all of our operational decision making policies, so how we apply the discretion that we're given by the legal aid legislation in respect of applications or accounts, and making sure that we have clear statements of all of our policies in relation to those that that is translated into clear guidance for the profession and for our own decision makers. As part of the process of drawing up the policies or articulating the policies that have previously been in place, we are conducting thorough impact assessments, we are consulting on those policies, we are seeking input from the profession, from users of legal aid, from others who might have an input to make, to ensure that we are properly reflecting all the needs of people with protected characteristics, as well as being able to clearly state how we do, what we do, why we do it that way, what information we need, whether that's from a member of the public applying for legal aid or from a solicitor, making an application on their behalf or submitting their account for payment, to make sure that all of that is as clear and transparent as possible. As I said, the equality's work is built in to the core of that. Another piece of work that we had already scheduled but have perhaps given greater prominence is a review of all our people-related policies, so looking at our staffing policies and procedures. Again, just to make sure that all of those are fully up-to-date and reflect good practice generally, as well as specifically in relation to protected characteristics. We will be incurring some additional cost in the support that we need to go through that full review process and make sure that we have that up-to-date suite of policies in place. It does sound quite labour-intensive what you've been describing. I would imagine that there would be some additional cost, but I guess the most important thing is that you can evaluate it and you can actually evidence it in your work. You have methods of doing that, so that's the most important thing. Is there anything else that you'd like to say about just the general costs and what your budget is? That improvement work that we're doing, generally speaking, we are using existing staff to do that work. We'll bring in a specialist support where we need it for short periods of time, but generally we're doing it using existing staff. For something like the Gala project, the project about our guidance on legal administration, we're really tapping into the expertise that exists within our operational teams. That inevitably means that they are drawn away from their day-to-day work for some of that, and I think that that is maybe where we're starting to feel a little bit of pressure. That's why the small increase in the budget this year will enable us to look at the resourcing in those teams so that we can do both the day-to-day work and maintain what has been fairly good performance in terms of the turnaround times that we have and the engagement that we have with the public and the profession on legal aid matters, while drawing on the experience and expertise of those staff for our developmental work. That's what we're going to be able to do over this period. I wonder if we can move on now to unless anybody else has got any specific questions around administrative costs. I'd like to move on to looking at trends and general trends around legal aid and the numbers of applications granted for legal aid. We've seen and spoken about that in our previous session with you. The trend has been downwards. While, for example, there are reasons for the pandemic, I'm just interested in whether or not you think that there are other underlying reasons why we're seeing this downward trend. What might mean longer term for legal aid budgeting and extending that to the situation that that might present for legal aid firms offering legal aid work? That's a really interesting question and one that I could probably spend all day talking about, but I'll spare you some of the details. Legal aid isn't a single thing, as you'll have picked up from looking at the stats and from hearing the discussion last week and also submissions that you've had. There's a very wide range of different topics that are covered and the trends in relation to those different topics are different. The overall picture is a combination of the impacts of really quite different things happening in society, in the criminal justice system and elsewhere. For example, over the longer term, if we look over 10 to 20 years, what we can see is a real move within civil legal assistance towards many of the social welfare law categories. We now see far more advice provided in relation to mental health, immigration and asylum, housing cases to some extent, but also the big rise in relation to civil legal aid is adults with incapacity. We can see the immediate impact of changes in legislation that the Parliament has brought forward and new rights that have been created or processes that are required then can stimulate demand for legal aid. Adults with incapacity is our guardianship-based application and is our biggest single category of application for civil legal aid. 15 years ago, it didn't exist at all, so you can really see how those shifts happen over a period of time. While that has risen considerably and stayed at a high level, other things have had different trends. The big headline trend is in relation to criminal legal assistance. Criminal tends to account for two thirds of legal aid expenditure. That balance has shifted a bit in recent years in that it is less dominant than it once was, and that is largely driven by a 10-year reduction in the number of court prosecutions. The system being demand-led responds to demand, so as the demands reduce in relation to the number of court actions that are taken, applications go down and, as a result, the number of cases that we then pay goes down. Generally, what one should celebrate is that, if crime is down or there are fewer prosecutions or people requiring assistance, that would seem to be a good thing. For those providing the service, it is business levels that then fluctuate. What we can see over that 10-year period is that the amount of business available to be done by those firms, particularly those who specialise in criminal work and might find it harder to, if you like, divert capacity into other areas of business, will have been fairly significant. It is a 35 per cent reduction in prosecutions over that 10-year period. It is a 32 per cent reduction in criminal legal aid expenditure. Those things will not be without their impacts on those who are delivering the service. I know that you will also be aware of that, because you have had submissions from firms. A lot of firms are very small. I think that about 70 per cent of those providing criminal legal assistance have two or fewer solicitors providing criminal legal assistance. Perhaps their ability to respond to changes of that magnitude will be quite difficult. They might find it a challenge to flex their capacity or, as I said, to divert into other areas of work. The model 30 years ago was of the generalist high street firm, who would be doing a bit of criminal work, a bit of family work, a bit of work for the local community and for local businesses. Those things might be ebb and flow in a way that could be managed alongside each other. However, they move towards specialisation in particularly small criminal-only firms and might leave them vulnerable to those kind of fluctuations in the market. That might cover my follow-up question, which is really about looking at how those in particular specialist criminal law firms might need to change their model of practice, perhaps, and what budget considerations might need to be taken into account in order to allow that to happen. I do not know if there is anything else that you want to add on that. It is, again, a really interesting question to ask, and it is a really useful one to be discussed. I think that there is a challenge in the discussion around legal aid, which is all about fees and spend, and there is less focus on the delivery. As we said in our submission last week, the delivery is good. We have a lot of committed solicitors up and down the country delivering a great service on behalf of their clients in difficult circumstances, particularly in the past 18 months, in difficult and changing circumstances. That is really important to recognise. However, the structures in which those services are delivered are not dictated by or required by the shape of the legal aid system. Any discussion about the different ways in which firms could structure themselves, in which they could mix their business, or in which they could work together at a local level or across the country beyond the scope of legal aid policy per se. However, the impacts of those issues result in the discussion focusing on fees and income levels for firms. Mr Greene raised the question last week about whether an immediate increase in fees would solve the problems that were being described. It is not for me to say whether there should or should not be an increase in fees, but a number of the issues that we see, the things that we hear about in the evidence that you have been given by firms, are structural. Some of those are about business models, some of those are about professional structures or training models, or the ways in which firms can deliver their services. As a public service, that is really unusual in that it relies for its delivery on hundreds of small firms competing against each other at a local level for business, rather than co-ordinating their services to ensure that client needs are met in the most sufficient or effective way that can enable them to derive fair remuneration for the work that they do in a way that is cost effective for the taxpayer but delivers high-quality services to the public in a way that is predictable, understandable and accessible. It is not a debate that we could possibly resolve today, but I think that it is a really important discussion to have. Thank you very much, that is a really helpful response. Russell Finlay, you are wanting to come in. Just going back to that point about local firms competing for the same pot of money effectively and some of what we heard previously from Scottish Women's Aid about a lack of specialist solicitors in respect of those types of offences involving women being victims. Do you see an increased move towards more direct employment of solicitors by the board as a likely direction of travel to help resolve that? Is that something that you are actively seeking to achieve, or really let's face it up against the resistance of the law firm and their lobby who are pretty hostile to the idea? As I said last week, it's not for us to decide how big or small or where public defenders are. We do have civil employed solicitors as well and the civil legal assistance office. We can't decide how many there will be or where they will operate. What we have observed is that a more varied range of tools might be helpful in addressing the range of needs that might present and in designing services to provide more of an assurance that services will be there when people need them. That question of competition is really interesting because PDSO has, from the outset, been seen very much as additional competition for the private bar. Both the private bar as a whole and individual firms in the areas where PDSO operates. It was part of the original expansion plan for PDSO when we went from one office to three to seven following the early evaluations. The way in which PDSO would operate would try to minimise the impact of their presence on any individual firms. Where we have a PDSO in Dundee, for example, it was set up to cover the courts in Dundee but also in surrounding towns so that its impact on competition was not focused entirely on Dundee. The Edinburgh Office also services Livingstone share of court, our Falkirk office, services Stirling and Allowa share of courts to spread that. You can debate whether that is the most efficient way of structuring it. In some respects, what that means is that our public defenders have to cover a lot of ground to deliver their business. If you were setting up a business and there was sufficient business to be had locally, you might be better focusing on your local patch but that is not how it was set up. There are different ways of doing that and there are different mixes that could be possible. It is not for us to say whether it should be 5 per cent at the moment or 10, 15, 20 or 30 per cent but there could be scope for both that and different ways of securing the services of private solicitors. At the moment, any firm that wants to provide criminal legal assistance can register with us. There is a fairly low bar for entry but that is not to say that there is a low quality bar. It is just to say that the requirements for entry are not particularly onerous and, as a result, any business that wanted to move into criminal legal aid work in any particular part of the country could simply do so. There is no overview possible or intervention that is possible if that looks like it might oversaturate a local market or draw a resource away from another area. Sure. A very quick follow-up. If I understand it correctly, in order to make any radical changes to structure, it would require political direction. On the basis of the structure, as it is, have you then thought towards creating specialist legal provision to deal with what has been identified as being a particular problem around domestic crimes? Sorry, what has happened to create or what could happen? Will it be something that you are exploring or have explored, or you are creating a specialist provision within the framework that you already have? I mentioned last week some initial discussions that we had with Rape Crisis Scotland. A lot of society were also involved in those discussions looking at the scope, even at present, for advice to be provided to complainers in sexual offence cases, particularly where certain applications were made for the leading of particular types of evidence, and the rights of those complainers in those cases to make representations in relation to that evidence. I also mentioned Lady Dorian's review, which looks at expanding the potential for complainers to participate in the process, or different aspects of the process. Obviously, for that to happen, there would need to be support provided, including funding for that support. There is a question as to whether that would best be provided by criminal defence solicitors, who have a clear understanding of the way in which those proceedings may unfold, the issues that might be discussed in court and what it might mean for a complainer, or whether it is somebody with experience in civil matters who might, for example, work in the area of domestic abuse. There might be different ways of doing that, but we have had those initial discussions to see whether, using the fact that PDSO is a separate service, we could try something out and explore what service would work best and how to get people in touch with that service, whether that is by referral from women's aid or rape crisis or other organisations that might be assisting complainers in those cases, whether it would be notification by the Crown if an application was made to lead certain evidence. We could try out those things and then use that as a basis for saying that there is a thing here, it does work with criminal defence agents, there is scope for it to be effectively a commission service that could bring in the private sector. At the moment, everything that the private sector does in a legal aid case is defined by the act and regulations, the things that they will be paid for doing. Other activity that is not directly associated with the case or with a defined form of legal aid would have to be thought of separately, and it might be that rather than thinking that is there a new type of legal aid or is there a new fee for that, it might be that is there a new service that could be delivered, that could be structured in a certain way, that could be commissioned out, contracted with private firms, delivered through a combination of public, private partnerships, specifically to meet that need as it emerges rather than using traditional models. I bring in Pauline McNeill. I think that you were keen to come in. Thank you very much. Good morning. Good afternoon. I know that you have heard some of the evidence that the committee has already heard. I just wanted to summarise what I was interested in about all of that. We have heard criminal lawyers and faculty of advocates just talk about the fee structure, about the fact that the faculty of advocates is saying that they have up their average daily cases to 20 from 12, and they still think that there will be a shortage of defence lawyers in the system. However, we also heard a lot about the job of a defence solicitor, and I think that there is a quite an important point to address here. The work-life balance for defence solicitors we heard, so they have to go to the police station, they have to go late at night. I would add into the mix that the vulnerability of all the clients of defence solicitors has to be acknowledged, but I suppose that I am asking if you agree with that. Any changes to a system, I wonder if you agree, needs to acknowledge that being a defence solicitor does carry all those things. Whether you work for the PDSO service, I presume, or your own firm, the job is probably much the same. You are dealing with vulnerable people in the criminal justice system who want a choice of lawyer to be properly represented, to give themselves the best chance to put their case forward, and the hours for defence solicitors are probably something that most ordinary people do not appreciate. I was wondering if you agree with that. I think that what you have had are some quite vivid descriptions of the work of a defence solicitor. I recognise absolutely that it is a tough job, and what you say there about the vulnerable clients. Many of them will have pre-existing vulnerabilities, and then being in a stressful situation in the criminal justice system will maybe add to those, or exacerbate those vulnerabilities. You have people who are in very difficult circumstances looking for help, and quite often their solicitor is the person who is there for them, the person they trust, the person they have a relationship with, and the only person who they think is on their side. It is a really important relationship. I think that it is one that so many of solicitors perform admirably. The pattern of work has changed again over the past period. It is around 10 years now since the cadre judgment extended rights to advice in police custody, and the criminal justice act three years ago extended rights further. In many ways, the change and the impact that it has on the way that services are delivered has not really been reflected in changes in the practice of criminal defence. It is maybe an additional burden, but the model has not really changed, which means that, while one might look at that and say, well, here we have a new situation where we have a requirement for a 24-7 service, a 24-7 service that is going to be delivered potentially by the same people who are delivering the daytime service, who may be called out to police station at 2 in the morning, but may have a chervin jury trial the next day. There are a sole practitioner, or they work in a firm with two people, so there is not really any scope for having rota there or having time off in lieu or substituting somebody else the next day. What happened in 2010 and 11, and largely in 2018, when the rights were extended, was that defence practices absorbed that work, so they took on additional responsibilities. While we had some discussion at the time about whether there were different models that could be used to ensure that you do not have to be on call all the time, if you are a sole practitioner, you might be able to collaborate with your peers to provide the sort of deputising services that you see, that does not happen. There is obviously a duty scheme that we manage, where we have duty solicitors who are available on there, if you like, on call. In a busy area, with lots of firms of solicitors, you might be a duty solicitor one week a year. In areas with your solicitors, you might be one week in two, one week in three, one week in four, but that means that you are not on call for that work all the time. However, for your own clients, the duty solicitor deals with people who do not have a solicitor, and who are in Police Custody to ask for a solicitor, and they will contact us and will arrange that. For your own clients, that service does not step in, and that is really where that extra burden comes. Even if you are only on duty one week a year, you might be on call for your own clients 52 weeks a year. I can see that that is a real challenge, logistically, as well as from a work-life balance point of view. What we did in 2010 was introduce a solicitor contact line, where solicitors employed by us provide a central telephone service, and that was augmented in 2018 to recognise the additional rights. We have a team of solicitors who are literally at their phones 24 hours a day, seven days a week, weekends, public holidays, Christmas day, boxing day, and they are available to take calls from the police for people who are in custody. They will provide telephone advice if somebody wants a solicitor to attend at the police station, particularly to attend for an interview, then we will arrange a duty solicitor to attend. If there is none available, we have off-shift contact line solicitors who we can call on to provide that service as well. That model was initially resisted. Initially it was regarded as being a grab on new business, but over the intervening years a lot of solicitors came to appreciate the fact that they were the first line and provided some sort of buffer for the demands of being on call 24-7. It has not really replaced that demand for individual solicitors to be on call. Part of the issue that goes back to the point about competition is that solicitors want to be there for their client, they want to secure that client, they do not want the client to be left with somebody else in case they stay with somebody else. The contact line does not do case work, so if a contact line solicitor acts for the client, the client will still be the client of the other solicitor coming the next day when they appear in court, so it does not disrupt that solicitor client relationship. I think that it would be useful to think about different models and different ways of delivering the service, if the private sector was to look at that. Could we operate in that way in relation to named solicitor clients rather than just duty clients? Is there a consortium type approach that might enable them to work collectively so that, again, every individual solicitor does not need to be on call all the time, but between a group of firms they could agree who was on call and agree that those clients would still be the clients of the other firms who were part of the consortium? An idea like that emerged about 10 years ago but was roundly rejected by the profession. It came from the profession but it was rejected by the profession who, I think, again treated it with a degree of suspicion and hostility. In some respects, that might hold the sector back in being able to think about innovative ways of responding to the new demands that would provide a good service to clients but without the impact on individual solicitors. I am just really aware that this is a really important topic and there are a lot of moving parts in it but just to keep to time and cover as much as we can. That was really helpful at that very quick question. I hope that it is a short answer. I know that you heard—I think that you did agree but you can correct me—that fixing the early plea aspect of fee might be helpful in the whole process. I wonder if you could put that on the record. Given what you have said, in the short term, until we find alternatives and agree some of the stuff or talk about some of the stuff that you have mentioned, do you think that there should be more immediate uplift in the fee structure in addition to what has happened in order to ensure that we can still provide an adequate service overall for people seeking to be defended in the criminal justice system? On the first question, yes, I do agree. To be clear, that would be reforming the fee structure to better reward early preparation, particularly where that leads to early resolution of the case. I absolutely agree that that should be done. That could be achieved through regulations. It does not need primary legislative change and regulations could be in place pretty quickly so that that new fee structure could be available for new cases within months. That would have an early positive impact. On the other question, there are two things here. There is one that is about should there be an injection of resource and the other is about should that injection of resource be enabled by or facilitated by an increase in the actual headline fee rate. As I said in my submission for this morning's meeting, the budget is demand-led. If there are more cases and there is more work done, more will be paid out in terms of fees. If there is an increase in demand in the short term and that results in more solicitors submitting applications or more solicitors doing work and submitting accounts, more money will flow into the sector immediately as a result of that. Our projection for this year is that we will return to pre-Covid levels within this financial year in terms of overall expenditure and that that will go up in future years because of the backlog being cleared and because of some increases in demand that we have seen even in the last year. That will put more money into the sector immediately. On the question of whether there should be a fee increase, ministers have committed to a further 5 per cent increase on the back of the 5 per cent increase that was made in March this year. The payment panel recommendations—I know that it was a statement made last week by the Minister for Community Safety and the Further Work—will be commissioned to look, hopefully, quickly at all of those questions as to whether or not there should be, over and above that, a 5 per cent increase, a further increase in the fee rate. I want to address what seems to be a bit of a contradiction in views as to what the situation is with Scottish legal aid. Anyone who follows Scottish legal news or any of the headlines over the last few days and weeks will see that there is quite a vocal concern from the legal profession about the situation versus perhaps what we are hearing in today's session, which is that the drop in review is simply a by-product of the drop in demand. We also know that what we heard from Citizens Advice Bureau said that those seeking legal assistance had gone up over 30 per cent in the last year but, at the same time, I believe that the amount of grants paid out had dropped by 27 per cent. Another illustration would be some of the witnesses to the previous panel who said that there are legal deserts in provision in Scotland. There are issues with access to justice, being many and varied, and those issues are particularly acute in Ireland and rural communities. It seems to me that, on the one hand, there is a body of people who say that the fee structure does not work, that they are not getting enough money for the work that they do, that they are not being paid for the right type of work and that people in the real world are not able to access the legal justice and representation that they deserve or want, but, on the other hand, it seems to me that the system is saying that we will only pay out as much as you ask us for. That seems to be a huge contradiction. Why is that? I do not think that it is a contradiction as such, but I can see why it might appear inconsistent. The system is demand led and that is baked in. If demand increases, if more people seek help and are given that help, more money will be spent on that help. Nobody is denied access on the basis that the budget has run out or that there is rationing of any sort. That is not how the system operates. What we heard from Sitton's advice was an increase in advice about legal aid, rather than an increase in people seeking advice on legal issues. Certainly, from my previous discussions with CAS over many years, I do not think that they tend to be the first port of call for people who are seeking a solicitor. Most people navigate their way to a solicitor independently. If they are having difficulty, they might go to send advice. I think that they mentioned a figure of 4,000 pieces of advice last year. Relative to the 100,000 or so who were granted legal aid, it is a relatively small number. I am not saying that they have not seen that increase. They absolutely have. Over this period, that might reflect challenges that people face during Covid in travelling or accessing physical services. They might have been seeking further advice on how they can get help during that period. On advice deserts, that is a tricky one. Over many years, we have a duty to monitor the availability and accessibility of legal services. We did that through an access to justice reference group for a number of years. We had the Law Society, the Scottish Association of Law Centre, Sins Advice Scotland, Women's Aid and many others sat on that group. The purpose of the group was to ingather evidence about those sorts of challenges so that we could provide an assessment to ministers of whether or not there were particular problems in availability or accessibility of services. All of our reports are published on our website. Generally speaking, we did not find evidence, and none of the participants in the group were able to give us evidence of systemic problems that would be isolated problems that they could identify. Nothing would say that the system is not working or that there are big issues there. In a couple of areas, we had evidence where we thought that something could be explored further. One was in relation to access for those who were deaf or hard of hearing, so we did some work with deaf action on that. The other was in relation to housing advice. Housing advice is one that appears to be very uneven on the face of it. We can see good strong pockets of housing advice, particularly in Glasgow and in areas where there are law centres or where our own offices operate, because we do quite a lot of housing advice for renters and such. However, there are other parts of the country where it would be fair to assume that there are people who experience housing debt. They may be getting help from the likes of Sins Advice or from Shelter or from specialist housing advisers, but we are not seeing that come through in great numbers of legal aid applications. In some of those specific areas, we can see that there may have been issues, but overall, the evidence that we had did not suggest a system of problems, and the evidence that we have gathered from applicants for legal aid is that a very small minority had difficulty finding a solicitor. We have quoted in the submission 5 per cent of criminal applicants. Our most recent civil survey was 8 per cent of civil applicants said that they found it difficult to find a solicitor. Generally speaking, coverage appears to be fairly solid. I know that that last survey was in 2018, so I presume that there is another one. We are running one now. I guess that the three strings to the puppet here are interlinked, one being obviously the set level of fees that is out of your control. There are policy decisions taken by Governments, the volume of cases that are brought to prosecution, but also the value of the cases. That is something that we have not discussed. There is probably no magic solution to all of that, but it is surely the increase of one or more of those factors that would increase the level of grants that is paid out by the board and the amount of revenue that is coming into the organisations that Pauline McNeill was talking about, who seem to be on the face of it struggling to survive on the smaller scale of the business sector. Where do you fit into that triangle of getting those up? Not that we necessarily want to be paying out more, but if that is what the right thing to do is, because it is an uncapt system, then so be it. Something has to give. What do you think is the most likely outcome? I think that what we can see happening in the past 18 months is obviously unusual. It has been very up and down, but we can see there being a build-up of cases in the system in terms of the backlog, which you are very well aware of. There is also an underlying growth in solemn cases, which we have observed. During last year, during the pandemic year, the number of solemn grants was higher than it had been the year before, and it is still going up. We see that growth in demand. The trajectory of those cases, the timescale over which they are seen through, will have stretched, but it has resulted in an increase in grants, which will result in an increase in activity and spending. As I said earlier, we expect to go back up to pre-Covid levels this year and beyond pre-Covid levels in future years. That does not look like it is going to reverse within the next two or three years, so we expect there to be a fairly significant increase in expenditure. In the course of this year, we expect to spend £30 million more than we spent last year. For brevity's sake, we are running out of time. Do you see your organisation more as a public administrator of public money to the legal profession business or as a consumer-facing organisation? The fact that there are so many thousands of people going to citizens advice—we know that many citizens advice services have been cut or lost recently—is not a warning sign that people have no idea where to go to seek for advice and help. Do you think that you can play a better role in being a much more consumer-focused organisation where people know who you are and know where to come to for advice directly from the body that administers the finance, rather than through the third sector or the charitable sector? As brief as you can, it is just to let other members come in before we close. Fundamentally, we are an administrative body. That is our statutory function, to administer the legal aid system. Whether that is all we should be is a different question, and there is potential to be different models of provision and different forms of intervention. There is scope for us or a body like us to take a more proactive role. The system is reactive, so it should not be. I will hand over to Collette Stevenson and finish with Fulton MacGregor. I wanted to touch upon interim fees that were introduced in the light of Covid because of the backlog in cases. Do you consider that that is the way forward? That should stay in place. I suppose that the impact is going forward in your budgets on how that will be impacted as well, so I came to find out a bit more about that. We have had interim fees for quite some time. They were extended for Covid purposes. Certainly, from the profession's point of view, it would create something of a cliff edge if the interim fee provision were to be removed, because there would be a gap, there would be work that already built and then there would have to wait for the end of other cases. If it, as a result of everybody bringing forward change in the cash flow model for the profession, then yes, it would change the cash flow model for us. We would be paying more out at earlier stages of the case, so it would bring forward expenditure from future periods. At the moment, I do not think that that would be an issue because of the interruption that Covid caused. It is something that the profession has talked about for many years, it is something that we have discussed with them. That is perhaps the best opportunity, having made those changes, to keep them in place in some form or another. They were brought through his emergency measures and they could be more nuanced, but something that addresses that cash flow issue of solicitors having to wait to the end of the case and carrying costs as they go. I have to say that the take-up of interim fees was not as big as we had initially anticipated, and I think that maybe that was because the profession was not confident that there would not be that cliff edge. An assurance that that would remain might give them the confidence to start changing their billing patterns and that would improve their cash flow in a way that I think would support their businesses. I just got a final question on the project that you are running just now. I will just call it simply the Gala project, but for the record, the guidance and administration of legal aid. In terms of this project, do you think that the work of it is having an impact just now on the effectiveness of decision making and stringlining? And do you think that it is having an impact on the experiences of solicitors and their clients who are involved with legal aid? It is an important one because it is a huge piece of work for us and one that is central to our work over the next couple of years. Ian Moyer in last week's panel mentioned the impact of the change to the interest of justice test. That came out of our Gala project, in which we looked at how we applied the factors that we weighed the information that we needed and concluded that we did not need all that information to be satisfied that it was in the interests of justice where a case was being prosecuted in the share of court. We changed our guidance, changed our system back in March. I think that Ian Moyer recognised last week that has already had an impact on the amount of information that we need to be given and perhaps the speed of some of the decision making. That is having an impact there. We have launched our consultation on accounts assessment. That should have an impact both in terms of some of the specific policy changes that we are proposing but also in making as clear as we can how the process works and the tests that we apply so that we can take some of the heat out of that relationship because it can get fairly tense. That should have a positive impact on solicitors both in terms of their administration and their cash flow if the result of that is that more of the accounts that are submitted can be paid in full first time because all the charges are valid and they are properly vouched. That should improve that position. We will be coming on to consults on means assessment and that is one that could have a significant impact on the individual applicants for legal aid in terms of the way in which we assess their income in particular. That might make it easier for some people to satisfy the means test and make the system a bit smoother. It is a very complex test at the moment and can be very time consuming. Anything that we can do there within the test as it currently stands could lead to an improvement. Separately, that process might identify and suggest a change to the regulations and that is something that we would then incorporate into advice from ministers. I suppose that the outcome of that and I have to say that anything that improves access to justice and access to legal aid is crucial. I welcome what you have said, but given that that is a budget scrutiny session as well, I think that by-streamlining that process once these things are working even more fully and better if you like, the result might be that more people are getting legal aid than before and will increase budget pressures in that respect. I have to be upfront about that. It could increase budget pressures on the Government, not on us because, as I said, it is a demand-led budget, but what that might mean is that people who perhaps should qualify but who find it difficult to go through the process—some people drop out of the process along the way—should get the help that they need. If us changing the way that process runs enables them to stick with it to the point where they get a grant of legal aid and they get the help that they need, that is how the system should be working. If that results in some additional expenditure, I think that that expenditure reflects what Parliament intends in relation to the act and regulations. Mr Lancaster, thank you very much for your attendance today. That has been most helpful. If there is anything that you wish to follow up, please feel free to do so in writing. Obviously, the committee will take that as that evidence into account.