 I welcome to the 21st meeting of the Criminal Justice Committee in 2023. We have apologies this morning from Sharon Dawey. Our first item of business is to welcome John Swinney to his first formal meeting of the committee. Sharon Dawey will attend next week as she has a prior commitment in London with the Public Audit Committee. I look forward to working with both of them and I repeat our thanks to Jamie Greene and Collette Stevenson who they replaced. Let me now invite John to declare any interests that are relevant to the remit of the Criminal Justice Committee. There is nothing from my register of interests that I believe I require to declare of relevance to the work of the committee. However, I need to state that I served as colleagues will know in the Scottish Government until March 2023 and participated in collective decision making on issues that will come before the committee during this term. In addition, for the period of July 2022 to March 2023, I took direct personal decisions in relation to the Scottish budget, which is relevant to material before the committee today and likely to be on other occasions. I would also like to welcome Donald Cameron, who is attending today as Sharon Substitute, as this is his first time with us. I would also like him to declare any interests that are relevant to the remit of the Criminal Justice Committee. Thank you convener, just one interest to declare and namely that I am a member of the faculty of advocates. Thank you very much indeed. Our next item of business is to decide whether to take item 5 in private. Our next item of business is to begin our pre-budget scrutiny of the Scottish Government's 2024-25 budget. We have two evidence panels today and I intend to run each of them for up to around 98 minutes. I am pleased to welcome our first panel of witnesses today. They are Jane Connors, DCC, Crime and Operational Support, David Page, Deputy Chief Officer and James Gray, Chief Financial Officer with Police Scotland, Ms Lim Brown, Chief Executive with the Scottish Police Authority and Mr Ross Haggart, Chief Officer Stuart Stevens, Deputy Chief Officer and John Thomson, Acting Director of Finance and Precurement with the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service. I refer members to papers 1 and 2. I thank the witnesses who provided written submissions. I would also like to thank the Scottish Police Federation and the Association of Scottish Police Superintendents for their written submissions that were received after we put out the papers. I would also like to thank the Fire Brigades Union similarly for their submission, which was likewise received after the papers were published. Those have all been sent separately to members and published online. Given the size of the panel, I am going to ask everyone to be as succinct as possible in their questions and answers and, if members can, to direct their questions to one or more of the witnesses at least initially. I would also invite each organisation present to try and feel just one person initially to respond. Having said that, I would like to begin with a very open question for us all just to get the session under way. During scrutiny last year, all three organisations here today painted a challenging picture on the state of their budget, although that was relieved in some part by extra funding allocated by the Scottish Government. I invite Police Scotland, the SPA and then Scottish Fire and Rescue to tell us briefly, if you can, how the finances for 2023-24 worked, what is the financial situation that you have been working in and what concerns you have and commentary that you have as we approach the 2024-25 settlement. If I can come to Mr Gray. Thank you, convener. The settlement that we received for the current financial year was a total increase in resource funding of £80 million, but of that amount, almost half of it related to squaring the pay settlement that had been agreed last year. With regards to new money, it meant just over £40 million. When we were trying to set our budget during the course of the year, what that meant was that there was a requirement for us to reduce police officer numbers and to reduce the level of overtime that had been seen in the previous financial year and also to reduce police staff numbers by a commensurate amount to the 600 police officer reduction, as well as non-pay savings in order to set a balanced budget. So DCC Connors would be better place to talk about the operational implications, but from a financial perspective, what that has meant in the current year is that our budget has been under considerable stress and we have been reporting that through Police Scotland and into the Scottish Police Authority that we have seen month on month overspends, which has resulted in us having to put together a plan in August that was approved within Police Scotland. On 8 of August of £18.9 million of additional measures that we would need to take in the year in order to bring the budget position back into line, that is primarily as a result of overtime being above what was in the budget, which I think is a consequence of the officer reductions and the additional pressure that puts on the service that has seen us overspend on overtime, albeit we are managing that very carefully on a fortnightly basis. Senior officers from across the service are coming together to scrutinise overtime from right across the service to see if there's areas where we could look to reduce that, but we are still seeing overspends there. We're still seeing overspends on police staff numbers. We have a recruitment pause in place, which has caused an organisational pain. That said, the usual turnover of staff has reduced considerably, so we're not seeing the level of savings that we would expect from that. So we are looking at other places now, such as the budget that we set aside for investment for the purposes of transformation to repurpose some of that money in order to plug the gap that we currently have in this financial year. I suppose that with regards to next year, what that means for me, I suppose, is an element of trepidation if we're to continue to see a similar settlement, which is below what's required to stand still and therefore requires reductions in the overall service. The compounding effect of that would be that it becomes progressively harder. Given that the service has taken out £200 million through police reform in the early years where there's been big efficiencies through economies of scale and procurement, there's been significant reductions in the estate, albeit that is a place that we absolutely recognise that there's further opportunity. We are about to go to the police authority to seek permission to start the consultation on the closure of 30 police stations. There's more that can be done in that space, but the workforce reductions are the most challenging area. If we continue on a track where the settlement doesn't meet our requirements to stand still, as it were, to that kind of real terms protection that we had seen in some of the years gone past, it's just my concern is around that compounding effect and the challenges that that will present on the service, which are already significant, as I say, with the overspend that we have. I'll maybe bring in DCC Connors in a second, but if I can maybe just come back to David Page and just ask if there's anything that you maybe want to add to Mr Gray's. Thanks, convener. As James has said, we took on a £54 million budget challenge this year alongside the officer reduction, and we're up against a £19 million mitigation plan at the moment, which we're struggling to meet. Where we're going to go with that this year is probably, as James has touched on, the reform budget, which has £20 million of the reform had been based on into our budget for this year, but what we're looking at at the moment is reviewing all of our projects and programmes to see which ones we can either pause or stop to reallocate the money's effect to fund the budget gap. We're trying to protect the rollout of national body warm video and the associated projects because obviously we've been looking for that for a very long time. However, the priority is to kind of balance the books and I think we're going to have to take a lot of pain in our transformation budget this year just to balance the books. The problem with that then is it delays the multi-year programmes into next year and if we have to reduce the head count by another 800 as we're going to the following year, I'll be using the reform budget to prop up the budget at that point, so that really slows down our capability. One of the things that we had been hoping for is that as the workforce reduces, we use capability enhancement to offset it, but if we're having to redirect our transformation budget into meeting budget pressures, then we've got workforce going down and we've got capability standing still, which effectively means we backslide on that, which has a clear operational impact on our operational colleagues. Dcc Connors, I'll come to you now. Thank you. So just to highlight some of the operational impacts, as I say, with limited resources and limited capability, that is going to impact on our ability to respond to different areas. So we are looking at how we shape our service to make sure that we define our core policing to reduce demand and increase capacity. We've already seen in some of our quarter one figures changes in service levels and our ability to deliver to the public on our outcomes that we're seeing a reduction in quarter one. We've already seen, and it's out in the public domain, some of the roads policing difficult and hard choices that are having to be made, prioritising things like 999 over 101, so that we can make sure that we manage the threat, harm and risk and vulnerability and protect the most vulnerable in the communities of Scotland. So that's just an overview of the impact that it's starting to have, the hard choices and decisions that we're having to make around how we deliver our service going forward as a result of the limited budgets that we have. Thanks very much. Lynne Brown, I'll come to you next, if you'd like to add anything to what we've heard already. Thank you, convener. Yes, what you've heard from Police Scotland is consistent with the authorities' consideration when the budget was set. The budget allocation, as you said, in 23-24, was better than anticipated, and we recognise and appreciate that, given the challenging fiscal environment being felt across the public sector, and when the budget was set in March 2023, the authorities were quite clear on their priorities. They wanted a balanced budget, they wanted prioritisation around areas of harm and the vulnerable, and they wanted the maintenance of 999. At that time, when they considered the budget in the papers, it did say that the financial year would see reduced levels of service in terms of delivery and capacity as it adjusted to the new funding model. What we've heard today is areas that the authority are expecting to be prioritised, as they expected back in March 2023. As we've outlined in our submission before you today, we received an additional £14.4 million from the Scottish Government in our resource budget for 2023-24, and that took our resource budget up to just over £308 million for the year. While we were very grateful for that additional funding and its assisting with pay awards for staff, we have still had to achieve savings of £11 million this financial year. As we've outlined our savings plan within our submission, details areas of our budget that were approved by the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service Board for our budget for this year have come across the whole organisation. Some savings have come from our service delivery arrangements and some from our support functions as well as we've sought to make those savings. Similarly to Police Scotland, it's led to us having to make some very difficult decisions this year. In respect of service delivery and based on our evidence-led modelling, we've temporarily removed 10-second or third appliances from multi-pump stations, and those were selected that would have the least impact upon community safety across Scotland. Aligned to that, we have also implemented changes that we identified within our operational strategy to our high-reach appliances, placing them in the most strategic locations where they can provide the most optimised and effective community safety response on a pan-Scotland national basis. We've also amended the crewing arrangements for water rescue at Polmwdy community fire station so that it's more in line with other water rescue stations throughout Scotland. In addition to those service delivery savings, we've also identified savings from some of our support functions, an example of the types of savings that we have identified as a recent decision to declare our office premises in Hamilton as surplus to requirements, and that will yield annual recurring savings for us and also a potential capital receipt for reinvestment. In terms of our financial position from 2024 onwards, we've modelled a number of scenarios largely depending upon what future pay awards and inflation might look like for the organisation up until 2026-2027, and those correspond with the timescales set out within the resource spending review. Those illustrate that, based on the flat cash assumption within the resource spending review, we may need to make additional savings of between £14 million and £26 million next year alone. By 2026-2027, our modelling indicates that that may rise to between £37 million and £48 million, and as I say, that's against the resource budget of just over £308 million. We've also outlined in our submission savings that have been achieved to date through the reform of the Fire and Rescue Service in Scotland since 2013, and our submission highlights how those savings have been realised, which have resulted in the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service now being very lean in terms of the structures that we've got within the organisation and also our expenditure. We also highlight within our submission that around 80 per cent of the costs of the service cover staff costs and of that 80 per cent relate to operational staff. The combination of those factors means that there's very little scope for us to make significant savings within the service without reducing firefighter and specifically whole-time firefighter numbers, and again we've illustrated that within the submission. If we were to have to reduce our firefighter numbers to the extent that our modelling suggests, then we do not believe that this could be achieved without impacting upon the safety of the communities that we are here to serve within Scotland. We've also provided information in our submission in respect of our capital budget, and as outlined, this has remained at the current level of £32.5 million per annum for the last seven years, and clearly over this time the spending power of that money has diminished as a result of inflation and other factors. We now adopt a risk-based approach to our capital budgeting, and we believe through this that we require a sustained investment of around £60 million per annum in our capital to address the significant backlogs that we have got. In particular, within our submission we've highlighted issues that we have with 14 of our stations that have reinforced autoclave aerated concrete, which is getting a lot of media attention. I note at the moment across the public sector that it's been used in 14 of our stations within the construction of their roofs. This is a problem that we've been aware of since 2019, and while we've got mitigation measures in place, permanent solutions are required because they are key locations for us to operate from across Scotland. We've also highlighted the overall condition and suitability of our property portfolio, particularly that we recognise the need for us to prioritise firefighter safety in respect of contaminants, and we seek to provide dignified facilities across our estate for all staff and visitors to our premises. Moving on to the environment, we are committed to mitigating the impact of our activities on the environment. However, we are not being able to invest as much as we would like to in recent years in technological solutions to assist with that due to other risk-based priorities in our capital budget. We have been able to secure additional rings defence money from Scottish Government for energy efficiency and carbon reduction initiatives, but not the scale to meet our ambitions in this regard. We are committed to safeguarding our communities from the effects of climate change and have invested recently in increasing equipment and training for our firefighters to deal with increased risk associated with wildfire and flooding, and those are areas that we would like to prioritise in the future. Finally, convener, we recognise the need for us to modernise as an organisation. We believe that through this modernisation, supported by an ability to reinvest internally generated savings and with modest additional investment, we can do so much more to protect and enhance community safety and wellbeing across Scotland. I am quite keen to open up questions to members, so unless Mr Thompson or Mr Stevens have anything further to add, if I can ask you to make it fairly brief. Very brief, convener. Thank you. Basically, just to add to this year, our forecast position is just over £1 million of an overspend. That is really around to pressure on the £11 million worth of savings that comes through in terms of our overtime position, similar to what Police Scotland have mentioned, but we have also got pressure on our property maintenance, our service contracts, et cetera, as inflation has been added through into those contracts. I just wanted to add a little bit of context around this year. I am going to move on and invite members to come in. What I would like to do is invite members one at a time and give them around 10 minutes to ask their questions. I am going to hand straight over to Mr Russell Findlay. Thank you very much. Good morning, panel. A pilot project in North East Scotland will see certain crimes not being investigated. Do you envisage this pilot to be extended elsewhere in Scotland? The changes that we are facing in the budget, the limited resources and the need to reduce demand and increase our capability. The pilot is being introduced, but what it is, the first thing I would say is that we want to make sure that the public do phone us. They do report their crime. We do not in any way want people to get the perception that we are not going to record their crime and not going to investigate it. When somebody calls us, they will go into the call centre and it will be looked at in terms of having a discussion with the caller. Is it something—I do not like using the word minor offences because minor is very subjective to the person who is actually the victim of that crime, so I am not going to use that term. Is that particular crime suitable to be able to go through the process where our resolution teams will speak to the caller and find out whether or not there are any proportionate investigation leads in relation to that? If there does not feel that there are any proportionate leads in relation to that, it is also QA'd by a police officer to bring a police lens to it. It can then be closed and the caller will be told at that time that there is not going to be an investigation. The key part to this is that the callers will make sure that there is what is called a thrive assessment, which is all about identifying is there any threat, is there any harm, is there any risk or is there any vulnerability? Each individual person's assessment across all of those is very, very different. That means that every single individual call will be assessed against those and they will be key factors as to whether or not that crime is suitable for this process. We need to see the results of the evaluation. We need to see the results on demand, but we also need to see what the communities and our scrutiny panels within those areas feel about the actual pilot itself. So it is safe to say that there are no plans to roll out further at this stage? We need to see what the evaluation is, but as we have already said, the hard choices that we are facing, the lack of resources we need to be able to reduce demand in a proportionate way, make sure that we still manage any risk to the communities of Scotland but provide a service as well. It has been reported in this, I think, is also for DCC callers that the cost to Police Scotland of operation branch form has now exceeded £800,000. I know that we should not talk about the investigation, but can you provide us with an update on the cost and indicate whether it is expected to rise further? I am not going to comment on anything to do with branch form, it is an on-going investigation, it would be completely inappropriate for me to comment. Even in terms of cost? It is an on-going investigation and I really would not comment on it at all. This is probably a question from Mr Page and or Mr Gray. The Association of Scottish Police Superintendents in their submission make reference to Police Scotland having a problem with the reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete. We have already heard from Mr Haggart that SFRS have similar problems with 14 stations being identified at a cost of fixing it at £70 million. I do not see any reference in the Police Scotland submission about this issue. I just wondered if it has been identified as a problem, what the extent of that is in terms of numbers of premises and perhaps even some kind of idea of cost. Okay, thank you for your question Mr Findlay. We have assessed rack across our entire estate. We did so through the month of April this year when we identified some crumbling rack in the FETIS workshop as part of a routine repair. As a consequence of that work, we have identified three locations across our estate where rack has been identified. FETIS is the most significant site where there are 10 areas covering over 4,000 square metres where there is rack in the roofing. The estimated cost of repair there is just over £4 million. Given the age and the condition of FETIS, which has been under-invested in for many decades, it is not economically viable to make those repairs. We are looking to go to the Police Authority next week to get permission to start a consultation on exiting FETIS and relocating elsewhere within Edinburgh. The other two locations are not quite as significant. One is Belluni Field in Dundee. The estimated cost of repair there is £1.25 million. What I should say is that there is no risk to anybody working in these sites. We have removed people from the affected locations and we have put emergency pillars in place to ensure and safety nets to ensure that there is no debris falling from these roofs. The last one is in Perth. This is very small. It is in a boiler room. It is only the estate team that has access to it. We have put the safety measures in place, so we are not proposing to do any work on that site at present and we will just continue to monitor the condition of it because it does not pose any significant risk to anybody at this point in time. In summary, three locations, one of which is significant and the other two are quite manageable. In terms of policing costs, the submission from Police Scotland and the Scottish Police Authority talks about hard choices that need to be made and that this does not allow the organisation to maintain the workforce at the levels of previous years. In your opening statement, the last identified number of police officers was around 16,600. Can you tell us first of all what that number is just now and also what is the best projection in terms of where we might end up based on the proposed budget? As of last week, it was about 16,600, so we are at that number. Give or take, obviously, ebbs and flows as people resign on whatever. One of the things about workforce reduction for Police Scotland is that we have 16,600 officers and we have five and a half thousand civilian staff. We have talked about proportionate reduction in the workforce to try to maintain the balance. One of the things about police officer numbers in Police Scotland is that the numbers are so large relative to the civilian staff. Because of the turnover, the attrition rate, on average we would bring in about 200 probationers per quarter, so there is quite a high number of volumes constantly coming in. If we need to reduce the workforce, the easiest lever to use, if you like, is to reduce probation numbers. The problem with that, of course, is that every time you are looking at a workforce reduction, the first place to go is to reduce the workforce in terms of the police officers. What we do not want to do is to make the overall workforce unbalanced between the mix of police officers and staff. We are looking to reduce our staff numbers, but obviously the regulations and rules in relation to staff are very different. We are investigating how we would rebalance the workforce better by pulling down the numbers of staff. Our attrition rates are very low in staff, so the natural attrition of staff does not allow us to just have a natural rebalancing, unfortunately. We have said if the budget comes flat as we have to plan for, we are expecting that we would need to lose on the face of another 600 police officers and another 200 staff going into next year. That number would need to be reduced by 1 April 2024 in order to have the cost played through the entire year. We have taken the decision not to take the action now to reduce the workforce further to allow us to cope with a flat budget settlement for next year, because we would need to do that in terms of the timeline that runs up, because we are already struggling to reduce the workforce on the staff side without turning off probationary recruitment for the balance of the year. We are wrestling with that problem at the moment, but with a flat budget we would need to reduce the overall workforce as we go into next year. That is a very quick question, and it is really quick. I had asked you previously about the electric fire engine that had been bought and deployed to Campus Lang. The last position from Scottish ministers was that it was due to enter service this summer. I would like to ask first of all whether it has done so and whether it has incurred additional cost and whether you plan to purchase more of those. The appliance at the moment is undergoing training with the personnel. We needed to do some work at Campus Lang as well in terms of the electrical charging infrastructure. There is training on going at the moment for that appliance. It is very much a pilot working with a local Scottish coach builder. It is very much a pilot that we are undertaking for this appliance, so there is only one that we are purchasing at the moment. There are no additional costs associated with any timescales, and it is very much an emerging technology in terms of electrical appliances for heavy appliances. We are very much working with the contractor undertaking a pilot and we will evaluate it before making any decisions. What is your most likely anticipated use for this service? Time scales? Training is on going just now. We would hope to get it into service this calendar year. I will bring in Ronan Mackay for the smallest supplementary question on Russell Lennon's question, which is probably for Mr Page. You talk about probationary recruitment numbers. What is the current recruitment numbers in the police and how is that balanced against the police that you are in? We have got about 192 that I think is starting next week, which is the September intake. There is another intake plan for December and another one planned for the new year. The September intake will go ahead, because we are expecting them in the college next week. The intakes for December and the intake into the new year would both be around about the 190 number given the attrition rate that we have at the moment. We are actively looking at the overall size of the workforce, the budget pressures that we have at the moment, and whether we need to dial down the probationary intakes pre-Christmas and into the new year. The effect on this year's budget will be relatively marginal, but what it would do is help us as we go into the next financial year. Again, that would put more pressure on the operational side, because it is the probationers that go into the front line effectively, they go out into local policing divisions, so we would be reducing the numbers that would go through that. I am now going to bring in Pauline McNeill, followed by John Swinney. My first set of questions is a follow-on from Ron Mackay. I think that we need to understand in some detail what David You said about the reduction in head count of 800. That is a significant number, but could she just be clear, is that police officers and staff? The planning that we are doing for 24-25, because obviously we get our budget settlement around about the December time, so we need to put it in our submissions before then. Working on a flat capital and a flat revenue assumption, which is the planning assumptions that we have been given as of the rest of the public sector, we built into our planning assumptions an assumption of a 2 per cent pay rise. We are not saying that is what we would be given or we would not be given, but we need to build something in. A 2 per cent pay rise on our current budget would need £50 million of additional savings. Is that why a 2 per cent? It is a working assumption that we have to build. The guidance— That inflation is considerably higher than that. Is that what your projection is, that it will come down to 2 per cent? No, it is not ours. The guidance that we are working with at the moment is the government guidance. The government guidance is 2 per cent. Public sector strategy in terms of the policy document. We need to put a number into the budget that we allocate some money for for the pay settlement. We did the same for this year. It is the most reasonable number that we can afford within the budget. Our biggest issue is 85 per cent of our entire headcount is staff. The non-pay budget is £200 million, and the pressure from the inflation on the non-pay budget means that we are struggling to meet that number. For next year, we have assumed a very modest 2 per cent on the assumption that inflation does come down. If we have to save £50 million to fail at 2 per cent, we can only make that saving through people. Effectively, 1 per cent is £1.5 million, and £1.5 million is £225 staff, roughly. That is split between officers and staff. That is how we get to the 800. It is a proportionate reduction on both officers and staff. Six hundred officers, two hundred staff. And over what period? If the budget comes as predicted as flat cash, we would need to take the workforce down by that number by 1 April 24. We actually can't do that because we don't have enough levers to pull. Even if we stopped all the probationary intake in December and the probationary intake in March, it would not get us down to the number we need to do, so we would be looking to other mechanisms like voluntary redundancy, potentially coming to the Government and seeking compulsory redundancy. So, the committee has heard previously the projections on retirement numbers given pension changes. I particularly get that still on going as well. It is, but not as bad as it was. We had a surge in April last year where pension rules changed effectively and we had a peak of effectively officers that were 50 years old with a 25-year service that could leave, and that did leave to lead to a number of retirals. That has evened off now, so we have a normal run rate of that, so that has built into our attrition figures at the moment. Thank you very much. That's very helpful. Could I ask DCC Jane Corners? You must be concerned about the reputation of the Scottish Police Force given what we've heard this morning about what it's fair to say, and I have said it in my 19-year career that Scotland has had an exemplary force. We do things differently here. The one of one service and many other examples, have you got concerns as the leadership, if you like, for its organisation about this? We obviously have concerns. One thing about Police Scotland is staff, its officers, they want to absolutely deliver the best service to the public that they possibly can. We are asking at the moment officers and staff to do everything that they've been asked to do with less staff and that can't continue. The difficult choices are going to have to be made about where resources are put, what the service looks like, whether it takes us longer to get to some places and deal with different things. Absolutely, Police Scotland, the executive and every officer and staff in it is finding that really difficult, but that's the situation that we're in. Those are the difficult choices and the processes that we need to go to to make sure that we do keep the public safe. We prioritise, we look at threat, harm and risk, where do we need to put our energy, there's been some fantastic results this week. I understand, but yeah, I can see it. What we've just heard from David, I'm just making an assumption here, but my concern would be about the cadet programme then as well. If you have to reach out and reduce the recruitment, is that likely to happen of new cadets, of new police officers? You mean probationers? Probationers, I'm sorry. So that programme could be compromised? It's absolutely one of the levers that can be looked at depending on what the future looks like, what do we need to do around probation and recruitment and how does that stack up with the numbers. It's again, and as DTO pages said, it's about the profile of Police Scotland, experience new officers coming in and how we maintain that balance because you always have to have a pipeline because of the attrition rate as well. So that's something that needs to be looked at, but it absolutely is a lever that is on our consideration. Thank you. Thank you very much. It's amazing how quickly time goes. It's been a long time. Can I now ask the fine rescue service to just one or two questions I have? Ross, you know that I've raised, as other members, the issue about digitamination facilities now do understand at least basics of the difference between the revenue capital budget. What progress do you think we're going to be able to make about getting shower facilities and the required facilities to keep fire and rescue officers safe, or do you have concerns about your ability to do that? Yeah, thanks, Mr McNeill. Firefighter safety and community safety are our number one priority within the service, and it's absolutely incumbent upon us to protect our firefighters as they in turn protect the communities, and we are really committed to working with the Fire Brigade Union on the contaminants issue. We've got a dedicated contaminants working group within the organisation that is led by one of our assistant chief officers and has Fire Brigade Union representation on it as well. In essence, in terms of protecting firefighters, there are some procedural practical things that we can put in place and we are putting in place at the moment, but there is also a need to have an infrastructure within the organisation to make sure that our firefighters are able to properly decontaminate when they come back to station. We've got some figures within our submission that shows the kind of suitability of our estate and our estate not being suitable at all in terms of contaminant control within fire stations, in terms of people being able to decontaminate and clean back in fire stations, and that's a concern for the organisation. As I mentioned earlier, we've received 32.5 million pounds of a capital allocation for the past seven years, and it looks like that will be the case going forwards, and there's simply not enough capital money for all of the capital priorities that we've got, but we are trying to work through that as best as we can. We have a programme in place at the moment whereby we are looking to rebuild and refurbish three fire stations, each refurbished or rebuilt on an on-going basis, but within a state of 357 fire stations, that will take a considerable period of time to work through with our current budgetary constraints. We are also looking at alternative construction methods for fire stations. We are doing some work at the moment to develop a business case round about modular-type premises that can be constructed off-site, and then built to replace fire stations. A business case is being developed at the moment with partners and with the support of the Scottish Futures Trust. We believe that that would be a particular solution within more remote rural areas of Scotland. There are carbon-neutral buildings, and we also believe that, as well as having a fire station, additional modules could be added on to that model for other partners to use, so we would truly create community resilience hubs within more remote rural parts of Scotland. We are looking at any of the solutions to the problem at the moment. Is it possible that the committee could get any concrete examples of where that was going to happen? I realise that I used my time up, but that would be helpful just to see how the delivery is going to be rolled out? More than happy to provide any further information off-table to the committee. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed. I am now going to bring in John Swinney, and then I will bring in Donald Cameron. My first question is probably directed towards Lyn Brown and the Deputy Chief Constable. I am interested in the interaction between the Scottish Police Authority and Police Scotland about the design of the policing model and its sustainability, given the extraordinary pressures of inflation that have been wrestled with in the public finances. I am interested in understanding what role the Scottish Police Authority takes in essentially scrutinising and challenging the plans and propositions of Police Scotland and the degree to which the authority is satisfied that Police Scotland is properly and fully considering, and the authority is doing this. What are the appropriate approaches to policing given the fiscal context in which we are all having to operate at the present moment? And flowing from that—this is where the question is perhaps relevant to the Deputy Chief Constable—is the process that is undertaken by Police Scotland to assess the role and the capacity of Police Scotland given the fact that although we are wrestling with extraordinary high inflation at the present moment, we are also experiencing some of the lowest crime levels that we have experienced in over 40 years. In terms of the role of the SPA in statute, we have four roles, which is to support the Police Scotland to advocate on their behalf, to maintain policing and to hold the Chief Constable to account. Against all that, we are very clear at the authority that operational autonomy sits with the Chief Constable. Our role is to give a public window to the Chief Constable and the operational decisions that are taken and to hold them to account in a public space to explain. That is when I went back to my opening statement around the budget. I said quite clearly that the authority had key expectations on that budget that were discussed in detail in public with the Chief. Going forward in the current year, the authority is focusing on capacity, which is the issue of demand, capability, technology, transformation and culture, which is on the back of the statement by the previous Chief Constable on the institution discrimination. In terms of how we manage or how we deliver on our oversight, we have got a system with committees, and you have heard some being referenced today. The resources committee, those meetings are held in public. The papers are in public, the discussions are in public, again that public window for the public interest to see how Police Scotland is delivering on their obligations. A range of other committees are very important. One is the policing performance committee, which was held yesterday. It focuses very much on some of the things that were touched on today around the north-east pilot, the downturn in performance, particularly around 999. The view of the committee is that it understands that there are priorities, that it wants to understand them better, that it wants to understand how Police Scotland has come to those priorities. More importantly, it wants the decision around the priorities very much communicated to the public, so there is understanding. We are very clear that we have a role as that public window to hold the Chief Constable to account, but they have got operational autonomy. That does involve providing the necessary challenge to ensure that, from the public interest point of view, policing approaches are commensurate with exhausting every avenue for efficiency and effectiveness. If I may, Mr Swinney, absolutely. The authority is very much focused on that. For example, the authority meeting in August was heard from Police Scotland on the challenges that they were facing now in terms of delivering against the demands that they have within the financial influx that they have. It was decided then that there will be a focus at the resources committee on exactly what Police Scotland is doing to make changes or to take decisions to come back within budget. It wants to understand how it will impact against the priorities that we set and the community interests. We are holding the Police Scotland to account for those decisions in public. In terms of holding us to account, the committees in particular that sit under the main SPA board have a number of sub-committees where challenging and scrutiny come into play. Constructive discussions as well, but actually, where Police Scotland brings forward their operational discussions and things that are going forward. I think that there is a constructive yet challenging oversight from the SPA into Police Scotland, which is as it should be. I am interested in the part of my question that relates to the experience that we have now in society whereby crime is comparatively speaking much lower level. I am interested in what the implications of that are and what the consideration of those issues are in influencing the size of the police estate. We have heard points raised this morning about police numbers, but I am interested in how that flows into your assessment of the degree of risk that exists within society that has to be handled. Absolutely. We have got lower levels of crime. There are certain crimes that are increasing. We are also seeing complexity levels in crime and investigation of crime, so large online elements in different areas of crime, sex distortion. We have got threatened extortion where many of the perpetrators are actually not in Scotland at all. They are abroad. You have got fraud. There is a lot of complexity in crime at the moment. I think that is one of the big changes while volume might be down in some areas. We are seeing significant complexity. What that requires is our ability to have the capability, the capacity to be able to train staff, to be able to manage the different crime types that are coming along, as well as being in the communities and dealing with the traditional levels of crime. People want to see us and be visible. Being able to do all of those different things with the limited resources is part of the work that we are doing in terms of the service model and trying to project forward the different crime types that are going to be coming towards us. If you look at vulnerability, which is also increasing, and that is not just mental health, but the different levels of vulnerability that Covid has had an impact on society, as you will know. We see that demand coming into policing as well, which is why working with partners and being really clear about how we can collectively look at the systems that the HMICS has said about working more collectively together and looking at systems. Coming back to your question, that ability to look at the complexity of crime, not just the volume, and be able to deal with all of those different elements is something that features in how we need to move forwards. That capability, our mobile ability, command and control, how we get contact with different people and how we manage cases, evidence, all of that is part of our capability and requirements going forward. Just to follow up that point, I was interested and I assume that you have seen the submission that the committee has had from the superintendents association, but there is one paragraph there in page 3. It says that the Scottish Government do have clear strategic objectives but the public services are not sufficiently linked in at the tactical and operational levels. I am interested in that because I think that it throws up the... I appreciate some of the challenge, having spent time with some of your own officers in my constituency. I see it first hand some of the challenges that are experienced because of wider social questions that police officers are faced with, but that point from the superintendents association rather struck me as being an area that is in need of further development. I am interested in what Police Scotland is doing to drive that degree of connection that is essential to make sure that members of the public, with vulnerability, are able to be supported by integrated services that stretch beyond just what Police Scotland can do and how Police Scotland is enabling that to be the case. I think that working at a divisional level and a very local level is really important and that is one of the things that Police Scotland... We have the central units, we have specialists, but they all link back in locally because that is really important because certainly in terms of confidence we see local confidence higher perhaps than we do with some of the overarching. So it is really important that we do that. Being able to link in with the divisional commanders being linking in through questionnaires and having different mechanisms to be able to get feedback from the public and being able to do that in a way that is inclusive so we are able to get different voices and different people to be able to feedback into us. I think that's absolutely essential because what that will enable us to do is form and devise our services as we go forward. It's very important and one of the things that we are doing in Police Scotland, this is not a top-down approach. We need to listen to the officers on the ground, we need to listen to their links with the community and understand how we then build our services particularly with partners to have a much better approach. Mrs Finlay, have I may add in terms of, from the perspective of the SPA, in terms of how it impacts on local areas, there is a strategic partnership signed this year between COSLA, Police Scotland and the SPA to make that understanding of what's happening in communities and to derive solutions much easier. Councillor Morrin Chambers, who is one of the COSLA leadership, sits in the Police and Performance Committee to bring that focus to the authority and to be aware of what is required in communities. There is a strategic intent there with local government. I'm going to bring in Donald Cameron now and then I'll bring in Rona Mackay. If I can remind members and our witnesses just to be as succinct as possible so that we can get as many questions in, Mr Cameron. Thank you, convener. Can I start with the Scottish Farm Rescue Service and the phrase that was used about community safety and an impact on community safety? Can I just get some concrete examples of what that means? What exactly do you fear might happen in terms of safety to the public? Thank you very much, Mr Cameron. From a Scottish Farm Rescue perspective, in terms of delivering services to communities, similarly to Police Scotland, all of our, the vast majority of our services are delivered locally by local personnel operating from local community fire stations. They pretty much involve what you would typically expect from the Farm Rescue Service, which is an emergency response. We've got robust arrangements across Scotland for an emergency response to incidents, but also our front-line staff have a key prevention role to play as well. We've been extremely successful through our staff in reducing the number of accidental dwelling fires across Scotland through preventative work, and we would much rather prevent emergencies from happening in the first place than respond to them. If I can give some sort of an illustration in terms of the magnitude of the numbers that we might be speaking about and the impacts that that might have. If we take our, and similarly to Police Scotland, we've done some financial modelling based on a flat cash budget going forward, and we've looked at kind of lower, middle and upper scenarios for both inflation and potential pay awards for staff going forward, and a conservative estimate of what we might have to save next year is £14 million next year alone. That would equate to 339 whole-time or full-time firefighters, and those firefighters would equate to 18 appliances that we would not have the ability to be able to crew because of a reduced firefighter number of 339. Again, to put it in the context, we've got 116 appliances, full-time appliances across Scotland, so quite a significant proportion of our appliances we would no longer be able to crew, which would ultimately, and while we would always model that and not crew those appliances based on those appliances being removed that would have a minimum risk to community safety, changes of that magnitude, we would not be able to meet our current response times and things like that, which would mean that we would not be able to keep communities as safe as they currently are because of the magnitude of the changes that we would need to make. Is that a question of response times? Would that be a danger of not being able to attend at all? We always attend every emergency at the moment. Clearly, the less appliances that we've got, we would still send the same weight of response to an incident, but that could be travelling further from further afield to get to an incident. There are occasions where we need to stack calls on a risk-assessed basis, particularly if we've got flooding conditions, bonfire night and things like that, but generally we don't have an issue with responding to every emergency call with a response immediately, but our response times would undoubtedly, on average, across the peace increase if we had less resources to be able to deploy with. Thank you very much. Can I turn to a similar operational matter this time for the police? That's the issue of body worn video, which Deputy Chief Officer Page touched on. You said that you're trying to protect delivery. Can you guarantee that body worn video will be rolled out from next year in Scotland? No, I can't guarantee that. Our budget is predicated on an assumption of a volume of policing. If any particular event happened that took an awful lot of policing resource, that would put huge pressure on the budget, and we'd have to find the money from that from other sources. I can't guarantee it. What I can say is that we're doing our utmost to protect the roll-out of all of the, not only the national body worn video project itself, but there's a number of underlying projects which you need to be in place. The desk project for the storage and the transmission of the data, infrastructure projects in police stations, obviously you've got to store the body worn video cameras themselves and the rest of it. We are looking very closely at protecting all of the projects that you need to have in place to enable it to roll out, so at the moment it's protected, but I couldn't guarantee it. The First Minister said in the chamber of this Parliament last week that the Government will start to introduce that technology next year. Do you, from your answer just now, does that mean that although the technology might, the background technology might be there, actual videos you can't guarantee that police in Scotland uniquely in the UK won't be away? We're not in a position to guarantee it, but our current plans are that we will do that. Given that I can't predict what's going to happen in the next five months in terms of policing pressure, if there was a major emergency that took huge amounts of overtime, then we'd have to find the money for that. But our current plans are that we would continue to roll out national body worn video as outlined in our previous plans. This is a particular pertinent issue in the Highlands and Islands, which is the region that I represent, which I think has the highest number of attacks per officer. I'm just sure you know that, but to bear that in mind. My final question is around the projected brown numbers, police numbers. I think you estimate that by 2028 police numbers will come down by over 2000, I think it's in your submission. That assumes a 2% pay deal, is that correct? If the pay deal goes above 2%, is there a risk that more than 2000 officers will be lost in the window 2024 to 2028? If our budget settlements are provided in line with the resource spending review, flat cash, flat capital profiles over the next five years, we would then have to make a decision about whether to give any pay rise or not to give a pay rise. We don't run straight to workforce reduction as the only lever. We are looking to continue to look for efficiencies in affectedness with running programmes internally, but, as we've already said, 85% of the workforce we've taken out £200 million. We took 1,600 civilian staff out of policing at the start of Police Scotland's journey. The resource spending review asks public sector bodies, quite rightly, to push ahead with public sector reform, to push ahead with collaboration to reduce their workforces and to pay for their own settlements. We've strived to do that, but with £200 million already delivered, with £1,600 staff already delivered, with a non-pay budget of only £200 million facing the inflationary pressures we've got, we don't have that many places left to go. Again, we discussed with the board, and these are finance discussions that we have at the force executive level because they're decisions for the chief constable in discussion with the SPA board. The question this year was, do we give a pay rise or do we ever pay freeze? The feeling was that the Scottish Police Federation, the trade unions have been made very clear of the very challenging circumstances in which police operate, so the decision was to give a pay rise. We've just gone through that process. We've put 2 per cent in the budget. We would hope to be able to fund at least 2 per cent. For our modelling purposes, that's where we are at the moment. I don't think there's much more we can do in efficiency. We will push very hard for efficiency, but it won't be enough to deliver the sums of money that you need to give a reasonable pay rise, which is fair and affordable to our workforce. It's a large workforce. I don't know if any other police witnesses want to add to that. I'm now going to bring in Rona Mackay, and then I'll bring in Katie Clark. If I could come to James Gray first. James, in your opening statement, you acknowledged that you received £80 million extra in your budget. You said that half of that was spent on pay rises. Sorry if this is a bit simplistic, but can you say how the other £40 million was absorbed? As you said, the first £40 million went to settle the £22 million, £23 million pay award because it ended up being higher than we budgeted forward. The remaining amount, when we were building the budget, obviously we had significant non-pay pressures coming through. I think Mr Thompson referenced some of the contract inflation for things like building repairs. We had something similar where inflation of 8-9% was applied to a very large contract. We were able to allocate an element of the £40 million towards a pay award, but it was somewhere in the region of 2%, because the other part of the new funding that we received this year had to go to manage non-pay pressures. Obviously, 2% was never going to be enough to get to a reasonable position on a pay award, and that is why we have built in additional savings into our budget in order to put an allocation aside that would be adequate. It was just because this particular year, with inflationary pressures, in normal circumstances, to be given £40 million, that would have been a fantastic settlement in a 2% inflationary environment, but with inflation being so high. Understandably, we are not sitting here being critical in any way at all. We recognise that the public finance environment, the wider economic circumstances are incredibly challenging. The money helped us, and as we have said, it was better than we thought it might be, and it certainly helped us, and we are in a better position than we would have been had we not received it, but just given the level of pressure, given where we are on pay awards this year, as you will know with police officers, at 7% extraordinary times, and that is just a consequence of that, has put a huge amount of pressure on the budget. In any normal time, that would have meant potentially that there would have been opportunities to invest into new areas, but that is just where we are to find ourselves this year. Mr Page, if I could ask you, could you maybe just briefly outline, you talk about your reform budget, what is that exactly, what does that mean? So, for, since 2013 onwards, the Scottish Government had provided a £25 million reform budget, it was called a reform budget to assist with the creation of Police Scotland, the reform of the eight legacy forces into a single police Scotland force. So that £25 million, which we'd received every year, had been allocated to Police Scotland but held by Scottish Government, and we effectively made bids to Scottish Government to draw down on that £25 million to make the reforms that we needed to make. That's been absolutely critical to Police Scotland to allow us to make some inroads into the digital data ICT transformation and address many of the other things that you need to do when you bring eight legacy forces together. For this current financial year, the Scottish Government baselined the reform budget into our core budget, but with a caveat quite rightly that it be used for transformation purposes, which I think is really essential. The difference was this year that it was £20 million that was baselined into Police Scotland's budget, not £25 million. £5 million was held back by the Justice Port failure for wider justice sector transformation, which we will benefit from in due course. So it's the £20 million worth of baselined reform funding in our core budget, which is the money that we use for transformation. So all the projects that we talk about, national body one video, COOS desk, all of those things, is funded from those projects. With this year, we sought permission from the SBA to allocate £5 million of our core revenue budget to prop up the reform budget, so it got back to £25 million, because obviously we'd made assumptions about £25 million being the money available. We have a lot of multi-year projects. When the budget was cut to 20, it left a gap, so we redirected £5 million of our core revenue budget into the reform budget to carry on with those projects. Unfortunately, because where we are now with the budget pressures, we've already reallocated £3 million back into the core budget, and we're just about to look at reallocating more of both the £2 million that's remaining from revenue to go back into the core budget, and I'm looking at the £20 million that we've not spent already, and I've asked for work or by the change programme to see which projects can we pause or stop with the least impact on our policing capabilities to save money to redirect that into meeting the budgetary challenges that we have at the moment. Just on the body one cameras, in the last term of Parliament, I was in the police subcommittee and we were talking about that then, that's seven years ago. I'm just wondering why it's not been a priority for you and whose decision is that? Is that operational or is that yourself? I mean you couldn't give a guarantee that there would happen, so I'm just wondering who actually decides that. It's always been a priority for us. We've had is that there's an awful lot of infrastructure you need to have underneath the body one video that people wear. There's no point in just buying cameras for people and giving them them, because effectively they can't score the data, we can't use it in a way that would be appropriate for evidence purposes and things like that. So we've had hundreds and hundreds of legacy IT systems. The digital data and ICT programme that we put forward in 2017 needed about I think it was about £350 million worth of infrastructure investment. This was to address really fundamental gaps in our technology capability, which for example a Strathglide officer, so many bases in Strathglide coming across the Lothians couldn't arrest someone because they couldn't actually use their ID codes on our systems. Our systems were so disparate that we didn't act like a national force. So one of the programmes you have to put in place before you get body one video working is the programme that allows any police officer in Scotland deployed anywhere to be able to plug into their systems and we capture it on a central database and then we can use it for evidence purposes across Scotland. So it's always been a thing that we wanted to do because we were way behind the curve against England and Wales, but you've got to bring eight police forces together and create national infrastructure before you can plug a camera into it and we're still some way away from that because even if we deliver national body one video in line with the plan the pilot won't start until July next year but we've got the desk pilot, we've got the cos pilots and some infrastructure because obviously we've got quite a larger state. There's an awful lot we've got to do to ensure that we can the officers who use the cameras can download them so the wi-fi infrastructure in the police station's got to be strong enough that we can download to the cloud and store the stuff safely. So sorry to interrupt, where are we with that then because 10 years does seem like a long time? Well where we are with it is we've got a the four business cases going to the board in January 24 the pilot starts in July 24 the phase one rollout currently planned is August 24 to June 25 and we're looking to roll out 10,500 body one video cameras to the front line and then we'll go on to phase two thereafter but obviously there's quite a big timeline it's a very major project and there's a number of other technology projects that sit underneath that which we do need in place before we can launch body one video so we are trying as I've already said to protect that to the best of our ability but the budget pressures are stripping away the money from other projects other than the ones we're trying to protect. In terms of the decision making the decision making goes straight into the force executive and all decisions about operational priority for change delivery are led by our operational police and colleagues anything that we do in terms of the state fleet procurement finance the way we manage the money we effectively produce the options and then present them into the force executive which is the chief constable the deputy chief constables and the assistant chief constable supported by directors to allow them to make a decision based on threat harm and risk and what the operational priorities are. Okay thank you and I'm running it down just very briefly go back to James you mentioned about the closure of maybe 30 police stations would that money go back into the capital budget as the fire service will do? That would be our intention the money we go back into the capital budget for reinvestment and the the savings that were made on the the maintenance and so on of those police stations would be able to be reinvested hopefully some of that back into the retained estate so that we get it up to a better standard. Thank you and then again just briefly for DCC corners you talked about the thrive assessment and it would be up to an individual officer to do that can I just ask you about training for that how that's going and also about you'll know that we did quite a large inquiry about the mental health and wellbeing of police officers how's that progressing? So yeah so the thrive assessments that sits mainly in our contact command and control centres that training has been rolling out and continues to roll out so it is something that's embedded it's something that's part and parcel of that and in terms of we then have trauma informed and other mechanisms that all officers and staff across the organisation have the ability to look and assess and work with each individual person. In terms of officers and wellbeing it is really important that we understand the pressures that are coming down on all of our staff and not just the officers but the police staff in particular as well and that programme led by Katie Miller is ongoing with lots of different work streams and the ability the openness culture that encourages people to actually come forwards when they're feeling that pressures are coming on to them so it's not just about putting the systems in place it's about creating the culture that we say please do be open and come and talk to us and as I've said the difficulties for officers and staff in Police Scotland is wanting to deliver that service for the communities of Scotland and trying to do everything and that's the bit that we need to manage so that we're able to to do things well deliver for the communities of Scotland but look after the wellbeing of our officers and staff. Thank you very much indeed and so I'll now bring in Katie Cart followed by Fulton McGregor. Thank you and I'd like to ask Ross Haggart some questions and the backdrop of course is a decade of cuts to the fire service in Scotland and Audit Scotland report that the Scottish fire service has insurmountable capital backlog and information provided by the service to my office suggests that 45% of the entire estate is assessed as being in either poor or bad condition. In your reply to Pauli McNeill you indicated that only five fire stations could be prioritised. The FBU decon campaign has highlighted the risk of contaminations to the health of firefighters and some of that risk relates to the condition of the estate for example the availability of showering. So what consideration has been given to the legal duty of care that the service is legally obliged to provide to its workforce and the risks of litigation and legal responsibilities of the service? Yes, thanks very much Ms Clark and as I've previously stated this is a real priority for us as a service and I know that there's been two debates within Parliament on the subject and as I've already said the safety of our firefighters is of Parliament importance to us as an organisation. As I mentioned to Ms McNeill earlier in my response the estate is part of the solution and ultimately we need to have an ability to be able to invest more within our estates to bring it up to a suitable standard for a 21st century fire and rescue service. Notwithstanding that there are other matters that we are progressing through our contaminants group in terms of policies, procedures, operational practices so that we can mitigate to an extent some of the issues that we've got with our current estate but ultimately a full solution will require policies, procedures, protocols, appropriate training for our firefighters to safeguard themselves from contaminants but also the ability to go back to a fire station and have a proper dirty clean areas be able to shower within four hours of being exposed and things like that so all of these things need to come together both the practical elements and also the estates element but we take our responsibilities in this regard as well as everything else related to firefire safety extremely seriously. Have you had any advice about your legal liabilities and is that something you could share with the committee perhaps in writing and also could you inform the committee perhaps in writing of the work that you are able to do some of the mitigation work that you've referred to if you could keep the committee advised on that that would be extremely helpful. We'd be really keen to keep the committee cited on the work that we're doing in this regard more than happy to do that. In terms of the legal liabilities is that something that you'd be willing to share with the committee because at the end of the day it's all of us that will have to pay the price if the fair service doesn't meet its obligations. There's always a challenge when it comes to legal advice and things like that but wherever possible we will seek to be as open as we possibly can with any information that we've got in that regard. As you know we had a huge fire in the Highlands in June and two firefighters were injured but across Europe over the summer we've seen wildfires and extreme flooding and indeed it's not just Europe it's across the world so the climate challenge must be at the forefront of your mind in terms of the implications on the fire service and the increasing demands there's going to be on the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service so what work is being done to look at what those increased demands are likely to be and how we're going to have to respond to that? I'll probably bring in Stuart for some of the detail on that if I may because Stuart leads on all things service delivery but just from a strategic perspective we are acutely aware of the impacts of climate change. I spoke earlier in my opening remarks regarding what we are trying to do to mitigate our impacts upon the environment but quite clearly we've got a key response role to play particularly from a flooding and a wildfire perspective so we've got that as your priorities in order to ensure that we have got our firefighters appropriately equipped and trained to deal with those types of incidents that there's a much greater risk of occurring not just in terms of numbers but in terms of the scaling as well and perhaps Stuart can provide a bit more detail around about the work that we're doing in that regard. Good morning committee in terms of the risk modelling element of it we absolutely model through the natural environment as part of our community risk index modelling programme the impact of wildfire and significant flooding events and clearly we've then build strategies to respond to those as an example we've upgraded all our water rescue teams over the last year or 20 of them with new equipment to be able to respond to significant flooding events alongside that as the chief says we have our wildfire strategy which is currently being implemented and that will see significant investment made in remote rural parts of Scotland in order to mitigate the challenges of wildfire but as you rightly say there's various examples from around the world and the challenge and the risk is very real and we are alive to that and we are not immune and the Scotland from significant wildfires as we've seen up north it was fortunate that they're not at this stage impinged on significant densely populated areas but that's not to diminish the impact they've had on the natural environment and rural community so we need to make sure that we are prepared to respond to that and whilst we've invested in wildfire resources and capability it really gives us a foundation to build upon but as the chief has already highlighted we have significant challenges with our capital budget and that we need so significant more investment would be required in order for us to continue to meet that demand so this obviously is a budget scrutiny process so what what do you think the budget implications are of these challenges is that something that you've looked at but you know the capital budget is clearly but we do a three-year capital budget and it's part of that we factor in the risks of the organisation and prioritise where the capital spend should be but with competing priorities around the rack panel roofing they can find facilities decon wildfire we have to factor in and prioritise all those with a very minimal capital budget I understand and as you know 10 appliances and additional height appliances were withdrawn across Scotland last week close to 1100 uniform firefighters jobs have already been lost and Ross Haggart you've indicated a potential further at 780 full time firefighter jobs could be lost in the next four years you've also indicated in your evidence today that firefighters may not be available for appliances that you do have and that they won't be able to be staffed but we know that we're already having concerns raised with us about the lack of availability of appliances and indeed increased response times I know there's been reference to modelling already this morning but what work are you doing in terms of what the implications of the lack of availability of appliances are going to have in the public and on response times and what information are you able to share in terms of what's happened since the 10 appliances were withdrawn yeah so thanks for that the 10 appliances that we have withdrawn as of last monday was done very much on a risk assessed basis and those were the 10 appliances that we identified would have the least impact upon community safety across Scotland as I mentioned earlier if we were to have to make budgetary reductions of the lower end of our predictions of £14 million next year that would equate to an additional 18 appliances that we would not be able to to crew across Scotland and that's against a backdrop of 116 appliances that we've got whole time appliances which is temporarily at the moment reduced to 106 so a significant proportion of our whole time operational appliances we would not be able to crew with a reduced number of firefighters based on the budgetary pressures and that will have a significant impact upon the organisation and the services that we're able to deliver to communities as I mentioned earlier we would always seek to minimise the impact of that upon community safety but we would not be able to remove resources of that magnitude without there being an impact upon response times and ultimately upon safety and risk within communities we're doing a detailed piece of work just now Stuart spoke earlier about our community risk index model that's one of the tools that we've used to underpin all of the work we've done to date so we're doing a piece of work at the moment to look at what would that what would the outcome of that modelling be should we have to remove another 18 appliances from the front line and again I would emphasise that that model is on going just now we would always seek to minimise the impacts upon community safety as best as we could through those reductions but ultimately reductions of that magnitude will impact upon our ability to respond to emergencies across Scotland so it's fair to say that response times are going to continue to go up based on the assumption of us needing to make changes of that magnitude then we would anticipate response times would go up as a result on average across Scotland and stan thank you okay thanks very much indeed and finally to mcgregor thanks can be there hopefully last but not least is the phrase i've got a couple of questions for each convener if that's all right firstly probably to james gray in david page earlier on james you talked about the issue but over time and you were looking at that now i've got i'm probably not going to pop your here and apologies to any friends in the place who are watching but i know that they obviously welcome over time like in david just now but i wonder how that could play out in terms of your budgets it would seem to be more sensible to reduce overtime to keep numbers is that something that you're looking at can you look can you expand on that a wee bit about about what the impact of overtime is in terms of figures and how that might how savings might be made there i can start and maybe dc corners might want to speak about the operational benefit of overtime so our core overtime budget is around one million pounds a month on average is parts of the year when it's when it's higher so it is profiled what we have seen during the course of this year is that we've been spending somewhere in the region of 1.6 to 1.7 pounds per month so we've been overspending in the forecast of that is that we would end up potentially somewhere about six or seven million over budget and as i say we're trying to bring that back into line and but some of the areas organizationally it's very difficult to in fact you know it's unavoidable in certain circumstances such as if you've we've got a court citation and depending on the time period of that the only way to manage it is through overtime and in particular if you're i suppose i don't want to get into too much of the operational side of it so maybe hand over to dcc corners on that but the we have obviously had discussion around the relative amount of overtime because it is a more expensive resource than just using straight time and having potentially more police officers but as you reduce your overall number of officers then the the feedback i've been getting is that the you know people would almost rather have have a little bit more overtime in order to have that kind of flexibility and resilience in order to do things in the context of having a smaller workforce overall but maybe just before we come in there get what would your projections around the people what would what would you hope to achieve in terms of saving from overtime in this current year yeah at the moment we're not we're not looking to to save anything we're actually just looking to try and bring the overtime budget back into line and which which if we did that for the remainder of this year would bring us back in about five million pounds and that's a component of our overall savings plan of 19 million that we spoke about earlier on okay thanks so yeah just to pick up on some of those points i think the key thing to say is is policing is unpredictable it's always going to be unpredictable it's very difficult to project forwards anything in particular which is which is why overtime comes in overtime can be really tiring the pressure on officers and staff at the moment when you're kept on your shift patterns are changed so whilst overtime may well bring money into the bank for people with the cost of living crisis it comes at a cost as as well in that sense so you know there's many things that that we're trying to do in terms of event management for example projecting forward when events and different large football games are coming in so we can give people notice and reduce the overtime budgets around that we do have to make some decisions around productivity operations that are going to be run what's going to be the cost what's the benefit where's the threat and prioritisation process so managing that whole overtime piece actually has quite a lot of complexity but the main things I will say as much as we can manage the overtime that's what we're doing but it is a very spontaneous role that we all do so having to manage that as well but it does come at an impact on officers and staff when we rely on overtime to backfill or be able to deliver what we need to because we don't have the resources that we need in the various areas thanks very much and you must have read my mean in terms of my next question when you mentioned sporting events here because I was actually at Hamden last night for the Scotland match and I have to say that there was a significant increase in police numbers there from previous games that have been I've been at all the games recently the fight game package and even my wee boy who was with notes he said oh dad there's loads of police tonight they were great I have to say they were interacting well with the fans and the kids and everything but can I ask you a wee bit about how how these things are thought out there was there I don't know the exact numbers but there did seem to be a very much large police presence last night you were seeing a police officer every every where you turned which I suppose is a good thing but in terms of the budget which is what we're here to talk about today the the scrutiny of that how does that how do you take that into account and prioritise that and I know you can't predict things you just said that and possibly what I'm about to say here is to do with the fact there was a large police presence I'm sure you would tell me that but I just seemed a fairly friendly atmosphere last night there wasn't I didn't personally notice any difficulties but you know how do you take this into account so there's different different ways of doing it most the event management is based on intelligence experience what's it telling us about the particular crowds or the dynamics or the game whether it's a friendly whether it's a cup game so all of that will factor into the intelligence in particular you then have the kind of the deployment model you can hold resources so you might have exactly the same number of resources on the game but they're held backwards so you don't see them or they're put forwards to engage with the crowds talk to people so actually it comes also down to your deployment model and whether you put people forwards so they're visible or whether you hold them back so that the crowds can manage themselves again so but it is based around again threaten harm intelligence professional experience what's the profile of that particular event but also what's the deployment model what's the style and tone that's required for that particular event as well thanks very much and just to reiterate the police officers that were interacting with us last night were absolutely brilliant just one further question in terms of the police convener if that's all right I wanted to go back it's for yourself again DC corners it was in terms of Russell family's question around about the pilot so I've got a question what you would ask for us because I think what you've said about the pilot in terms of risk of harm risk of vulnerability I think that is sensible measures particularly given the costs cuts that we're all facing just now across the UK as a whole so what would you ask of politicians around that would you ask us to be responsible in terms of that pilot because when I first heard about it last week it was certainly portrayed let's just say differently to what you've said today what would what would you ask be of us as politicians across parties as a committee in terms of that pilot and how we relate that to the public so I think as I say in terms of the pilot and one final stage in the pilot is it's the local teams that then look at those particular reports and they will look at it through a context of local knowledge what's the particular area what are the different crime trends so it has lots of different lenses that are looked through before a crime is then said actually we are able to close this there is no more investigation so for me it's the ability to speak to local officers speak to local divisions speak to the police so we can we can give a really articulate and accurate account of what we're trying to do so the public get not the truth because that's not the thing but but an accurate representation of actually what we're trying to do we're trying to make sure that we do service delivery and not create any risk to the public and this is something that that absolutely will do that many people just want to report crime we will be able to deliver that service as well but it has a number of checks and balances to make sure that absolutely nobody who needs to see police is is not going to see us we have the checks and balances including that local element as well I think it is very important that we help you to reflect that accurately a quick couple questions for the fire services as well and a bit I will be quick convener the first one is on a probably for yourself Ross Haggart and it's on the appliances I done a bit of work locally with my local fire station quote dike fire station not too long ago but it was certainly pre Covid and before budgets where as they were just now and there was some discussion about appliances then I think there was some thoughts that maybe appliance would be lost from there and when I got involved and started speaking to senior officers about it there was a lot of discussion that this was a model the fire service were looking to do anyway they're looking to do new models so what I want to know is how much of the appliance cuts to do with budget pressures or are they to do with the way that the fire services moving anyway and I suppose that the reverse question of that would be is if there was a magic wand and you had all the money you needed would you be reinstating these appliances or would you be moving forward in a different direction? Yeah thanks very much for the question Mr. McGregor and in terms of the current service delivery model that we've got for the the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service the work that we had been doing to identify risk across Scotland using our community risk index model pre-dated the resource spending review and what that model identified to us is that there is currently an imbalance of fire cover across Scotland because largely the cover arrangements that we've got in place at the moment are based on legacy arrangements that we inherited from eight different fire rescue services that deployed resources as they thought appropriate at the time so we had identified that there was an imbalance of fire provision across Scotland both in terms of the duty patterns that are operated from stations and the locations of stations and areas that have got greater and lesser provisions across Scotland so we had set out a piece of work to look to harmonise that and make that provision of service more equitable across Scotland and it was all part of our imperative to modernise the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service and there are key elements to that modernisation part of that is the role that firefighters play within communities and we've done a lot of really good work with the fire brigade union to look at what an expanded role a developed role for firefighters could be across Scotland so that we could do with some modest investment we could do more for communities and more to enhance community safety both in terms of a preventative and an emergency response perspective and we would also look to we were also looking to rebalance our resources across Scotland so that we had a more equitable balance of resources across Scotland and we fundamentally need to reform our on-call provision on-call firefighters cover huge land masses of Scotland play a huge role in terms of protecting their communities a hugely valuable role they play but it's a system that we struggle to maintain on a whole UK basis because people are living and working in different ways and we also need to improve training for firefighters and use much more innovation and technology so we understand that we need to modernise as an organisation and we believe by with some modest investment in the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service we can modernise however the alternative to reducing budgets year on year is that we just ultimately need to take more resources out the front line which will ultimately impact upon community safety. Thanks very much for that answer and my final question is on an area we've been doing a bit of work on within the Parliament and I have to say the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service do a fantastic job with us and that's around water safety obviously access to wild waters is becoming more and more popular both as a result I think of the pandemic and climate change so warmer weather I'm just wondering how much thought and resource in terms of the budget has been put in to what you do around that because as I say it is very good and I think it's welcomed by everybody who's in that field. Yes so again in Stuart might want to come in with some more some more detail and we are really committed to the water safety agenda across Scotland we've played a key role within water safety Scotland we've got an officer seconded to water safety Scotland to lead that work like all incidents we would rather prevent accidents from happening in the first place and a lot of the work that we do through Water Safety Scotland with Ross but is roundabout preventative work mitigating work within local communities but also as Stuart's mentioned earlier we've also got 20 water rescue stations strategically located across Scotland and we've recently upgraded the equipment that they've got to deploy with as well so we're really committed to water safety both from a preventative and an emergency response perspective around others. Very much indeed so that's just brought us to the end of our session and can I thank all the witnesses for your attendance this morning and we're very much hoping to have further engagement with the new chief constable in due course certainly by the end of the year so thank you again we'll take a short suspension just to allow our changeover of witnesses and a brief comfort break thank you very much okay thank you very much so I'm now pleased to welcome to our second panel Stephen McGowan deputy crown agent with the crown office and proc curator fiscal service and Eric McQueen chief executive of the Scottish courts and tribunals service so i'm just going to begin with the same opening question that I asked our panel earlier on so during scrutiny last year both organisations here today painted a concerning picture on the state of your budgets although this was relieved in part by extra funding so can I perhaps invite crown office and then courts and tribunals service to just tell us briefly how or what your experience of the financial situation has been for 2023 to 24 and what if any concerns and commentary you have as we approach the 2024-25 settlement so I'll bring you in first Mr McGowan thank you and I'm grateful for the opportunity to come here this morning so after last year's session there was additional funding provided to us and we're grateful for that additional funding which addressed some of our essential needs including the Covid recovery costs and the justice system more widely the investigation of Covid deaths and a pay parity challenge that we've had over a number of years with Scottish Government main we were realistic about the pressures on the public sector funding generally and the need to deliver improved outcomes and while that additional funding was very welcome it didn't address all of the many essential funding that we needed for 23-24 and so there was a shortfall on a number of areas those were for funding to additional high courts to reduce the pandemic backlog to establish an evidence by commissioner unit so that vulnerable witnesses could give their evidence in a way more suitable to their needs the cost for implementing new legislation costs in relation to pathology services which created an additional pressure on the budget and costs arising from the continuing high inflation which added another pressure to the budget so we had currently have nine million pounds of pressure on the budget due to the nature of the services that we provide which are statutory and legal obligations and that is a tricky situation for us to be in and we have little room for manoeuvre on our budget 82% of it is staffing and much of the rest of it is committed to things like pre-contracted spending on things like pathology etc but we're working with the Government to make sure that we achieve a path to balance and we balance that budget this year but it's a challenging financial outlook it's it's clear okay thanks very much indeed i'll just bring Eric McQueen straight in okay thank you good morning members probably a similar position to what steven's outlined for the crown and quite clearly we we painted some quite dire consequences if we're going to end up in a flat cast situation and thankfully that situation didn't fully materialize so we did get increases in terms of our our core budget which largely covered the issues around about the what we thought was going to be pay increases at the time covering largely inflation on a lot of the areas and we also received significant in-year funding to make sure that the court recovery programme which is obviously an essential part of our our operations was maintained in its full and we also received additional capital funding to move towards some of our critical building maintenance type project so I say that that put us in a relatively good position but again left some shortfalls and pressures on our overall budget we have been able to continually drive efficiencies so we have been scrutinising all budget lines through our good work here procurement team we have realised about £2 million in terms of procurement savings that we've made over the cost of last last year our whole approach in terms of digital strategy is to move away from externally provided services to bring those in house and we're now making that move and we reckon that will reduce cost by about 25 percent so again these are just things we're doing trying to drive the efficiencies out while we can try to focus on delivering core business similar to current about 85 about 75 percent of your budget is tied up in people and buildings so area for maneuverability is is quite tight on the buildings front we've reduced our investment in terms of backlog maintenance that's been a risk based decision on the basis that we have substantially brought down our backlog maintenance over the last four or five years so this year we're putting slightly less into backlog maintenance while that's a low risk for this year that's not a sustainable position going forward so that's a again that will be an issue and a pressure that will push into into next year our biggest remaining concern and trying to find a way to that sort of path to balance is primarily around about paying the pay increases so our budget was very very much based on public sector pay policy where we were anticipating a pay increase of around about three and a half percent scottish governor have now settled a much higher level so they've gone beyond what was an original the public sector pay policy where effectively for the bulk of our staff it would mean an increase of round about seven percent this year and an increase for the bulk of the staff of about five percent next year that's put a real in-year pressure of about three point nine million this year which we're currently discussing with government in terms of how we can close that gap and it will have a knock-on effect into next year of somewhere in the region of about six and a half million pound so we're doing our best to manage some of the pressures we have quite clearly within the overall court business we are seeing a continuing increase in terms of the more serious cases coming through and that is a a big issue in terms of recovery programme and as people will be aware there's the ongoing challenges we currently have with GOA me where there's a quite significant impact again on the operation of the court so there's a a range of things now that are adding to pressures to help to to make us try to work through get to a a path to balance by the end of the year okay thanks very much indeed so i'm just going to use the same format as we did in our last session and i'm going to hand over to Russell Findlay and then i'll bring in Katie Clark just to make members aware i'm looking at around about eight or so minutes each and if we have time at the end we'll bring in some supplementary so Russell Findlay thank you i'll keep an eye on the clock and try and be quick first question i think is to mr mcqueen i am on a recent visit to victim support scotland's offices in glasgo they were showing us this new facility whereby witnesses should be able to give evidence direct court from from the premises so far however the only time this has actually been used was a case involving a canadian court rather than a court in scotland do you know if this maybe it's not a delay but you know if the non-implementation so far has anything to do with budgets or is it more impractical? no it's not to do budgets at this stage it's more just practical issues so we are looking at the technology connections between the rue victim support scotland premises which i must say are excellent so we have been out there we have visited and working very closely with them so we can use their premises for tv links into courts where we're trying to get a technical solution is how we can bring people in virtually from that premise for evidence by commission and that's where the bulk of the work is going but we think we're fairly close to get a solution on that and working close to victim support scotland to make that a reality is clearly having witnesses given their evidence from that type of environment is something we all aspire to achieve sure thank you now the scottish government is legislating for the creation of a new criminal court sexual offences court have you undertaken any work in terms of evaluating how much this might cost in terms of i mean you're not building physically building new courts this will be essentially a rebranding exercise or will there be any costs it's a bit more than that i mean quickly that will come back before the committee and that will be part of the the financial memorandum which has been submitted and we're currently just submitting our views back in that so yes there will be cost to the court service as there will be to every organisation perhaps the most significant area of cost will be in relation to evidence by commission because obviously the presumption of that bill is at all complainers and witnesses in these cases will give their evidence by commission so one of the things that we have been doing is modeling work looking at the overall cost of it we currently have four high quality evidence by commission suites now in place so we have one in Glasgow one in Edinburgh in Vernes and the one in Aberdeen is just getting commissioned as we speak and we have funding from scottish government next year to build another specialist suite in Dundee which will be a shared facility with victim support Scotland so we'll have their staff present within that area as we do it in Vernes so we are trying to model where we are on overall capacity at the moment we're actually dealing with about 800 evidence by commission hearings a year so that's a significant increase in where we've been on previous years and that current capacity that we have would give us a theoretical limit of about 2000 hearings per year if we were able to use it to its full capacity but what we want to achieve is a fuller spread across all sheriffdoms to make it an easy access for people attending these hearings and this is maybe a slightly technical question but evidence on commission happens already that's remotely recorded or recorded prior to risk but what i'm talking about i think is more live evidence from elsewhere that's the issue that's been worked on well there's two things that i mean first so the evidence by commission is in place at the moment for children in the high court what the the new bill will propose is that that's a presumption that everyone within the specialist court will give their evidence or evidence by commission so the whole theory of evidence by commission is to avoid people having to give evidence by live link to participate in a trial and give their evidence at the very early stage reducing the trauma on the individuals involved so that's clearly the big step change that we would see in terms of what would come out of that bill in terms of live links we already have quite extensive capacity across the country to give live links either from court to court or from individual premises so we've got about 20 vulnerable witness suites at our external with difficult buildings where people can currently give their evidence by video link at the moment okay thank you the next question is from Mr McGowan it's just something that's in the submission that caught my eye in respect of civil recovery on page 16 of the crown submission it says that since 2003 the civil recovery unit has recovered over 20 million pounds in cash in assets from criminals I don't know if that number's accurate it just seemed quite low do you happen to know if that's... there's a lot of care put into the submission so I think it's accurate and we can double check that and just give us an accurate 20 years worth of cash in assets from organised crime it doesn't seem like I very much at all but yep that'd be helpful thank you now one thing in the submission that was notable for its absence was any reference to the rangers malicious prosecution scandal now the most recent public figure for the cost of this the taxpayer is 57.4 million pounds with 5.7 of that being two legal fees so I understand the compensation payments included undertaking with the crown to meet any future tax liabilities if they arose it's just to check whether in the recent months whether there have been any tax liabilities that have been met with the crown or the Scottish Government and whether the that number has risen since it was published and looking forward to the imminent inquiry what kind of cost implication that might have on the crown's budget so the the figure that you have the 57.4 million pounds that that figure is the up-to-date figure there's been no change in that figure as ever I'm limited by what I can say because of the ongoing litigation and there is still litigation ongoing the inquiry when it comes will be something which we have to budget for we've already dedicated some resource to it but I wouldn't have thought that it will be a major line in the budget that the wider number of public inquiries that we have at the moment is something that is a pressure on us but it's a pressure that we're absorbing and managing yeah okay thank you and if I've got time just very quickly in respect of fatal accident inquiries and increasing numbers of them I'm just trying to find the relevant page on the submissions page 15 also it says that 39 hearings are scheduled these are brand new ones for 2023 yes so how many more are there works in progress if you like and so there I don't have the precise figure of of cases that we have live at the moment in progress the ones where the the shed the hearing is scheduled are the ones where the court's been petitioned there will be a small number and I don't have that figure where there's an instruction and we haven't yet petitioned the court we have an internal guideline where we look to petition the court within six weeks of getting the instruction to do that after discussion with the court the increase I think in the number of these cases comes from two things firstly there's been a significant increase in the number of discretionary fatal accident inquiries over the last couple of years that in part is due to the complexity of the deaths that we're dealing with now we have many more deaths which are real complex deaths where we have issues of medical negligence mistreatment etc and those are issues that require ventilation before a court but I think we had 10 of them in the last year that we've instructed which was more than the year before so significant increase right and I suppose there's an expectation I suppose from some families who would like to see fatal accident inquiries taking place in the ground have to consider those on a case-by-case basis yes we have to consider those on a case-by-case basis there's some other work that we're doing in relation to that so we've got the complexity of the general death case work anyway we have a deaths improvement programme at the moment and one aspect of that looks at the public conference issue more generally and looks at doing more work to publicise what we do in our routine deaths investigations where lessons are learned and there is material that comes forward which will prevent other deaths from happening in future and how we can best publicise that and get that out there perhaps in a way that doesn't require a full fatal accident inquiry but means that there is public confidence that those lessons have been more widely learned it's not an FAI or nothing there's lots of work there absolutely so there's a continuum of responses within them okay thank you very much thank you very much I'll bring in Katie Clark and then I'll bring in Fulton McGregor Katie thank you very much and of course one of the major challenges that we still face is the backlogs in cases I know there has been progress but it's still a massive problem and that's having a huge impact obviously on all the individuals involved the crown office submission suggests that the level of resource funding that may be required is around 207 million pounds in 2024-25 to take into account pay rises so could you set out how that figure has been reached and the potential implications if aspects of that may change so the 207 million or 206.8 million pounds that we've set out in the submission to the committee it firstly comes from taking what we assess has been necessary for this year at 182 million it then takes into account those aspects of the budget which I mentioned were pressures this year the additional high court evidence but commissioner the new legislation etc but over the past few years we've been on a journey on pay parity and pay parity ensures that those working for crown office and procurator fiscal service have paid a similar amount of money than those in scottish government main whether that be lawyers whether that be support staff whether that be IT professionals whatever they whatever they are historically they have been paid less and that was an issue for us and led to issues with retention in particular so there's a figure for that and then in applying the scottish government pay policy we think that that won't require an additional 10 million pounds to fund that pay award to keep to pay parity so that the good work that's been done and the support that we've had from scottish government recently and getting us to that level will be retained where that note done and where we did but we didn't have that then we've given some examples within the paper of what that would mean and it could mean the reduction in headcount by about 200 people which would be equivalent to the Aberdeen not having fiscal office that's not our serious proposal obviously but that's that's the equivalent so that's a significant equivalent and there's no doubt that if that happened that would have an impact upon the service that we aspire to deliver to the public and the service that the public could expect from us might be below that which they can reasonably expect there would be hard choices would require to be made so i mean the pay parity issue is clearly very important because there's some staff and some groups of staff that have very legitimate claims in terms of their treatment and issues around about its comparative you know pay but the backlog from a you know public policy point of view is a major problem continues to be a major problem there was additional covid funds i know that there's always an answer that it's not just one part it's you need resources more resources in all parts of the justice sector to address this but what basis are you making these projections in terms of what you expect to happen to backlogs because it's some of the you know the individuals that come to us um outline really completely unacceptable backlogs in cases being dealt with so could you outline your approach so that there is specific funding to deal with the backlogs which is there until 26 27 and that's that's built into the budget at the moment um the backlogs are generational they are they're bigger than they've ever been they mount a huge challenge over time those backlogs are coming down so cases have been taken off the summoning backlog cases will be taken off all of the backlogs as time progresses and we are progressing towards that um it's undoubtedly the case though that there are people at the moment victims who are waiting for their cases to come to court um or who have recently had their cases in court that they will have been waiting a very very long time and that pre-sates very difficult for them but the additional funding that we've got across the justice system as a whole is something that will help us bring that down over time so gradually those stories that you'll be hearing from constituents and those experiences should begin to improve but that is a multi-year journey that we're on to get to that point. I mean we obviously are passing legislation in this place we've just passed the the bail and release bill we're discussing the witnesses the victims and witnesses bill I mean what implications do you think they are going to have in terms of this coming year um on your budgets on the budget um it's difficult to say in relation to the victims and witnesses bill because that's just going through a parliament and we're like Scottish courts ever so the point where we're beginning to model what that will mean um and it's almost inevitable that if we increase evidence by commission um which is one of the proposals there um and we do more work to engage with victims of that will cost more money so that modelling is on going at the moment um and we'll be in discussion with the Scottish Government as a year goes on in relation to that and no doubt that will come back before this committee. So can I just interjecting that so does that mean that you're expecting cases to cost more if these legislative changes take place appreciate that's not going to be this coming years budget but you're not expecting it to be a streamlined cheaper process you're expecting it to be a more resource intensive process that will cost the public purse more that's my expectation that it will be more resource intensive so um there is more resource in the commission than there would be if everyone came to the court and evidence was given live um that's more the preparation for a commission hearing is the same as the preparation for a trial and from the perspective of the prosecutor who's doing it even though there may only be one witness you still have to have all of the the evidential aspects of the case covered so that the appropriate questions can be asked um so so that we've done the case and then in relation to the sexual offences court some of these cases at the moment will go through the sheriff court it costs less for a case to go through the sheriff court at the moment the standard of preparation of those cases will change so that it's the same as the high court I would expect and so that again an additional cost for preparation of those individual cases so I would expect it will cost more but we're still modelling the extent to which that might be the case I understand I don't know convener if I've got time for additional question I know we've got time pressure if I could just ask one quick question of mr McQueen again in the submission that the the Scottish courts and tribunal service have made it suggests an increase of 13.4 million pounds would be needed can you just briefly outline how that's been calculated yeah I mean the 13.4 million is is partly in terms of the pay award so we reckon that based on current projections we need six and a half million pound to put towards that pay award and what's your projection what pay you know what percentage yeah so this is our projection that we follow the line that scots got it may have taken this year which is a broad seven percent increase which obviously would impact on the baseline for next year and that for the majority of staff next year because most of our staff are in the lower pay grades it would be a pay increase of round about five percent for those staff and two percent on staff on on higher salaries so our projections in terms of that overall impact for next year are something in the region of about six and a half million pounds on top of that there has been a recent increase in terms of pay increases to judges now while we don't recruit or pay judges we do pay part of their pension and just in terms of the way it operates and also we pay fee paying judiciary so again the costs of both of those are given up and we reckon that will be in the region about one and a half million pound we have some extreme pressures in mental health tribunal at the moment because of the growing business that's now going through there and we reckon that we will need something about 1.4 million in terms of additional members hearings for the additional hearings that we need to hold in mental health tribunal next year and the final part of that 13.4 million increases largely through inflation so this is even based on a lower level inflation coming in next year we still think that that will have an overall impact of our budget of about four million pounds so that brings us broadly to the the 13.4 million thank you okay thanks very much so bringing in Fulton MacGregor and then Donald Cameron hey thanks thank you my first question is one that I hope actually links this session in the previous one because thank my colleague John Swinney and his line of questioning when the last session talked about that joint up thinking within the justice sector now this will be no surprise to you and I think actually it's probably been raised with you before maybe even by me a previous session I can't remember but we often talk we often hear from the police about the amount of time that is in resource that's taken up by officers having to attend a court and we all know that and we've heard it many times we heard that again today in talking about that even taken into overtime budgets is there anything that the service is doing to try and limit that but further work with the police to see exactly how that can be handled to try and reduce that and then that would impact on the police budget which we've just heard about and presumably your budget to next then as well yeah I mean if I'll kick off first of all there's a there's a number of things that we we have been doing and are doing in that area so at the moment all police witnesses can be on standby so they don't actually have to come to the court building until a time they're due to call so the whole idea was that police officers could continue working within in police buildings before they were actually required to give their evidence that was a stop gap position that was put in quite a number of years ago from January 2022 we've had the position where police officers and expert witnesses in the high court can now give their evidence remotely from their place of work and so far about 700 police officers and expert witnesses have now gone down that route we'll be doing an evaluation of that in October and we would hope to shortly be able to roll that out during the course of next year across the sheriff's courts again I think quite a game changer for the police because it essentially means that anyone that was required to give evidence would simply give evidence from the place of work or from a police station or from a hospital if they were an NHS or a consultant employee again significantly reducing the time that they would have to make that contribution so I think that will have a significant impact the other area where I think we will start to see early benefits is the somebody case management pilot so this is a pilot that's currently taking place in three courts Dundee Hamilton and Paisley with a real focus on trying to bring cases to inclusion at the earliest possible stage and trying to avoid setting down and at the citation of witnesses for unnecessary hearings so the key part is about the automatic disclosure of evidence at the earliest stage before the case calls to allow the proper consultation and negotiation to take place between crown and defense before pleas are then made what we have sat to see through the pilot is quite a significant impact in terms of witness citations so in some areas police witness citations have reduced by 50 percent broadly speaking other witness citations have dropped by about 30 percent and we are sat to see the figures changing in terms of the earlier settlement the pilot's going through a full evaluation at the moment so that's currently underway and we expect that evaluation will be completed in in october with the full evaluation taking place next march now what we anticipate if the evaluation confirms the positive progress that's been made then there is the possibility that that could be rolled out to other courts in the near future pending the full evaluation taking place in in march so there's a stream of things that are in place at the moment where hopefully it will bring positive benefits particularly to the police in terms of limiting mainly the number of police officers that actually have to give evidence in the first place but then provide a different means when they do have to give evidence to the court yes thanks very much for that that does sound really positive because i think this is a bit of an ongoing issue that's over a number of years in terms of police officers time but i was going to ask about the pilot that you're talking about there in terms of how that can impact resources across the board and that's really interesting here that's up to 50% decrease how do you think that can really change the way we do things in courts in terms of are you going to be looking at it and a bit in terms of the police pilot that they talked about is it going to be in terms of like risk and vulnerability and the sort of standardness if you like for one of a better word of the case and where that can all be agreed early on and say that i think i'm sure steven i'll want to say a bit more on this but primarily this is about trying to take a very different approach so the key thing about this particular private is judicially led so this is being led by share principal anwar who's now the share principal in Glasgow and Strathkelvern and the whole emphasis behind the project is about sheriffs taking a much more focused and a much more hands-on and proactive management of the cases so this is about proper case management from the very start to the very end and the key part of that is about this very early sharing of evidence so making sure that key evidence is available before the case calls in court before police are actually tendered so that hopefully will reduce the number of cases that are set for trial and reduce the level of witnesses and citations we're currently seeing at the moment and at the end of the generate a much more effective and an efficient system but steven i don't know if you want you say more about the time's perspective of your role and this is critical so the summary system the summary system is almost by design inefficient because the way the legislation operates in practice until now it has assumed that everything will go to trial and we know that cases going to trial will actually have the exception rather than the rule less than 10 percent of cases go to trial so what we do is we cite witnesses for cases at trials that aren't going to happen and we prepare for trials that aren't going to happen and there's a huge amount of resource that goes into that what the summary pilots are doing through judicial case management and early targeted disclosure is getting to the point where those cases which we know will resolve in a play of guilty at some point down the line resolved by a play of guilty at an earlier stage before we've gone to the extent of citing all of those witnesses of doing the preparation for the trials that won't happen as Eric says that the results that we have at this early stage are really positive and if we can reduce the number of citations to witnesses by about 50 percent that's got a huge impact upon the public it's got a huge impact upon the police it also has a huge impact in terms of freeing capacity of prosecutors for example to do other parts of our work and the feis that we've discussed in the serious crime that we've discussed in the sexual offences and not preparing for hearings where we know that there's not going to be a trial it eliminates some of that churn and it's a real positive aspect of our business so we're really hopeful that we get the results that we're looking for there and it's important to say that this has been done without a legislative change this has been done within the parameters of the current legislation through good judicial case management through initiatives that we've taken up it's going so well at the moment that we've been able to put some additional factors in so we have enhanced the pilots whereby if we have a domestic abuse trial we are increasing and enhancing the amount of contact that we have with victims throughout that period so they'll be contacted within two weeks by a prosecutor to discuss the case to give them the reassurance that they need and there will be a meeting with the prosecutor before the case not just at the court but in advance of the case and we're also supported in the early disclosure but the DES project which has been mentioned this morning which has been funded by government and that allows us to do this early disclosure in a way that is really convenient and logical and easy for people to use so some real significant benefits if we can get that and they will save resource along the way and they will also speed things up and give a service that's much better for victims and witnesses across the piece it does sound very positive overall but you know what sort of discussions are taking place with with defence lawyers who are a key a key part of making that happen they're involved in these discussions at a local level in each of the pilot courts they're involved their feedback is really important on this and we need a proper engaged defence to make this work to be there to have those discussions with the clients we know that they have some of these discussions with the clients at a later stage the way the system works doesn't encourage that to happen and we'll try and so they're a really key part in having these important discussions about what material is being disclosed at an early stage can i can i bring in john swinney just to ask a very quick supplementary this will use up my slot convener because it's in exactly the same territory and i don't want in any way to give off any non encouraging tones here but i'm really interested in why this is why this has not happened before because you know that in paragraph page 19 of the submission i really welcome what's going on here i don't please don't take anything discouraging from me but it says this has been achieved without any additional funding or the need for legislation Mr McQueen talked about you know we've now got proper case management in the pilot by sheriffs and you know what i think about all that the criminal justice system wrestles with the backlogs the frustration about witness citations the time it takes for cases to handle and the begs the question why is this not been done before why is it and what else could it what else could be going on i mean i think that's a fair question i think because because ultimate sorry i'll let you answer i think i think it's a question we could ask across a whole range of areas the the the gennif is out of this actually came probably about six or seven years ago so there's a major review of evidence and procedure carried out by Lord Carly at that particular time and a report published i think it was actually back in maybe 2016 in terms of the future way that we should think about taking evidence and the inefficiencies in the current system so that report had a lot of wide-ranging implications so it pushed a lot of what we're now seeing coming out of Lady Dorian's review it was the genesis for the children's bairmshoose which the first one is now being launched in scotland and it was also the main emphasis for this pilot was now taken in this pilot was actually put in place in just in 2019 and it was halted because of the pandemic the pandemic gave the opportunity to bring in judicial weed through the sheriff principal to refocus the program the the actual approach that's been taken to really think hard about what we want to take out of this in terms of what would that case manage it look like and that pilot has now been put back in place it did recommenced in september last year but because of the difficulties with legal aid and government of that particular time it was difficult for the legal profession to fully engage in it with that part resolved that engagement started back in earnest in january time and we're now seeing significant results so yes we can always ask the questions you know why not before why never but this has had quite a long time in terms of its its genesis to get to where we are now but you'll understand where i'm coming from now absolutely you know we're sitting as a committee and there'll be other committees in parliament hearing all sorts of issues about financial pressures and here you're giving us concrete evidence of areas where no more money is required just that the system has got is undertaken improvements and i'm pressing about well where else can that be done because when we we will come to consider the victims and witnesses bill and you know and i suspect i will come with that from the perspective of seeing well why does this need to absolutely why does this need to cost more why does this need to involve more resources if you look at the range of things that we're trying to take forward i think you can see that same that same approach coming through so i think there's very much a recognition that i think one of the positive things coming out of the pandemic is that actually things can happen quickly and we can move quickly so i hear the remote jury centres we're a a real example of how we moved in a very short number of weeks a very different type of operating model so we are taking forward and pushing hard now the whole thing about the police witnesses we are now looking very seriously about how we roll out virtual custody's on a national jurisdiction basis across the whole of scotland again part driven by the problems that we are now experiencing by jamie but how do we drive this in a different direction we are doing a work in terms of domestic abuse in gramping islands and islands where we want to take the whole of domestic abuse and essentially move it into a virtual court world so we want to move to a position where complainers and witnesses domestic abuse never have to come into a court environment where in a virtual world we can get greater consistency in terms of specialized sheriffs and specialized procurator ffiscals and that we can offer trial diets within somewhere between four to six weeks to prevent that disengagement that happens with witnesses over a period of time so i think there is a real renewed energy and drive across all criminal justice organizations that actually maybe the things that we thought were very very difficult in the past are where we absolutely focus now and i think the programme of change and reform have hurt my easy's all of those things thank you please thank you very much okay i will do thank you i'll bring in donald cameron and then i'll bring in poly mcneill donald thank you um it's very struck by mr bagan's comment about the summary system and saying that it i think you said it's but it's very nature it's it's inefficient i mean if there's one part of the system that should be efficient it strikes me it's the summary summary part and you know you gave your reasons and i find that very compelling but i just wondered if you could expand a bit on on those reasons because it strikes me this is you know absolutely a part of the system that should be you know working like clockwork so if you look at the legislative provisions they operate in the way that they did probably at the end of the 19th century where they assumed that the police will bring someone to the court immediately and there will be an immediate trial and the summary system really takes its nature from that and as time has gone on obviously things have become more complicated and more cases have got into the system as eric mcqueen has alluded to some of the genesis of the pilots came from lord carloy's work some of it also came from reflection and certainly we did this reflection in crown office about what happened in the previous attempt to reform the summary system in about 2006 2007 when the criminal proceedings reform scotland act was passed and that took us to a place in crown office where we thought that in order to get proper judicial management you need to give the judiciary better tools and the tool that we thought that we could give them was a copy of the the the summary of evidence from the police report and that then allows the sheriff to look at what the case is all about and to begin with a more informed view to start to identify what the issue is in the case so what's likely to be in dispute that allows you to cite less witnesses it allows you to have less items at court as productions it allows you to to begin to get back to that point where we can do things and so it begins to allow a greater focus on each case and that for us in addition to the journey that we've been on with lord carloy there's a bit of trial and error in that and we have had the opportunity to try those things out we tried some of it out immediately before the pandemic we reflected on that during the pandemic and we're out the other side of that night with with some some really useful lessons and some good signs of progress so so these reflections as time go on it should be the quickest part of the system but the volume of cases and the fact that everything gets set to trial means that too many cases call too little happens in those cases because there hasn't been that focus that we're now beginning to see the ability to bring to bear turn it to the backlog are you confident that we will ever reach pre-pandemic levels both of you i think we've been quite clear that we we see that as being unlikely and we see that as being unlikely because of the continued increase that we are seeing in terms of serious cases coming through so if we look at the level of indictments over the last five years then both the sheriff court and the high court have increased by approaching 38% so any any notion i think of returning to pre-pandemic levels i think went quite some well back so this has been a continued level of increase so what we've tried to set out in our our modelling report is what we see has been that revised baseline so previously in the the high court we would deal on an average year with somewhere around about 400 trials we think realistically that in the future will be closer to 600 650 potentially slightly more within the sheriff and jury business previously it was about five or 600 trials realistically that's looking more like 1500 so i think it's now not just the fact that there's been a backlog but actually we're dealing with a different level of cases that's coming through the system i think somebody business is the one area where i think we will return to pre-pandemic levels that seems to be the the closest area but in terms of song on business there has been a continual increase in terms of the case types coming through and that's a trend that it looks like continued for the future do you agree with that from our protocol tutorial? yes yes if you look at the longer term trend in in serious cases it's up so significant increases if you look back five ten years in sexual offences etc there's no sign that that's going to go down we see every year that it might be sliding up it might be sliding down but that longer term trend is on the up so the longer term trend i think for the serious businesses that will be there the system was beginning to kick a little bit before the pandemic we were routinely extending time bars so that pressure's there that's one of the reasons why it's even more important that we sort the summary stuff out when we've got the opportunity to do so at the moment because it is a capacity builder in the wider system it will free up resources elsewhere to begin to tackle those more serious cases and lastly convener on on the issues of sexual offences i was noticing that both the law justice general in his introduction to the corporate plan in april 2023 stated that he made support the number of documents in sexual offences is is rising and i think the crown office submission to this committee mentions an appeal case is that right yes that's right where there is a potential to significantly increase so in budgetary terms are you able to say what the impact of that might be particularly so the appeal case the law of advocates reference number one of 2023 as you'll be aware is awaiting the appeal course decision and it looks at some of the older cases that has been on that particular case called smith against lees and to see whether that's correctly decided in terms of what evidence is required to bring a prosecution and in particular roundabout issues of distress it is no doubt that there would be an increase in the number of cases that we were able to bring we haven't been able to do modelling which allows us to put a figure on that but if that reference was successful and we await the decision of the court then clearly there would be an increase in the amount of cases that we could bring not only at the high court level but i think also at sheriff injurian potentially also summary because it would have far reaching consequences and central offences and also potentially offences such as domestic abuse okay thank you thank you thank you very much i'll bring in poli mcneil and then finally rona mackay thank you good morning we won't be able to answer all the questions i have this morning but can i just put a marker down you're going awfully fast in this reform and i would just plead to give us some time with the committee so we understand i mean like john swinney a lot of the reforms we would support because we need to end the turn but i do have some concerns about some of the human rights issues attached to virtual elements my first question is is i'm confused about this because you might have heard me talk about the shambles of the glasgo sheriff court on virtual custodies and that's the sheriff who's saying that and i agreed so i moved an amendment which the government accepted during covid so that the virtual custodies could not proceed and they should be i don't understand why you press release can you explain that to me how can you proceed against the legislation i'm not sure of the amendment that you moved um so virtual custodies are are in place and they're covered by the existing legislations that's in place and actually it's also in place so that it can be done on a national jurisdiction basis so i'm well can we can have any further exchange in this because i specifically moved an amendment during covid against virtual custodies because it was an app i can assure you what i saw was the complete shambles and that's my concern about the reform i mean it's going to be some further discussion on this because so i think this is i suppose i'm back to mr swinney's point about you know why aren't we doing things faster you know i mean i think if we if we look 10 years down the line and we look back i think we'll question why are we moving thousands of people in the back of white vans every day and driving them all around about scotland why are we picking people up at prisons at at preschool six o'clock in the morning sticking them a white van driving them to share of court having them sit in a share of court crowded cells for six or seven hours for a court hearing that might last a couple of minutes and then at the end of the day put them on another white van to drive them to a prison i think we'll loop back it and say that to mark don't mean you say put it like that but but you put it like that but what's the point if the court the custody court then lasts twice as long as you use the glass so what we're trying to put in place is is a model that will allow that to be done much slicker and much better so we put virtual custody in place during covid as an instant crisis management situation yep there was no great thought the technology was strung on we had to put something in place and predictably it got us through yep but it didn't work well now we did deal with 20 000 cases by virtual links during custody yep and not all of those 20 000 cases were the disasters that you might have seen on on glass when that particular day so you have the vast majority of the virtual casteries that went through actually worked pretty well yep it wasn't a slight we wouldn't see that as being a model for the future okay but what you're saying is that there'll be investment and it'll be different so what we're now putting in place and we've now got agreement from all the justice organisations from the law society and from the Scottish solicitors association is to put together now a judicially led group that's going to look at virtual casteries and make sure that the model that the technology the provisions we build are one that people can buy into and one that we can deliver in a reasonable course of time thank you but i say please don't that don't link it back to the quick and dirty approach that's effective in Covid thank you that's helpful um so in answer to donald Cameron that you know this has been a long-standing issue for me on the delays in the high court and the law on 140 days so you've said that you don't see reaching the pre pandemic levels is there a target as to what you aiming at see for the yeah so so i think i think there's two things there one why don't we don't actually see the level of cases dropping to the pre pandemic level but what we are anticipating is that with the recovery program in place then those timescales will start to reduce so within the high court we have now increased the capacity by more than 40 percent pre pandemic so there's now 40 more high court trials on a daily basis than there was in the pre pandemic period so what our expectation is through time and we expect we'll get to that revised baseline in about 18 months time where yes we'll still be dealing with a higher level of cases but we'll have started to reduce some of the timescales involved so at the moment a high court case has taken 43 weeks so with all of these things you know when we talk about extensive delays there's really three main parts to it so there is the part of the police in terms of the incident and investigation there is the part of the crown in terms of looking at the evidence decision to prosecute and then there is the part when it comes into court at the moment on average high court trials are taking 43 weeks to have got to that evidence lead stage we are currently fixing trials for the high court in eight months time so already some of those periods are starting to come down and as the recovery program now starts to bite with the new capacity that we put in place then we expect to see the timescale starting to come down but we do expect the actual case numbers to still be at quite a high level in 18 months time thank you and just finally the steven the figure that you as I can add to the 200 people that you might lose in the service it is what would so what's needed to prevent that from happening was there a figure that you mentioned yes so the figure of 206 almost 207 million pounds for next year is the figure that we're looking for to cover all of the things that we need to do and from the the pay impact so that's the figure that we're in discussion about thank you thank you very much thanks very much and I'll bring in Rona Mackay thanks I'm conscious of time so I will be I will be quick yeah thank you I'm fine it's finding that's a very encouraging session thanks for the efficiencies that you've made in the reorganisation Eric I just wanted to ask you to talk to the start about pay increases been a bit higher than you thought etc etc so I'm imagining that I'll be helping you with recruitment and retention is that the case I've got to say really the increase of the pay level above what was in the public sector pay policies is one we welcome so that you're the pressures on staff the cost of living have been really tough over the course of the last year 18 months so I say I don't have any difficulty at all with that level that we're now trying to reach an agreement on we just need to find a way of making it affordable and manageable and that's a discussion that we'll have with the government so certainly making sure that our pay levels for our staff are comparable across government the public sector are a key part of retention and a key part of just express the value that we have in our staff and Steve that would be the same for you with trainees and it's the same so it's addressing that comparability with Scottish government main to make sure that we that was giving us a recruitment retention problem but the comparability allows us to address that good thanks Eric capital funding predictions anything you can yeah capital funding is is one that's always tougher us mean our our core baseline budget is eight million pound which is nowhere near what we require in recent years through in-year adjustments and fundings we've pretty much been sitting round about the 17 million which we think really is the the minimal level we need to run good and safe operations so our capital budget covers both our predominant air building side and digital and both of those are expanding and under pressure so on digital it's absolutely clear we need to have the the right underlying infrastructure in place and that's been a lot of work we've done over the the last two years and that will be the platform that will support things in the future like the virtual custody that we've been that we've been talking about cyber security is also an increase in risk and again it's a little bit like what I heard police Scotland saying earlier you know when they were talking about police body one cameras you know it's just it's not about putting more video links in and more video screens in it's actually making sure that the underlying infrastructure is not just one that we put in place but one that we maintain and one that we continue to develop so our view is at a 17 million pound capital budget is really the bare minimum we need to make sure that we continue that type of development just i'm incidentally mentioned virtual trial so i'm really pleased about your plans for virtual domestic abuse trials i think that's a huge huge thing forward yeah uh-huh great any problems with the rack thing in the buildings you know the reinforced concrete yeah we've we we carried out all the desktop surveys earlier on this year in line with the guidance we are now carrying out detailed structural surveys across 10 year buildings that we think there may be some potential the first of those was completed last week and there's no trace of rack i heard last night that the second building that we have done has identified that there is rack panels within the roof area at the moment the investigation have said that none of them are damaged there's no deflection in the panels so we think it's a it's a safe environment those structural surveys carried on through last night and i'll expect to get the further results of them this morning this afternoon the the other surveys we will have completed as we get into and take over great thank you i'll have a few more questions but i'll leave it there thanks yeah i'm for one or two well yep just just to ask steven about the crown office submission talks about the appeal court appeal court considering the scope of law of evidence sex offence cases etc and you said that could significantly increase do you do you mean that's going to mean staff is that more staff needed for that or is it difficult to say until we see what the appeal court say at the end of the day the appeal court might say that there is no change in the law as we've understood it since the mid 1990s continues to be the law if the appeal court says that some of those cases were wrongly decided we would have to read that and see exactly what it means to see what the impact would be but there is no doubt if they say that that case was wrongly decided that it might well be that there are a whole series of further cases that we now could bring to court and we would have to then scope and what the impact would be we just need to wait to see so we need to we need to wait for the appeal court to to issue their ruling and do that work all right thank you thanks okay thanks very much i wonder if i can just come back in and maybe ask yourself eric you mentioned white vans earlier on and i know that there's been a joint decision on albeit on a temporary basis to set time limits to avoid late night sittings in custody courts so obviously that's very welcome for in particular lawyers and court staff but i just wondered if there's been any modelling done in and around the impact of that so my immediate thought on that is that that's potentially just going to create a backlog of cases that aren't dealt with into the evening hours so it was just to ask a wee bit about that we we hope and anticipate that won't be the case and just to give you a little bit of background i mean obviously the du a me situation has been deteriorating quite significantly in recent months we understand that their resource levels are now about 25 percent below where they would expect to be and we are seeing the impact across all courts so in the last six weeks we've lost 68 sorry 48 trial days because they've not been able to bring custody or prisoners to the to the court for that and we're seeing a significant number of courts now that are sitting quite well late into the evening so seven eight o'clock at night is now becoming almost at norm for a lot of our courts and nine ten o'clock at night is is not unexpected that you're quite right it's putting a serious wellbeing issue for everyone that works within the the court environment it means that people are working 10 and 12 hour days and then expect to be back at their desk the next morning and that applies as much as it does for lawyers and solicitors it does for my staff or for the the judiciary that's working on the good will the good will of everyone that's involved but it's actually not a it's not a long-term sustainable position that we can continually ask people to work in that way so in discussion with the judiciary the judiciary are now issued guidance that is a first step and it is only a first step of a way we can try to deal with this so the important part of their guidance is that in terms of all business which is procedural the aim is to no longer bring people from prison unless it's absolutely necessary so it would only be if those individuals were unrepresented or it would only be if those individuals were going to plead guilty equally the same would apply to anyone who's in prison that was being cited as a witness to a trial again they would be done by a virtual link so we hope that what that will do is free up capacity within gioamie to focus on the areas where we've got big gaps at the moment so by setting the time limits of seven o'clock on a monday and six o'clock on a Tuesday through to friday what we hope is that by being able to divert the resources we can avoid that situation because quite clearly end up in a position with a whole number of people that they're remanded for a further evening may just compound the problem so this is about how resources can be managed across the system to try to mitigate the impact it is not by any stretch of imagination a solution in the long term i've got serious concerns that if the resource levels are 25 percent down at the moment where might they be in four months time or five months time and that's why we're very seriously and very quickly working with and collaboratively with the legal profession and justice organisations about actually how do we move to a position where we could very quickly move to virtual custody thanks that's that's really very helpful update and just one final point that i was wanting to just pick up on was the process of information transfer from police to crime office and so police reports evidence and so on and forgive me if it maybe has been covered off in earlier responses but obviously that's a welcome part of transformation and reform so i'm just curious about what if any update there is on that work in the context of the potentials that budget implications for crime office is that on the desk program that we've been talking about vigil evidence capability so that's been piloted at the moment and indeed and it's really positive what it begins to allow has become a platform whereby we can share cctv video images photographs with the defence on early stage it then begins to be the tool that we use in the pilots in order that we can in order that we can get this early disclosure early discussion with the defence judicial case management it has wider impacts as well previously things like cctv mobile phone footage would all have to be burnt on the disks and pen drives all of that infrastructure all of that handing out of things can be stopped whenever you have a disk you run the risk that it can be lost and that leads all sorts of data protection implications it rules them out so it's a really important technical innovation where because digital images videos are so much part of life now we're finding a sensible way to introduce them into the criminal justice system without going back to burning disks and pen drives which is digitally prehistoric and i take it in the context of budget then that there's that will continue there's not a kind of that's that's there's separate funding streams from scottish government into organisations to do that we have our own funding that we need to do to make sure our systems are compatible with it but that's all built into the budget that we've set out in the submission okay thank you very much okay i think that brings us to the end of this session and can i thank you both very much for your attendance and we'll have a very short pause before we move on thank you very much thank you very much members so our last item of business in public today is to review a supplementary legislative consent memorandum on the UK government's northern Ireland troubles legacy and reconciliation bill this lcm has been lodged because there have been a small number of relatively minor amendments that have been made to the bill since we last considered the issue of consent and these amendments impact on devolved competences as outlined in the lcm the new amendments fall within the Scottish Parliament's legislative competence as the relate to the way in which the independent commission for reconciliation and information recovery carries out its functions insofar as they relate to scotland of criminal investigations under the review and investigations of death or harmful conduct and they therefore require the consent of the Scottish Parliament before we start i want to point out to members that these new amendments do not affect the key parts of the bill we have already looked at and the Scottish government has not changed its view that the Scottish Parliament should not consent to the relevant parts in this bill for reasons we have already discussed and after a vote agreed with i should also point out that because of the timetable in the UK parliament and our recess the bill passed into law last night so therefore all we need to do today is to note this development so can i ask if anyone has anything else that they want to add or are we agreed to note the supplementary lcm are we all agreed okay thank you very much okay so that concludes our business today next week we will be joined by Jill Emery to review the work of the response to deaths in prison custody group and we will also consider our approach to the police ethics conduct and scrutiny scotland bill so i now close this meeting thank you