 I welcome to the seventh meeting of the Criminal Justice Committee in 2023. There are no apologies this morning, and Katie Clark is joining us online. Our first item of business today is to agree to take item 4, which is our review of evidence on today's agenda in private. Are we all agreed? Yes. Great. Thank you. Our first main item of business today is to consider the criminal justice issues raised in the Scottish mental health law review. As members will recall, the review was established by the Scottish Government to review existing Scots law with a view to improving the rights and protections of people who may be subject to mental health, incapacity or adult protection legislation, by virtue of a mental disorder. We are joined this morning by Professor Colin Mackay. Professor Mackay is based at the Centre for Mental Health and Capacity Law at Edinburgh Napier University and was a member of the Scottish mental health law review team. I warm welcome to Professor Mackay. I refer members to papers 1 and 2, and I intend to allow around about 45 minutes for this session. I would now like to invite Professor Mackay to make some brief opening remarks. Thank you very much, convener, and thanks very much to the committee for the invitation. I'm really delighted to see an interest in the work of the Scottish mental health law review. This is actually, I think, the first committee that started to look at it, so it's great to see that it's starting to be noticed. The review was a large and complex one, a bit of a visual aid. This is a print-out with it double-sided and double-spit and single-spaced. It's probably the largest in this field because it covered not only the Mental Health Care and Treatment Act of 2003, but it also covers adults with incapacity or, to some extent, adult support and protection. It's a very big and wide-ranging review, so obviously I can only scratch the surface of what the review is about in these opening remarks. We made over 200 recommendations, but there are three broad themes. The first of these is strengthening the voice of people who use mental health services, whether that's people with a mental illness, learning disability, dementia or whatever. The second is reducing the need for and the use of coercion in health and care systems, whether civil or criminal. The third, and perhaps the most important, is giving effect to the full range of human rights to everybody in the system, including economic, social and cultural rights, such as the right to health and the right to independent living. You can't actually do that by the law alone. That was one of the things that really became apparent as we did our work, that the law needs to be changed, but if the law is to secure the full range of human rights, we also need changes in the culture and shape of services and how services are held accountable. Just a couple of words about the forensic aspects of the review. In line with our remit, we initially started by looking at the specific forensic disposals in criminal law, which derived mostly from the 2003 act. We do make some significant recommendations about them. One of the most stark things that we noticed was that there are fewer than 100 of those mental health disposals a year, but there are thousands of people with a mental illness or a learning disability in the criminal justice system. A lot of evidence that the system doesn't always meet their needs. We felt that we had to make some recommendations across the whole system. Starting with the initial police contact, we actually followed up the work that this committee has already done in its round table last year, and we recommend the development of new models of crisis support to fill the gap between prison and psychiatric hospital. Where people with a mental disability are charged, we want to see a more systematic diversion out of the criminal justice system and greater support for accused persons and indeed victims in court processes. We have called for changes to avoid people being reminded in prison for lack of a bed or if sent to hospital, kept in hospital and definitely awaiting a trial for many months. We do think that it is important that there is a specialist mental health disposal as an option for offenders who should be supported and treated in hospital. We are concerned by the evidence that some people, particularly people with learning disabilities, who receive those kinds of disposals can spend much longer in hospital than they might if they have received a prison sentence and gone through the ordinary system. For the most serious and risky forensic mental health patients, we propose keeping the special category of restricted patients but we make a number of recommendations to give more power to the tribunal to oversee those cases and to reduce the role of ministers in overseeing the cases. We do not say very much in the review about prisons but that is something that I would urge the committee also to consider when I was with the mental welfare commission we saw some very distressing examples of women with serious mental health needs in prison where prison was not meeting their needs. That was actually drawn to our attention by the European Committee on the Prevention of Torture. That tells us something of this useless of it. It was the last point in terms of reviews. We are not the only review in town. We came on top of the Rome review of learning disability and autism in the mental health act, the Baron review of the forensic mental health system. There has recently been published a review of diversion and prosecution. Round about the same time as our review came out, there was a prison mental health needs assessment. There are a lot of reviews and a lot of work being done to review the system. I guess that we are at the point now where we maybe need to stop reviewing stuff and start a systematic programme of change. I hope that that is helpful as an outline of our work and I am very happy to answer questions. That has been a very helpful overview. I will just move straight to questions. If I may, I will kick things off with a question around section 297 of the mental health act, which is an issue that I have been very interested in for a number of years, which allows an officer to take a person from a public place to a place of safety. As the review highlights, large amounts of police time are committed to dealing with those types of cases, and you will know, as you referred to a few moments ago in May last year, that the committee took evidence on the issue, in particular the fact that many people in distress are in their homes, in a private place. The review report outlines a range of issues, including police are not best placed to respond, and provisions are being used to respond to people in distress, rather than who are experiencing acute mental illness, which is actually the wording in that particular part of the act. We know that your review makes some recommendations around that, including that the Scottish Government should work with health and care agencies to develop alternative places of safety for people who are in distress and at risk, who may not necessarily need psychiatric care, and that the Scottish Government should review whether the place of safety powers should extend beyond suspected mental or intellectual disability to other people who may be at serious risk. That is a rather long-winded introduction to perhaps outline a little bit more about the work that was done in the review on that particular part of the act. Thank you very much. The work on place of safety links in with some of the broader work that was done around the scope of the act and issues around coercion and the use of the state powers, as it were, to try to keep people safe. I think that there is a broad theme that comes through in the work of the review, which is that, in a way, the system kind of works for the people it is designed to work for, and those are perhaps people who do have an acute treatable mental illness, so they have an episode of bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. They need to be in hospital so that they can get some medication so that they can recover and be reintegrated into the community. It does not work so well for all the people that do not quite fit, so that is people with personality issues, people with comorbidity of substance disorder and so on. People with problems do have mental health needs, absolutely, but do not necessarily need to be treated as inpatients in a psychiatric hospital. As psychiatric care has developed, there is a smaller and smaller number of people who fit the bill for acute inpatient treatment in a psychiatric hospital. We took evidence from a wide range of stakeholders, including people who use services, including people who provide services and third sector organisations and advocacy organisations, and so on. There was a general theme running through the report that there is not just in relation to police issues, but the same thing that you could see around child and adolescent mental health services, for example, that the whole system is geared towards getting referral to the CAM system, and a lot of people end up being rejected out of the CAM system because they do not meet the criteria for the system. There is a big gap there. In a way, the focus on mental illness is perhaps the wrong focus. I know that Dr Heyman, who gave evidence to you, highlighted this idea of what she called the medicalisation of distress. We heard the same evidence that the committee heard about the concerns of the police at the amount of time that they spend dealing with people who appear to be in great distress, particularly at risk of suicide. Even the statement that the chief constable made recently prior to his resignation suggested that the idea that the police are having to fill in for other agencies is one of the things that they do not think is sustainable. Obviously, it is not our place to allocate budgets between the police and the care agencies, but certainly the gap between inpatient psychiatric care and the other services that people might need was quite starkly evident. Anything was agreed to by most of the people that gave evidence to us. Looking at section 297 in particular, again, what was this design to do? A design to address situation where the police will find somebody, appears to be unwell, appears to be in need of care, and they'll take them somewhere where they'll be looked after. The reality is that for too many of the people, there isn't anywhere they're going to be looked after. Certainly, an acute psychiatric ward or A&E is not the best place to look after them. The police are left holding the baby as a result of that. They spend a lot of time getting the person to A&E or psychiatric hospital. They spend a lot of time hanging around waiting to see what's going to happen and then get to the well. We're not actually going to admit this person, and they are left with a problem. It's not that we think that there couldn't be any alternatives. I think there are other ways of conceiving crisis services. A lot of those would be places where people might go into a voluntary basis or might self-refer to. There are one or two examples of crisis services in the country, which could be more widely spread. When we talk about coercion, we also talk a lot about the preventive approach. One of the things we want to do is reduce the amount of coercion in the system. Often, by the time you get to the crisis, there's not much else you can do but use some kind of coercion, whether that's through the police or through mental health attention. Often, it could have been prevented if perhaps people had received some support earlier or if there had been somewhere they could go. We talk a lot in chapter nine of our report about the development of alternatives around safe spaces where people can go with, where they may feel increased distress, peer support and other ways of thinking about those services. I'll maybe come back to what those alternative options and places of safety could look like. Just conscious of the time, I'm going to bring in other members. I'm going to hand straight over to Russell Finlay. Good morning, Professor. Your report is now six months old. It makes, by my count, 205 recommendations over 115 pages, I think. Even within those recommendations, many of them have got sub-recommendations with, for example, 8, 10, has got 11 specific asks. It's a huge piece of work and it's something that I didn't appreciate at no real involvement with or knowledge of. However, it makes reference to an implementation gap. There's a re-up and an understanding that what this is seeking to do and how it's delivered might be two different things. Can you give me a sense, six months after delivery, what you think the Government's position is on a lot of those asks? Have you got a general sense of some of the stuff that's never going to see the light of day or there's a favourable reaction to some of it or just roughly where you think it's landed, how it's landed? I don't think I can speak for the Government. I mean, I think they are taking it seriously. I think they have officials who are working on this. I understand that the statement that I've heard from civil servants is that they hope to publish a more detailed response in the summer, where that civil service summer, which takes you into October. However, I think that they are taking it seriously. I think that it doesn't come out of a clear blue sky, but I think that a lot of what we recommend builds on other things that are already in the system, so recommendations that we make around scrutiny and accountability services, for example, linking to other work that they were already doing as a consequence of the investigations into Tayside. As I've said, there is other work that's been done around the forensic mental health system, so it is big and complicated. It isn't totally new, but some of it is quite radical. My sense is, and I think that we say something about this in the report, that there are some things that the Government should do quite quickly, because there are one or two areas where we think that there is a risk of VCHR challenge, for example, around deprivation and liberty, so there are some things where the law does need to be fixed quite quickly. There are some things around service provision, which obviously could be done now. There are other things which we acknowledge would take a long time and a lot of work to develop, and we're talking about five years down the line, I would suggest. Some of the stuff's happening anyway. Some of it can be done within organisations, just cultural changes, and some of it might require legislation. Yes, so one other thing that I thought might be worth asking about is the possibility of some kind of online action tracker, so that individuals involved in the report and in the professions and members of the public could see where we are with each of these 200 plus recommendations. Is that something that you would support or have asked for? Has there been any discussion about that? Well, we haven't asked for it specifically. What we've done within Napier, and obviously the review team has done its job, and it's disappeared, as it were, as a review team. Of course, the chair of the review is now a judge, so we, as the reviewer, have done our job within Napier. We are helping to support discussions about some of the implementation of the review, and Government officials have been very willing and supportive of that. I would absolutely agree that it would be helpful to have, I suppose, a fairly systematic response to which of these things. I think that I did see some work that the Royal College of Psychiatries was doing in terms of thinking about the different recommendations, which are either, well, that's obvious. Who could disagree with that right down to Bloody Hell? That's a really crazy idea. Perhaps even traffic light system, something that's happened, something that's been, like we do in the committee with reports. Yeah, I think some chunky of this up into a programme of change, I think, would be very, very sensible. Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much. Okay, I'll bring in Rona Mackay. Thank you, convener. Good morning, Professor. I want to ask you about Chapter 5 of the report, Support Within the Criminal Justice System, specifically in relation to communication with people who have learned difficulties or additional support needs. I have a constituent who currently has a petition going through Parliament. I think that the Qualities Committee, we're talking about it yesterday, my colleague, can confirm that. And it's relating to a family member who has had, you know, great distress trying to communicate with the police and carers, actually, because she uses the Macaton signing system. And, you know, my constituent is trying to promote this and say that, you know, the legal advocates and public people dealing with people with mental health should have that ability, or at least some of them. I wonder if you could give me your view on that. Well, I think certainly in relation to the expectations of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which is one of the things that has kind of guided us, I think it would absolutely be the case that if people need augmented support needs to communicate particularly in something as serious as a police case, then that should be provided and supported. In fact, even, I think, in basic equality legislation, that should be the expectation that people have particular support needs. I think there are perhaps two different issues. One is about just the ways in which people might be supported to communicate, and I wouldn't see a difference between that. Translation services, for example, you know, you'd expect that a person who couldn't speak English would have an interpreter. So, I think if a person uses Macaton to communicate, then that should be facilitated and supported. There's the other issue, I suppose, in the criminal justice system about what weight you attach to the evidence of people with intellectual disabilities and how much you can say what, do they really understand what they're telling us? But again, I think that the focus shouldn't be on, as it were, trying to find a way to exclude some people from the system. It should be around how do we support people so that their evidence can be, just as we now take children's evidence much more seriously than we used to to give their evidence. So, yes, I mean, I would think personally support the idea that those kind of augmented communication needs should be available, and I think it would be something that would reflect our equality or obligations under equality legislation and under the CRPD. Would you see that as something that needed legislation to introduce or maybe just an operational, you know, the police service, for instance, said, well, we will have so many officers trained in Macaton or BSL. Well, I mean, I think practically, yes, I mean, it's perhaps an operational issue. I mean, it may be that, and as we already have the Equality Act, so I suppose the question, I mean, I think legislation might help, but I think the primary thing would be, and obviously the quicker thing would be, that this becomes part of an operational expectation. I mean, as you'll know, I think we already have legislation around the appropriate adult system, which was actually ran for about 25 years on a non-statutory basis, is now statutory, and I would see that as being part of perhaps how the appropriate adult system should be supported. Thank you, thanks. It's very helpful, thank you. Okay, thanks very much. Fulton Midgar-Graw, do you want to ask us a follow-up just to Rona's, and then I'll bring other members in? Thanks, can be in a very brief just to say and put on the record that I, as a member of the Equalities Committee that Rona Mackay made reference to there, we actually looked to this petition that she refers to just yesterday again, and just to say on the record that the Equalities Committee has agreed some further work around area, but the question I did want to ask for yourself, Professor Mackay, was the review team aware of that petition, and if so, did it take it into any consideration when looking at this particular section? I don't think the first I wasn't aware of it, I don't know if any other members of the review or the secretary were aware of it, but it wasn't one that I personally was aware of from a friend. Okay, FAM, you've got it. When was the petition? It's been up by yours, hasn't it? It's been 2020, it introduced it, and then it's moved on to the Equalities Committee. Apologies that I hadn't picked up on it. No, that's what you just thought I'd ask. Okay, I think Jamie Greene would you like to come in now? Please, thank you. Thank you, convener. Good morning, Professor. I wanted to focus on some of your comments that you made in your opening statement around the role of policing and their role as first responders in situations. Certainly, you're right to echo comments by the parting chief constable on his concerns over the increasing use of the police as a first port of call for incidents where there's clearly a mental health element, or that is the substantive element of the situation, and how police both deal with those situations, are prepared to deal with such situations, and then what happens thereafter when someone has to be removed from the location to another place and where they go? There's been a lot of discussion over that over the years, but it seems to me, anecdotally, if not evidentially, that that is increasing substantially. I just wondered if you could maybe just talk for a few moments about the work and big report lots in it. I know certainly that Chapter 9, for example, went into December. There's lots in there, but if you could maybe just sum up what you think the problem is and maybe what government should be thinking about. In relation to the police, I suppose it's a complex multifactorial problem. It's partly to do with the way that services have developed, I think, and I think this came out in evidence to you. I think that as things get tough, people kind of look to their own basis and stop working together quite so much, so they say, well, you know, I can hardly help the people that I'm supposed to help, so I'm not going to take on these other people who might not fit, or I'm not going to do these other things with this other agency, but I'm struggling to do my own job. So I think that the scope for multi-discipline working has diminished. I think the complexity of needs has increased. I mean, this has always been a problem, but I think for a number of reasons, the complexity of presentations has increased, and local authority services, particularly, I've obviously had huge pressures on them, so the kind of things that might have been available in the past aren't there. So there's something which is just about the level of resourcing of the system. There's something about the targeting of it towards these people who don't fit well into the boxes that the system provides for them. There are very practical things that can be done to improve the system. The mental welfare commission looked at psychiatric emergency plans, so each health board is supposed to have a psychiatric emergency plan if it does have one. There's a lot that can be done to make those more consistent and cover some of these bases, particularly some of the areas such as what happens if there is a difference of view between the police and the health services about what the needs of a person are, or if this is a huge complicating factor, what happens if the person may have a mental disorder but is also intoxicated or has obviously taken something, and what do you do while you're waiting to assess a person? So there are a number of practical things that can be taken, can be done, and I guess that needs co-ordination, and it needs, I suppose, central support and encouragement to co-ordinate that. I think the law can play a part in it, but it's probably not, to be honest, the biggest thing that needs to be sorted out. I think it's much more about interagency working, trying new things perhaps. One of the things that we encouraged was we need to be looking at what people have done in other places, we need to be trying things out. The evidence we had, and I think you perhaps had as well, is that there are pilots around the place but they never seem to become mainstream, they just kind of bubble up and then disappear. So a lot of it is about the better joint working, all the things that we've been talking about since the Christie commission, I suppose. Absolutely, yeah. I think what we'll certainly identify that one of the things that was evident is that many of the social services that local authorities provide or the NHS boards or IGBs provide are very 9 to 5 Monday to Friday, and outside of that there's very little scope to support people, and that's why other emergency services are sucked into that vacuum, if you like, and have to respond. Certainly there was some discussion, a lot of interest, I think, in some of the pilots where police would attend situations where there was a suspicion that perhaps there was no crime being committed but someone was certainly vulnerable or a danger to themselves or others, for the reasons you mentioned, that they would be supported by other bodies or agencies, a triage on the spot system that identified where is the best place to take those persons at the moment. A lot of them seem to end up in police cells for their own safety as opposed to the safety of the public, and that doesn't, to me, sound like an ideal place to be taking people in that situation. No, it's absolutely not. I mean, you're right, there have been some positive developments and, for example, around I think Glasgow used mental health nurses as it were working alongside police officers so that where there appears to be an issue of some kind of mental distress, the nurse can intervene perhaps in a way that would be difficult for a police officer to do, and I mean I'm not an expert in the outcomes of that, but some of the stuff I've seen from that suggests it. Often it's not that we then go on to use any statutory power to admit people or to detain people, but they're just able to de-escalate the situation or get the person on to some other situation. I mean, I think that one of the fundamental things about section 297 is the great majority of these people do not go on to detain long-term in the mental health system, so they're there for some other reason and they need to be in some other place, and I think that's the big gap that needs to be. I want to talk about half-time, just ask one more question about prison prisons. I think that it's quite evident that the prison population in terms of statistics is showing us quite worrying trends of those with long-term mental health conditions, history of self-harm, depression, anxiety and abuse of alcohol and drugs, and some of the statistics taken from your report are very interesting. In some cases, it's almost double the rights of the non-prison population. We also know alongside that there is quite a disparity on the provision of mental health and mental health nurses across the state, and again, there's some statistical data on that, and it ranges quite varied from one nurse per 53 inmates to one nurse per 177, depending on which prison you're held in, which is a postcode lottery, if you like. Of course, the sad outcome of that is that we have an unfortunately high rate of prison suicide, and many of those are remand prisoners and not even convicted in long-term sentences. I just wondered if you had anything notable that came out of your investigation to that, that the Scottish Prison Service should be taking note of and the Government should be addressing. I think that there's a lot in that. I'd have to say that we perhaps didn't look in that in as much detail as we might have liked, but I think that there is other evidence, particularly the Prison Mental Health Needs Assessment, which was published in October of 2022. I think that it's a nail on the head, but I think that that was a very credible report that talked about being consistent in arbitrary resource allocation, support directed to the acutely mental ill, leaving a large number of others without support, limited cross-agency partnership working, the system, and this is something that, when I was with the mental health commission, we did come across places too much emphasis on the person to engage, so they want you to say, I'm feeling suicidal, I'm feeling unwell, and there are also some reasons why you might not say that, including what might happen to you if you're put on suicide watch, and the assessment calls for a fundamental change in approach. There is an issue about small numbers of acutely unwell people who need to be in hospital or need to be out of a prison, certainly, but the wider issue is, as they say, that people in prison are far more likely than not to have a mental health need, so this is not a small subset of prison population, this is a large proportion of the prison population, and there are big gaps in evidence, particularly around things like neurodevelopmental disorder in young people, and areas of particular risk, as you say, like the remand population, so I think there's a fairly big cluster of issues there, and again the recommendations of that assessment are the same things, you know, focus on this group, multi-disciplinary working, try different ways of moving people through the system, and better ways to listen to people so that we understand when people are in distress and may need some kind of intervention, so I think absolutely that needs to be a priority. The mental health commission also did a review of the visits to prisons, and that tells a similar story. Thanks very much, Kate. I'm going to bring in Collette, Stevenson, followed by Pauline McNeill. Thanks. Good morning, Professor. I wanted to touch upon prisons as well, but also the sentencing aspect of it. In the report, it stated that there was very little use of community disposals, particularly with people with mental health conditions. Do you think that that's in relation to the forensic mental health system or the criminal justice more generally, and what do you feel needs to be done about that? Well, I think there are some, seem to be some quite complicated systemic issues, because in a way it's not the way we don't have the legal options, so there are a number of different community-based disposals which could be put in train for people with mental health needs who you offend, so that includes community payback orders with a condition of mental health treatment, compulsion orders, which could be in the community guardianship under the Outlawing Capacity Act, which might sometimes be relevant for offenders with learning disabilities particularly, but we can actually count the number of these orders. They're often in single figures in a year, so they're not used. There are a number of reasons why that might be. I mean, one is that sometimes I think there's a view that because we can't compel somebody to take mental health treatment, they're pointless. I mean, it's kind of toothless sanction. It was striking in the report of the joint inspectors into diversion from prosecution that they identified that sometimes having a mental health need or learning disability was a reason for being excluded from diversion, so there's this kind of sense that we don't have the options for them, so we're not going to use these powers. So, I guess the fundamental thing is we need to have a system which provides good options, which people could use, which develops good options. I mean, some of it may be that over the years, I think criminal justice social work and mental health social work have slightly diverged. You know, they're kind of almost two different sort of professional paths, and maybe we need to think about bringing them a bit closer together. But, you know, I think unless a sentencer, you know, a sheriff or a judge can see a practical option in front of them, I think a lot of sheriffs might well be happy to consider these kind of disposals, but they need somebody to say, this is something we could offer and we think this is a reasonable shot at working. So, it's really around the design and development of those bespoke alternatives for people who have these kinds of needs. And just on that, I had a conversation as well with Wendy Sinclair-Giddon, the inspector at prison, and one of the things that we were talking about was, you know, alternative disposals and electronic monitoring and taking that a step further. So, in terms of their annual down in England and Wales, we use a sobriety cuff, but this was tapped more into technology in terms of monitoring a person's sleep and electronic tag so that they would be in for a certain length of time, but also alerting them as well when they should go and speak to their social worker and whatnot as well. Have you came across anything on that or was there anything done on that? I'm certainly aware that there are apps that people can use around monitoring their own mental health. So, when people do have, perhaps, triggers that tell them that they're becoming unwell, I think that that is something that's got a lot of work being done on and a lot of research being done on it as a way of helping people maintain their own mental health and to know when to seek help, because obviously when you're becoming ill, that might be when you decide you're not going to seek help. So, I haven't heard of it in a criminal justice context. I think that's an interesting idea and maybe it's worth following up. I mean, I think for a lot of these things you obviously need to get the person to buy into the idea that this is something for them. It's not just part of a punitive disposal, but I think there could be opportunities. I mean, I think those apps are still, you know, in development. I don't know how many of them are fully kind of evidenced and worked through. So, but I think it's, there's certainly creative things that could be tried, I think, around how do we help people to manage their own mental health to stop them from getting into the place that might have got them into trouble before. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Pauline McNeill. Thank you. Good morning, Professor McKay. It's really excellent work you've been involved in, so thank you very much for that. It was really a follow-on from the convener and Jamie Greene, because I'm having difficulty visualising what this might look like. So, forgive me to return to the same subject. So, as Jamie Greene said, so we've heard from the police service, they're 24-7 and they have the responsibility to keep people safe. So, that's why they're called, they have a duty to come out. So, I'm wondering how that's really realistic, realistic, going to change. So, who then would take the police as a police in a different system? And where would they be taken to if it's not A&E? So, I'm just not familiar with the types, I mean, I've been in forensic units, familiar with that, I used to represent mental health nurses, I've a bit of a knowledge of that, but I'm just thinking maybe we don't have the places, maybe we shut down too many places when we did the big reforms in the early 90s. So, I'm trying to visualise what does this look like, what other, if it was mental health nurses who took it over, so would they need to change their working pattern then, and would they need new powers for restraint? Because it might be difficult circumstances, that's why you use the police, because they've got those powers, and clearly we want to avoid taking them to A&E, so anything you can help me with to visualise that would be useful. Well, I think in terms of replacing the police, I mean, I suspect there will always be a role for the police, and I think the police in certainly Police Scotland, when we spoke to them, accepted that in terms of the immediate crisis, the police and warrant officers have important powers, and public people know who the police are, and in fact, some of the evidence when I was with the commission was that people who had been in crisis spoke more positively about the police than they did about some of the other services, so it's not that the police don't have a role, it's that the police's role is the immediate response, and if necessary, I suppose, the getting hold of whether it's a GP or a nurse or whatever, somebody else who can conduct a medical assessment and then help them work out where a person should go. In some places, sometimes that may not be into some kind of special place, it may just be about how do we help this person calm down so they can, the immediate crisis can be managed and they can be linked into services. But I think in terms of the model of services, I think there are different models, there are, there already are, kind of crisis services where people can self refer and just say this is all too much, but I really don't want to go into a psychiatric hospital, I just want to go somewhere where I can be quiet and get my head straight for a while. There may be other places where, as you suggest, you might need some limited powers of detention or whatever when people are, but might look and feel a bit different from an acute mental health ward. I mean, I'm not really sketching this out in a good deal of detail because I guess I'm not probably not competent to do this, but what you're illustrating to me is I just don't see how things are going to change, to be honest with you, because if there's no one else to call, if you identify that someone's in distress or they, you know, are on the face of it, they've got acute mental health distress, in the circumstances where you would use the section 297, right, who else would you, how, who, who would you contact with? So surely then the only way this can change is if you're giving an alternative to one-on-one or 999, call someone else. Otherwise, it's always going to fall back into the police. I can't see how that could possibly change. But I think, I think, I see, the problem with the police is not answering the call, the problem with the police is then spending the rest of the shift following the person around if they can't get them into somewhere. So I think it's about having somewhere where the police can lock into health and social care services, which will pick up the issue and will support people, and that could be through the third sector. But I mean, it needs to be an integrated system rather than, I mean, the police as the, the fallback right through, you know, I mean, I think the evidence is that people, the average time they spend on a case like this is about seven and a half hours, or it is basically a shift that people are police officers are spending dealing with these crises. So, so I just, so the only way that can change then is if the police take the initial call and they hand over to someone else then. Yes. Well, I mean, that would, I mean, it wouldn't always be the police, but yeah, I think in a lot of cases if it could be the police take the initial call. Who would that be then? What service would that be to, do you think? You know, it would have to be supported either by the health service or by social work services, but it could be a third sector service. Do you think it's quite a radical change then to make? I don't know enough to know. Potentially it's quite a radical change, but I don't think it's completely unheard of. I mean, I think you look back in history, I think there have been services that are a bit like this, these kind of more informal crisis services, and they've tended to be disappear as services have had to focus in on the more mainstream specialised services. Can you feel optimistic, because from what I'm hearing, I am not that optimistic that things can change? Because what the evidence we've heard is that the police are the last responders for everything, including this. So for this to change, there has to be a structural change in service, otherwise we'll be back to... I don't see... Well, I think it's about, I suppose, you know, one of the arguments is we're spending a lot of money doing the wrong things, and so if you could spend some of that money doing the right things, you might say a change, but I agree with you that we'd need a structural change in the kind of services that are on offer, I think. Thank you very much. That's just brought us up to our 45 minutes, nice and neatly, so thank you very much indeed, Professor McHale, for attending today's meeting. I'm sure that members may have some follow-up questions, which we'll write out on to you, but thank you again, and we'll just have a very short suspension, thank you. Thank you very much, members. Our next agenda item is consideration of the timetable for the implementation of the various provisions in the Fireworks and Pyrotechnics Articles Scotland Act of 2022. As a committee will recall, we were the lead committee for the scrutiny of the bill, and the Scottish Government undertook to keep us updated on the implementation of its various provisions, and I refer members to paper 3. I just invite views or questions or comments from members on the update that has been provided. Jamie Greene. Thank you, convener. I thank the Minister for Community Safety for the update on Valentine's Day. It was a welcome gift, I have to say. I actually didn't spot this until the committee papers came out, but I did want to comment on the content of the letter, perhaps pose a few questions that we could ask the minister to expand us a lot in here. The first main paragraph around what appears to be the only bit of the bill that was passed that did come into force was the proxy purchase and emergency worker aggravation measures, which we passed. To be fair to the former minister, I am grateful to the Government for including our request. It would have been helpful if we perhaps had some data on whether that was a worthwhile exercise or not. Certainly, I have chucked in a few questions into the system, but perhaps the minister could make it easier for us and enlighten us if there were any offences around proxy purchase or attacks on emergency service workers. Now, at the time of Bon Far Knight tail end last year, we know that there were some high-profile incidents because we discussed them in the chamber and they were reported widely in the media. What is unclear, though, and I appreciate it, is that it is only a few months ago when these things take time to come through the justice system, but I would be really intrigued to know if any of the emergency worker aggravation measures actually will come into play in any of those cases. I guess that what we talked about a lot in the preparation of the report and as the passage of the bill was how many incidents were reported and the conversion rate into charges, prosecutions, convictions and what the sentence looked like. I would be interested to see a piece of work on that at some point this year. The second point was the next paragraph, where the Minister of State's, and I quote, the on-going unprecedented challenging financial context is impacting our ability to implement the Romanian measures of the bill. I just want to dig a little bit further. What are these on-going unprecedented challenging financial contexts? What specifically is the Minister talking about? If the answer to that is inflation, that is a bit too generic. If it is a freeze on that directorate's budget, if it is a reduction in the amount of money that is available, that really comes back to the financial memorandum that lots of us raised during the passage of the bill. As always is the case with those things, it seems to be underestimating perhaps the overall potential financial ramifications of the bill. It seems to me that perhaps that is actually coming to pass. Again, there may be valid defence in here but it does not say what it is. I would like some more information from the Minister exactly as to what are these challenges and why are they stretching the original anticipated timescales. The next point is around the issues that have been delayed and it is clear that quite a few things have been delayed now. The firework control zones apparently will commence this year but we were promised that we would see both guidance and a framework around that. I think that we will need that in quite a timely manner to interrogate the Government on those and to perhaps even speak to stakeholders. Some of us tried to put on the face of the bill that that should be part of a valid scrutiny. What I do not want to say is that those things are just getting chucked in as SSIs at the last minute where we have not had any time to properly scrutinise them because the firework control zones are quite a big part of it. I note the delay to the licensing system. That is not a huge surprise to me, I am sure. It is unclear what the delay is. Is that related to financial? Is it related to disagreements with local authorities? Is it technical issues or IT issues? Are there any concerns that have been raised by anyone or has it just taken longer than the Government thought? That is just a valid reason. The final issue that I wanted to raise is around the restricted days of supply and use. That was another controversial element of the bill that we talked about at great length. There were very mixed views on it and, of course, the effect that it had on retailers, both online and physical retailers. It just says here that it has been paused to future financial year. That sounds very much to me like it has been kicked into the long grass. It is a very polite way of saying that we are not doing it at the moment and I am not sure when we are going to do it. Perhaps the minister could provide a little bit more information about pause to future financial year. Future financial year could be any time of the century. Is there a bit of backtracking going on here? Are there some issues? Have there been any legal challenges? Some of us warned them, maybe. I hope that there is nothing untowards happening here that would cause issues for the Government. It is a helpful letter, but it raises more questions and answers. I am beginning by noting the irony that the minister responsible for trying to curtail fireworks is now putting on such an entertaining display as she sees it becoming First Minister. Turning to Eleanor Whitham's letter, there is a lot in here and it is really quite concerning. Remember that legislation was rushed. We felt collectively that there was not appropriate necessary time for all the scrutiny that was required. We were told that there was nothing to worry about. They would fill in the details later on. Here we are with a letter that fails, frankly, to do so. Jamie Greene has touched on some of this already, but going to the bullet points at the bottom of page 2, the minister talks about a slight delay to implementation of the licensing scheme, which is one of the central planks of legislation. My understanding is that this would have come in this year, but it will not be until next year at the earliest. That seems a bit open-ended. Even more vague is the final bullet point, which is around the restriction of days of supply and use. You will recall that it is related to specific cultural, religious events and so on. It says that it has been paused for a future financial year, but it does not say which even, as I guess, so it would be nice to know if it could give us some indication of which one they are working towards. Is it, like the previous point, 2024? Or is it going to be even further down the line, or perhaps, as Jamie suspects, that it might not happen at all? When you take all of these implementations, the fact that we warned about the confusion of what is being brought forward, the confusion will be even greater when the public are only going to get this stuff coming in piecemeal. The plan was to bring in the proxy purchasing in year 1 and the aggravation for emergency service workers and then bring in all the other stuff together in year 2, as in this year. That is now not happening. It was already confusing. It is going to become even more confusing. I think that the letter, if you read it, is all perfectly fine, and it is far from it. There are clearly big problems around delivery, as we warned. We really need to be drilling into as much detail as possible as to what the timescales are and why their lies are happening. I thank the minister for the letter as well. It is a bit of a mixed bag. We have heard a more critical view so far, but in terms of the first two bullet points, Russell Finlay was referring to the bullet points. I think that they are good and reassuring that some of the provisions will come in before the bonfire night, which is the season that has been targeted, and the pirateate possession offence. I think that that is positive. In terms of the last two points, I agree with colleagues that I have already spoken, it is a bit watery. Even in terms of the licensing system, which was key part of the legislation, and even saying that it will commence mid 2024 at the earliest, I would rather it was maybe where we are going to be working to mid 2024 for definite, albeit that there could be mitigating circumstances. Of course, in the final one, I just don't think that it's good enough to say that it could be in a future year that we need a wee bit more definitive. A mixed bag for me in terms of the letter given the work that this committee and all of us put into this legislation is good to see some of it coming forward. We hope that that will make a difference to our constituents, but there are areas that we need tightened up on to write back to the minister. I welcome the fact that the letter sets out quite clearly. I take it that my reading of the financial context seems to be about the implementation, but it would be good to get that clarified. I welcome the fact that fair control zones will commence. I suppose that the test for me is whether or not they are going to be used by local authorities, so that's what I'm interested in, and the offence. I really had concerns about the licensing system anyway, so I'm not concerned at all about the delay in that. We had raised concerns about the costs as well, and I wouldn't be happy if those powers were used without having some indication of the cost of the scheme. I'm actually quite supportive of the content of the letter. I think that it's an interesting lesson for people who observe the legislative process. You think that you've passed all the laws, but no, you haven't, because what matters is when do they draw the powers down for each section of the act through the statutory process. That's what the letter clearly sets out, so I thought of that in. Thank you very much indeed. Members, I probably concur with pretty much all of the comments that have been made. Jamie, your suggestion around looking perhaps at some data in relation to the provisions around emergency workers and proxy purchase provisions is a good suggestion, and I'd be happy to take that forward. I do think that it would be—this is a bit light touch—and it would be helpful to have more detail in particular around some of the key points that members have raised. Really across the committee we've got various levels of concern about pretty much all the key updates that were provided. I'm happy for us to write back to the minister seeking some data as Jamie outlined, but more detail on the key points that were outlined in the correspondence and a reassurance that every effort will be made to keep the timescales on track and minimise slippage, given the public interest in that issue in particular. Pauline, on that point about costs, that's a well-made and we'll incorporate that into our correspondence. Katie, you're in agreement with the suggestion around contact with the minister by way of a follow-up letter. We've just spent 20 minutes talking about a letter. If at the most of us sitting here, we probably could have resolved all those issues without the need for communication. If the minister feels the need, he should be very welcome to come and talk to us. It would save the need of the ping pong of letters back and forward, where people can hide behind niceties that don't mean anything, which is what you often get in these civil service drafted letters. There's no disrespect to them, but maybe we could just ask some direct questions of the minister and she's welcome to be accompanied by advisers if so need be, but we could probably settle this matter quite easily with an appearance from the minister, perhaps tied in some other issues. Thank you very much. That concludes our public item, so we'll now move into private session.