 Hello and welcome to the 16th meeting of the Criminal Justice Committee, and we are joined remotely by our convener, Audrey Nicholl, and Jamie Greene is running slightly late, we'll be with us soon. Our first item of business today is a roundtable evidence session on policing and mental health, and I refer members to papers 1 and 2. It's my pleasure to welcome to our meeting Dr Inga Haman of Edinburgh Napier University, Alan Staff of Apex Scotland, Martin Evans of the Scottish Police Authority, David Hamilton of the Scottish Police Federation, Assistant Chief Constable John Hawkins of Police Scotland, and Superintendent Marie McKinnis also of Police Scotland. Thank you all for providing the committee with written evidence, which we've had a chance to look at. If you would like to answer a specific question that comes up, just try and catch my eye or indeed that of the clerk here, Stephen Imre, and we'll do our best to bring you into discussion. We've got about 80 minutes in total for this evidence session, and if it's okay, I'll kick off with my own question, one of the benefits of convening, I suppose. The first question is for the ACC, Mr Hawkins. Can you tell us how many Police Scotland officers have lost their lives to suicide in recent years? I don't have that information with me, but I'd be happy to get that and to provide that to you and to the committee. The reason I ask is, a couple of years ago, I made inquiries to that effect, and at that point it didn't appear to be something that anyone was keeping record of. Furthermore, those who had died from suicide, none, were subject to fatal accident inquiries. Are you aware of that issue as well? No, but again, I would be happy to provide that for you. Moving on to the Federation, is that something that you might happen to know? I can tell you that there have been two attempts recently. We actually had evidence that was submitted by our written pack, which we actually kept out due to sensitivities of it, but it's a problem that seems to come in clusters. Certainly in recent years, I'm aware of at least, we've got a cluster between two and four, maybe in an almost yearly basis, which is perhaps indicative of the problem that we have. I was again aware of a particular cluster not so long ago. I was speaking to a former police officer who is a friend of two officers who took their own lives in quick succession, one doing so within a police station. He believes that the protracted nature of the complaints process that these officers may have been subject to could have been a contributory factor in their deaths, but without a fatal accident inquiry, we've no way of knowing. Is that something that you're aware of? I would refer to my previous answer. I'm more than happy to get information about suicide and the FAI rights for you in the committee. Crown officers aren't here to explain why they're choosing not to do FAIs. Is that something that you would support? I think it would perhaps depend on the circumstances. Sometimes these are entirely to do with personal reasons and it wouldn't be necessarily appropriate, but where there is a work element, I think we would welcome that. Again, not knowing the full details of all the cases, I'm aware of them and we are always alert to that issue that there could be a workplace element to this. We tend to have discussions with different commanders regarding that if there's anything that we've got concerns about. In fairness, Police Scotland is good on that engagement side of things. It's a loss to the whole family, the police family, and we do try and work things out. I don't think there's anything suggesting anything being hidden under the carpet, but I think perhaps, as with all these things, it's layers of stress that build up on people and sometimes it can be the straw that breaks the camel back, so there may be elements in there that are not immediately obvious. Before I move on, I want to ask Mr Evans whether the authority has any data or has conducted any form of investigation into the suicide of police officers? We've conducted no investigation. It has been raised at the board level by Merrick Cathie, who chairs our People Committee, expressing the concern about when it has happened and looking for more information. If we do hold it, I'll send it to the committee, but I'd also just give a note about what their inquiries were about the suicides that they were made aware of. Great, thank you very much. The next person looking to ask a question is Fulton McGregor. It's just a resupplementary on your line of question, convener, for probably for David Hamilton when he was talking about it, that it might be a personal or a work-related reason, but how do we make a judgement on that? Everybody's lives are complicated and it might be well interweined, for example. It might be work that leads to maybe substance abuse, for example, at home, but that might be the more precipitating factor in any sort of further crisis it might be. I'm just wondering how it would be that the police or anybody actually would identify, which was the more prevalent, if that makes sense? Yes, it makes entire sense. The honest answer is that I don't know, unless there was something that was a note, for example, left that specifically referenced something, then other than that, you're very much into that. Well, we don't know. All we can do is speak to friends and colleagues after us and give them that support, and if we censor something there. Again, the nature of that type of incident is that it often comes as a huge surprise to everybody. On one of the recent occasions, one of my colleagues had been speaking to the officer just hours before he took his life and was absolutely stunned because he'd made arrangements for the following week, so it was unexpected. I don't know how you would absolutely refer to the medical professionals as to how best to untangle that. I apologize, but it's a difficult question and a very sensitive area. I'll just take this opportunity, convener, to the instances that have been described already, to pass on my condonsies to all witnesses here who have obviously experienced loss of friends and colleagues in service. Audrey Nicholl may have a question for us online. Thanks very much, and good morning panel. I hope you can still see me. I've got a wee bit of a problem with the light in my room. What I'd like to pick up on is the legislative provision that we currently have in Scotland. I'll become firstly to Inga Haman on that. I'm very much welcomed your very comprehensive submission. One of the things that you picked up on was the issue of the difficult or the challenging legislative provision and legislative barriers that exist in Scotland. One of those at the moment appears to be the Mental Health Care and Treatment Act. Insofar as, when it comes to officers assessing an individual in terms of whether or not they might wish to take them to a place of safety, the legislation currently only allows them to take someone from a public place, and we know that lots of people are in their homes at the time. Secondly, the wording of the legislation is that, where police officers suspect someone has a mental disorder, we know that police officers are not trained, and it would be inappropriate for us to expect them to be able to assess that. Rather, the main issue that officers face at the moment is where individuals are in some distress. As a committee, I'm just interested in what you feel we should be thinking about in terms of making the legislative provision more appropriate and more of a fit for the growing numbers of scenarios where officers are encountering someone that is in poor mental health. I'll maybe come to Inga Haman first of all and maybe then bring in ECC John Hawkins on that. I welcome the opportunity to participate in this round table meeting. There are a number of elements within that question that point to the medicalisation of the legislation in the first place to say that it's dependent on disorder. We look not just at the Mental Health and Treatment Act but also at the Adult Support and Protection Act. It's dependent on where people are brought to on disorder. We understand that there's a huge number of people who are in mental health distress who do not have mental disorder nor should be diagnosed with that. Nor should we be putting a label on individuals to say that they are disordered. There's a gap in the legislation around the medicalisation of the terms within that. It's important at this point to acknowledge the reform of the Mental Health Act at the moment and that's being looked at very seriously. This is an area that would be really worth flagging up to our colleagues who are working on John Scott QC, Jill Stavart and Colin Mackay, who are working on the reform of the Mental Health Act. It's looking at these very specific issues around terms that are within the act that really restrict how we support people because of the distress as a result of social issues. Clearly, the support that they're going to get through that legislation is not going to be sufficient. The issues around, for police officers—I think that I understand that it's around the gap in 297 around private dwelling—is a significant issue. For the individual themselves, it's being quite restricted in that. The basis of the Mental Health Act is about being least restrictive. However, when somebody is held within a house, because there is another option for them, it makes it incredibly difficult for that individual. Their voice is quite missing within the legislation there. For police officers, it's a huge challenge because they're often left between a rock and a hard place because they can't remove somebody from their home forcibly. Then there's a question there around should somebody be changed in the legislation to be more restrictive so that police officers can remove somebody or not, but where does that leave police officers from a perspective of breaking the law? There's lots of complexities within that that need to be pulled apart. It's not just about, let's just give more powers around the legislation, but it's actually thinking about what is least restrictive for that individual. I think that that should come right back to the work that's happening in mental health reform and the police voice being part of that, because I'm not sure that it has extended the consultation from the forensic side for that to be discussed. Sorry, that was a very long-winded story there. I appreciate that. I think that that's really set the landscape out very well. I'll maybe bring in ACC John Hawkins just to ask if you would like to add anything to that. Thanks, Audrey. I think that it has covered it really well and specifically the point around the powers being provided in a public space is problematic in an instance where an event takes place in a private space, so that's pretty clear. There's a problem there, and I do think that would benefit from further consideration, but I think it also speaks to the broader point, which is, I think very often, it almost becomes inevitable that a criminal justice outcome is what ends up in these particular cases rather than a health outcome. So there are individual cases with individual difficulties that end up on a process, which I think far too often ends up with an individual being perhaps arrested because the situation deteriorates rather than having access to health provision. So I wouldn't want the broader point to be lost around what is a very obvious but specific challenge with section 297. Can I maybe, if I may, just come in with a very quick follow-up on that? Again, I'm happy to come back to Inga Haman and ACC Hawkins. We also know that, where officers use the provisions within section 297, they can take someone to a place of safety, and very often they're turned away for lots of different reasons that we know about, and very legitimate reasons as well. So they're essentially left-holding the baby. In your view, and I know that we are working on this, and there is progress across Scotland in terms of pathways, what should we be thinking about in terms of the optimum pathway in local areas, bearing in mind the challenges of remote and rural areas? I'll come back to Inga Haman if I may. One of the challenges there is that we try to fit people into this binary system. There are either criminal justice or their mental health system. As I was saying earlier, there are people that don't fit in either system, and neither should. We criminalise people because we can't fit them into the health system. People shouldn't be fortunate into the mental health system. The idea that it's just that somebody needs a mental health response, actually it's not necessarily the right thing. We know the harm that we do by putting people into hospital is that we can do more harm by putting people into psychiatric care than we could do. So I think part of the response that we need to think of is broadening that, maybe a third response, so that it's really focused around social care as well for individuals and not trying to fit people into those two systems. There's another area that people could get a much less restrictive response. An example could be that police officers might be able to take somebody not to a place of safety, but it could be a safe place rather than, from a legislative perspective, a safe place where somebody can be supported to manage the distress and not necessarily go into either system. I think it's about being quite bold and thinking about another option rather than, let's try and fix the legislation in both mental health and criminal justice. The appetite in Scotland moment, as you're saying, now there's been so many changes in the last little while, all the amazing work that's happening in Police Scotland around the mental health pathway is the unscheduled care pathway. There's so much work going on there and the appetite is really good to really think out the box and think beyond either policing or criminal justice. I think that David Hamilton would like to come in on this as well. Just to supplement the discussion, I agree with everything that's been said today, particularly on the private side of spaces. From a police officer's perspective, what the frustration that we get here is that they don't have the powers to deal with that and are then dependent upon a GP, for example, coming along and having to do that. It's what you do in that gap between so that there's delay waiting for a GP to get there to make that assessment. If they make that assessment, they still need to be taken somewhere. That's when we then go on to another journey of delay and frustration. That 297 section, which is in the public sphere, the difficulty that we have is that when we're taking people to that place of safety, we end up then queuing because our responsibility to that patient is right up until either there's been some kind of disposal determination made by the practitioner at that place of safety. That might take hours, as it often does, but sometimes these patients are in a distressed state that requires them to be handcuffed or restrained. That again is falling on the police officers taking that personal risk, trying to work at how best to look after somebody who hasn't been assessed, but they have to look after it. We're very limited in our capabilities as to what they can do. There have been evidence that we submitted in our annex, and incidentally this has been an unprecedented response from our membership who are so concerned about this issue. An example where somebody felt they had to get her out of her handcuffs because she'd been in too long, and then she was attacking them, and it ended up escalating into a further problem. In many ways, waiting for assessment is the other part of that section, which is a problem. It's how we can bring that forward. Police officers, of course, accept that they have a role in this, but it's that critical to bring safety and order to this, and then hand on to another agency who's better equipped and more qualified to deal with it. However, at the moment, it's stacking up teams of police officers with patients waiting to be assessed by an under-resourced function in the health society, and all that risk comes back on police officers. When they're doing that, they're not doing other parts of the job, which is putting further pressures on and so on. It comes through loud and clear in the 20 submissions. Mr Stafford, if you might have a view from a slightly different perspective about this particular issue. Yes, my perspective would go back to about 30 years when we were tackling the exactly the same issues and the same problems. It would appear to me that progress, if it's to be made, has to be on a multi-agency, multi-sectoral approach. The stresses that the police are under are as much about public expectation on them and about their own superior's expectation and that of other agencies, as they are about anything else. Our experience currently is that there are still huge gulfs between the different agencies involved, and there's a lot of blame going on. It's your job, you didn't do it, why didn't you do it? It's your job, no, we don't have the resources, so it has to be you and the sort of thing. That's not new and it's not unusual and there's no easy answers, but the solution that we would look to would be greater collaboration at a local level between the agencies and the formation of some form of crisis response team, if you like, if you want to take a team approach, but certainly one where all of the agencies who can be concerned in that have a joint agreement and are jointly taking ownership rather than sitting back and saying now it's yours. Thank you, and I think that Mr Evans also wanted to come in on this. Thank you very much, convener. The convener asked a question about additional powers, which is important that it's in Dr Heyman's paper, but I also want to add what has been implied and said by others that it's the services that are available to the officer, so an officer goes, and occasionally they don't have the coercive powers to actually undertake their responsibilities, and that's called out in the paper. I would point you to, in very good evidence from the Scottish Police Federation officer 20 in that, is saying, I do go, my frustration is not that I don't have the powers, my frustration is that there isn't the service to go to, but also recognises the improvements in service and calls out the mental health hubs and actually get a very good analysis about their weaknesses as well as their strengths. The two things I would put in here are, in terms of public policy, the very high assessment bar to actually get into a mental health service, and if you don't get into that service, what then happens? Because these people are remain vulnerable and they remain in high distress, but they can't get into a formal service, and that's consistently a case across the United Kingdom in reporting in this area. The second one is an intoxication strategy. You won't be assessed if you're intoxicated by drugs or alcohol, and that is often, as again, the police evidence shows, some of the most difficult cases in terms of dealing and restraining and supporting and safeguarding people who are vulnerable and distressed. So I would say, there are clearly, in English paper, show that a legislative gap at which is important, but the massive issue is about the services available to that officer. As they attend a distressed and vulnerable person, it is not that they need more powers to make them do something quite often, it's what they need is to use the officer's authority, and that's the important thing. That's why we have police officers, their authority, to direct a service to take them, and that doesn't happen as much as it should do. I think that the evidence from the more than 20 officers that David Hamilton submitted just reinforces that all the time, that frustration about caring and being human about their endeavour and actually not helping, and it comes back to your question rather than the beginning. That adds stress to an officer, there's significant stress, and that comes through C3 as well, the non-officers there, where they feel helpless to do something. So that's a vicious cycle. Thank you very much. I wonder if the superintendent McInnes, whether, from your perspective in dealing with custody cases and managing officers on a daily basis, can you quantify how that can impact on the loss of officers' hours to dealing with patients? We have over 100,000 custodies come through our doors each year. A high proportion of them have complex needs, so that is either mental health, substance addiction, alcohol, isolation, etc. Generally, it's a combination of all. We do have healthcare provision in place with partners, but that often requires a further assessment of sight when it's in relation to mental health. That is an abstraction on our time, but the important bit is that people in our care get the help that they need. It isn't helpful that it takes so long for them to get that to get that referral, to get that care. Sitting in a custody place is not the right place for someone with a mental health crisis. Thank you very much. I would like to move on to Jamie Greene now. Thank you and I apologise for my tardy arrival. Traffic has been unkind to me this morning. I read the submissions from the officers last night and I was quite struck by, well, it's very sad actually, quite distressed by some of the anecdotes that they shared, the abuse that they've had to put up with, the effect that it's having on their own mental health, which I know will come on to you, but one of the themes that came out at me, which I'm quite keen to explore, is that we can have a legislative conversation about more powers that are needed, but what is abundantly clear is that the police are being used more and more often as the first line, first point of contact in the absence of the availability of other services, other partners, whether that's health, social care, local authority, and whether that's simply just driving someone to the hospital and then spending hours and hours on site and situ trying to restrain or look after someone, or to dealing with a health emergency in a private environment for which they have very limited powers to intervene from a medical point of view. I want to explore that further, so putting the legislative issue aside, what more short to medium term interventions could Government take to alleviate that immediate burden, which is resulting in so many officers becoming, effectively, mental health workers rather than police officers tackling crime, and I'll open that up to anyone. If I could kick off, I mean, I think it's worthy of just stressing the prevalence of mental health and distressing society. I think that's an important starting point in this, so we reflect on 3.2 million calls a year coming into policing. I call every nine seconds. Less than 20% result in a crime being recorded now, so overwhelmingly the calls for service on policing are in the vulnerability space, including mental health, so that's changed hugely over my service, kind of, that policing wasn't like that once upon a time. Policing was around crime and criminality much more clearly, but I don't think policing is alone in that societal change. I think that change affects all parts of public service, all parts of public service are wrestling with the same prevailing problem, the same kind of people are popping up as victims of service users as accused. I genuinely think the first point is to have a joined up discussion about the system rather than dealing with it in silos, so we need to think about this, not just in terms of the demand that comes onto policing, because, of course, 7 hours, 20 minutes to deal with a mental health call is the average. That has a huge impact on policing and on our ability to do other things, but actually what about the citizen at the centre of that moment who's found themselves edging towards and ended up in crisis? So I think the conversation has to be a multi agency, a joined up one, it has to be more around prevention and early intervention, and while it is really great to come and to have this discussion in a criminal justice setting, my sense is it needs to be a much broader discussion. I think that's an important point just to make at the outset. Just before others come in, I think it was your evidence paper that you said that part of the problem is that you're struggling to quantify the demand on police for delivering services which you probably shouldn't be delivering, but you're happy to deliver it as a first point of call. That's down to issues with recording systems, IT systems and the interpretation of what an incident is actually about. What has been done to improve that? So there's an awful lot of work being done in policing through our demand and analysis unit, but I think it's important again to ask the question about what's been done on a systemic level to understand an individual citizen's journey through services. So almost continuing to build more sophisticated single agency data sources or analysis techniques is actually arguably missing the point. Thank you for that question and it is something which you'd imagine we've given a lot of thought to as to what are those short to medium term solutions in. If we look at it from the police officer's perspective, the two kind of stops in the current system, the problems in the system just now relate around, first of all, what we talked about in the 297, which is about the ability not to go into a deal with somebody in a private dwelling. So, you know, if somebody's out in the street, we can deal with it. They go into their house, we can't. And there's a kind of illogic about that, albeit the principle of a home being somebody's castle is understood, but I think given the point that each of these calls, that may be something that we wish to review again. And the second thing is about the handover of people at their receipt at a mental health hub. Now, if there was some kind of facility whereby mental health professionals, whether it be nursing staff or whoever, are able to look after people at the hub on receipt, freeing up officers to then go and do policing things. And if necessary, coming back and supporting the staff there, that to me seems one of these things that would make a huge difference in the demand. And it would take a 7-hour 20 call right down to probably a couple of hours at the most on that. And that would change the system. And, of course, somebody's got to pick up that space. But from a patient's perspective, what you would also be getting is better quality professional nursing care and medical care, as opposed to police officers sitting with Ian Hancoffs. If I may, I mean, I read some of the testimonies that mental health hubs, I guess, are pretty few and far between across the land. And that most people will be taken to accident emergency or a hospital in the first instance, if there's harm involved. But I read stories, for example, of nurses asking police to restrain people so they can medically intervene, et cetera. I guess what's your view on the role of the police in that environment versus the medical professional whose job it is to administer medication, whichever means possible, at which point have you been asked to be a security guard, to physically strain someone in an environment where they are a danger to themselves or, indeed, officers and others, reading some of the examples that have been assaulted and so on. Where do you feel that line has been crossed? I think the difficulty is that there's a spectrum here we're talking about. So it's presenting in different ways. So whilst we will get high ends of violence aspects, those are the ones that we can often, just because it's the only tool we've got, look at the criminal justice outcomes, and that's not where we want to be. Because at the heart of hearts, we're thinking, this isn't, but it's the only tool we've got. So police officers using that as a tool says what's the best outcome to get here for this individual and for other individuals who are affected by it. And we just hit these blockers at time and time again. Our, I suppose, in many ways, I describe policing like brokering, where you've got to try and deal with a problem, a chaotic problem, bring some order to and move that on, because we don't have the capability or capacity to have that longer term investment with a lot of these issues and a lot of these people. So, yeah, that's, I think it's, that medium to short term thing, it's just about looking about, that would help the police side of things, would be to get rid of these two pinch points, and that is waiting for medical intervention in a private space and being able to release officers at a suitable assessment centre by having the medical profession taken more at that point. Thank you. I think that Mr Evans was keen to come in on this. Is to make the points which I've been learning about over the time I've been on the police authority, especially my closer involvement with CAMHM and the C3. And it's this, we quite often talk about the demand coming into the calls for service once every nine seconds as ACC Hawkins. I think that ability for vulnerable people, all of us to call on the police is a hard won achievement, not available in every society available across the United Kingdom. And it's a precious, a precious right that we have to call in distress on a police officer or warranted officer. And the point is not to stop those coming in. A point is, as the evidence is, when a warranted officer with powers is there, we expect them to be able to do some direction about helping that individual, put them somewhere, use their authority to place them, and that's where there are lacks. An important thing to say, that isn't a universal lack, it's, throughout the papers, it sometimes is outstanding in some areas of Scotland and sometimes it's very poor, and it's a frustration you can't replicate the excellent. The second point is, 101 started off, and it surprised me as a joint endeavour with local government. It's now taken over entirely by police service. So we need to look at a person-centred approach. A Christie commission often we talk about prevention, but the first bullet point was a person-centred public services. A person-centred public service wouldn't separate out the service you're going to receive. It's say, I'm in distress, who's behind the telephone and how can you apply? And the best responses are multi-agency, I think Alan said this, and interdisciplinary. So we've got to look at the engine room of 101 in here in order to direct people. And the last one is about cost. I actually think there's very good cost information. We're going to get new information from the board on cost of police officer time, which is important, and the actual financial cost. But the real issue, the opportunity cost here, is as you get to that lack of handover that David was talking about, as you extend the time up to an average of eight hours per case, eight hours per two officers, I think per case of mental health responding, that is an enormous opportunity cost. And actually the harms in our society where we need a warranted officer to be there are getting pushed down the agenda chain as officers are stepping into this area of actually having to do very little, but hold hands in the best possible way through a distressed situation to their immense frustration that comes through the evidence, and to their mental health detriment of officers too, is a feeling of helplessness, but also irritation with the service that are called on to do something which, to be frank, that's not what they're trained to do and it's not what we pay them to do and it's an expensive way to do that. I can just say the handover that David talked about, I think we should be talking far more about civil society stepping into that space. And if you look around Scotland, some do, there are some fantastic local schemes, community schemes in that area and their evidence in the paper, but it's not universal. Thank you very much. I think that Grona has a supplementary question on that. Thank you, convener. It's actually, it's following what ACC Hawkins had said about the changing nature of policing over the years and I really wanted to probably direct it to David Hamilton in terms of has the training for police officers kept up with the massive changes that have happened over the years. Do you feel the training is adequate in terms of what they should expect, you know, how to recognise people in mental health difficulties and on the other side of the coin how it might affect them and their mental health? Do you feel that that's adequate? I don't think it's adequate. It has been training but it tends to be remote training which we know from all our survey work is loathed by officers and in something as important as this, I think that we need to be having some kind of more interactive type of training so that there has been some. Some of it has actually been quite useful, the feedback that we've had from officers, but ultimately it's how far do you want to train them and to do what is a kind of capsule. We've got distress brief interventions and so on and which are kind of perhaps more lower level side of things and that's been a good addition to where we are but fundamentally the problem which is causing the big issues are more severe and acute issues which we don't have the training for in truth and sometimes these are returning calls, you know, these are people who we are dealing with on a regular basis and sometimes their children as again one of the officers talked about in the evidence pack about the child who is trying to stab her mother and it's heartbreaking stuff and it's how do you train an officer to deal with that. Yeah exactly and just to go back on police officers mental health themselves I mean do you feel there's enough support within the police to deal with you know for officers who are finding it hard to deal with encountering situations like that or really difficult situations? I don't I think the problem sits in the fact that the services response to wellbeing has been very much reactive to it and what we need to get is to stop the problems happening in the first place so we're constantly putting plaster on to try and stop a bleed but I should stop the bleed first of all and that requires again the challenges which are coming through from from our evidence from our surveys and police scotan surveys is people are burning out because they are so busy with things not least mental health calls but they're just not getting a chance to get away from work it's constant constant and getting to that these critical stress levels that that people are beginning to burn out on and that's the that's what this all the data tells us that police officers are burning hot just now and are beginning to fail on this and that's that's something that no matter what you do in terms of response you still need to have that what you want to stop happening in the first place before you try and fix it okay thanks thanks very much thank you thank you very much I was moving on to Pauline McNeill and I should have said at the outset I failed to do so just to try and keep the questions and answers as brief as possible a lot a lot to get through thank you thank you thank you I have two questions one is I want to explore what I've just heard about what are the answers to police officers being the first responders but effectively they're asked last resort and secondly I want to talk about the resource impact can i begin by saying the testimony that the federation have supplied to the committee is very useful but really difficult to read I have to say because it amplifies what perhaps we've always known which is the only service that cannot walk away is a police service and I for one as a politician do not think this is recognised enough and I think that however I've arrived at this round table I think it's crucially important what's concerning me so if I start by saying well on section 297 what I don't understand is and Professor Inga's you know in your submission even where there's no self-harm or no offence committed why are the police even being involved question mark what does it to me speaks I can understand where there's harm involved in the last police officers when you step in and so on and we've heard from David Hamilton about the long wait times to get it just seems like every other service can say oh we can't take you or but the police cannot and it's so to me it's so fundamental to resolve it and so so ACC Hawkins you're suggesting that well a multi agency discussion seems likely and then we've heard that 101 services have always become exclusively to be operated by the police so I suppose my question is is this going to lead anywhere because if we have a multi agency the way I see it from what I've heard what's going to happen is unless we make specific provision for the police not to always be the position of last resort for example I mean I don't know enough about mental health services to know what duties need to be imposed on mental health services in the same way that police why should mental health services be able to walk away from a person at risk where the police cannot so I suppose my question is maybe start with you you see the Hawkins do you not feel that even if there's this discussion the police are still going to be left as the last resort and we'll get no further forward well I certainly hope not and I suppose there is a role there for parliamentarians such as yourself to help us kind of in that particular scenario we find ourselves in the truth is there are a number of of examples of really good collaborative work and I think the mental health pathway which we've worked hard with the ambulance service and the NHS 24 gives gives a sign towards what is possible so that's where there is training we've now got mental health nurses in our control centres able to help us to refer calls into a health staff hub less than 10 percent of the calls that go in end up with a subsequent emergency response so so that kind of many of the provisions and custody of are very very helpful too but but genuinely I think that only happens when there is a meeting of minds and the stars align and and that collaboration is supported as it's funded it's prioritised it takes place and I do genuinely think that single agency discussions are are missing the point there's enough enough examples now of the kind of initiative and response that that is working out there they need to be prioritised in my view thank you I will come back to you Dave Hamilton just want to understand maybe I don't know if it's for you to answer professor but the where you senior submission if no offence has been committed and there is not at immediate risk of life place may not legally remove them from their home for assessment or safeguarding with place of safety um I'm wondering why the police are involved at all then in a case like that I think you know people will call on police if you're in distress you won't let the stress on that pain to stop now the agility of health services to you know or to come you know we were speaking about a GP their time constraints are there's constraints there for them as well somebody say it should be a police officer that necessarily attends but for a lot of people police officers come with that authority to contain and help them manage their distress in a in a way that probably other people can't so there's a reason why there's also you know I mean police bring you know bring that authority and they will come quickly and so there's almost a revolving door that'll happen there because they will come quickly then people will use those services because of their agility to be there so it's not necessarily a last resort everything point make is in a and I'm I keep harping back to that but it actually might not be a mental health related issue so we keep asking you know saying let's take people to emergency health services to me actually rightly so saying well look this is not a mental health problem you know it might be to do their distress might be because of unemployment it might be because they're intoxicated it might be for lots of different reasons but not because of mental health but we do not make sense then for another service to pick that up okay yeah but at the moment we don't really have that I just want to tell you that that is the obvious I think one of the other things that's worth considering as well is that there are opportunities with technology now to do more remote assessment we do not need to necessarily take somebody to A&E which is incredibly undignified and you know I'd be distressed as well if I was sitting between two police officers in an emergency department my distress is going to escalate but can we use smarter ways of doing that so using technology to do a remote assessment of that's what's needed and there's loads of work happening within Police Scotland around development technology but there's also the person's voice is missing in this the whole you know a lot of we're not really hearing that we're speaking about somebody being a patient or whatever they're human beings and we've lost the the humanness of this and what individuals need and that I think we've spoke earlier about with the individualised personalised responses actually is there a way that we can use our information sharing between services which were really very poor at sharing information about what's happening but have a person's voice in that as well so services are actually talking to each other and and untie in some of the conversations so that person could maybe have an advanced statement of what they need at you know if they've called on the place what they need in such circumstances when their distress is unmanjable and I think actually the system in how we're working within this push and pull systems we're actually just retraumatising people we shouldn't really be surprised that they keep phone in the place and they keep coming back shouldn't be surprised because we actually retraumatise people simply because of the system and I wanted to ask about the resource implications put this to you David Hamilton I mean the Serona MacArthur already asked about you know the distress to officers and so I just wanted to quote from one of the statements I've seen my hands shaking on my way into some night shift knowing I may only have one or two cars available it's just the added stress of increased call volume and low staffing levels is shocking I mean further down we've got other officers saying that they can't even get their leave so that's obviously impacting on on on the service as well and as as we know well the suggestion is that if we lose a lot of police officers under the McLeod judgment then we're going to be left with a lot of police officers with far less experience I just want this when they have a huge impact I would have thought on the mental health of police officers being able to deal when we're talking about dealing with other individuals who are experiencing mental health so I suppose my question is the resource must be a big issue impacting on the police service mental health it is critical it is and we have been saying this for a long time and you know people have looked at it and I mean I think if I may just say on the on the issue of of partnership working I think we're beginning to lose faith in this as a concept because when times get tough people retreat to their base so we have we'll run pilots with different agencies and then they kind of dissipate quietly into into nothing and there's no sustainability along term aspect to that because they haven't retreats back to it this parliament itself had a joint health and control justice a forum which where the committees are coming together I have no idea what that ever achieved if anything and I think this is a problem as we can go down talking about this thing we should be doing more of these partnership works but never actually changes anything and what we're seeing today is exactly the same issues that I was dealing with 20 years ago as a constable working in Tayside nothing has changed these are the same problems slightly different legislation but it's the same issues but the problem is the demand has skyrocketed and that's where we're really feeling the pinch here so we have that's the bit that we need to to really get on top of is of the demand piece because it's just coming in more and more and when you look at so we've got heat maps that tell us when the mental health incidents are happening and you're looking at that and funnily enough friday four o'clock when everybody else finishes for the week it's hand over to the police and it's and we suddenly get hit with a whole lot of incidents we get hit with a whole lot of mental health related missing persons and often those are from social work agencies from from homes and so on but they've been dealing with it but because they're not 24-7 well that's us we're back on monday so let's phone the police and hand it over now as long as that type of behaviour persists we are absolutely hammered on it because part of our statutory responsibility is well-being you know in in you know in society now i have my own issues with that because that could be we should be tell me we should be tell people not to smoke because it's bad for them you know what how do you what is the limit within that and it's actually something that Sir Michael Barber addressed in his recent review of England at Wales policing where he said that police officers should be or policing should have a locus where they have powers to do so and not beyond that and actually i think there's a lot of sense in that because it constrains an otherwise insatiable demand so your question as to why are we getting involved in some of these cases is a good one but the but the answer to it is because it's what comes into policing principles and what's legislated in the act but there's no control on that so people will know that we have to step in and and in truth policing as it is we want to help and we will not walk away and see people left because we also know that we are the system of the service of last resort the problem is that's been taken advantage of and that what we need in order to function that way is some kind of supportive mechanism that prevents us getting everything dumped on we need a a filter that stops that all coming down to the officers and it's going all the way down and it's these officers who you're reading about who haven't picked up the pieces and and deal with that and the no consequences for resourcing is that there are fewer and fewer officers on the street because we're dealing with that and frankly it's about demand for us in terms we need to get on top of that because we've taken on so many new functions without new resources and we're losing resources on top of the ones that so even if we could have more resources we can't recruit them fast enough at the moment thank you very much I agree with an awful lot of what's been said there and the particular instance that Pauline was talking about we would refer to that as a concern for call a call non-criminal call where concerns been raised about a member of the public so over the last five years we've had a 60 percent increase in adult concern calls and a 36 percent increase in child concern calls so it's that non-criminal growing demand on service and and I really just wanted to associate myself with Inga's point about these are human beings these are fellow citizens that are getting the wrong response in their moment of need and I do I do think what well our discussion around demand and displacement is entirely right to my mind that's the that's the central issue we need to challenge yourself with how we can collectively provide a more appropriate level of service to individuals in their moment of need thank you very much I know we need to move on but I think what you said they're really chyned in terms of talking about this for 20 years we know that there's a solution and these pilot schemes lead to nothing I don't know whether it's on pleased to be a bit more forthright in terms of their responsibilities or whether it's on government is that something you could touch on just quickly so I'm not sure I fully agree with David on on that point I mean certainly pilots have come and gone I think the mental health pathway which I've referred to already has real potential for the future that this collaboration between ourselves the ambulance house and NHS 24 so that has received government funding that's allowed us through COVID to accelerate that I would like to see more of the same though I think that's in a sense given us a signpost around the kind of initiative so more of the same okay and the fault and I believe you've got a question yeah thanks convener that is as broadly following up from the discussion we've already had and I'd like to sort of reflect myself on what David Hamilton said because previously before becoming an MSP I was a social worker on criminal justice and a child protection should probably just declare an interest because it's on my register of interest that you know when that has always been the case you know when I'm thinking here think you know I'm thinking about it and you like now because I'm seeing it from a different perspective but you know we were always told you know that the police is the last resort and you know you use the police quite frequently frequently I would say and you would say to you know this is a police matter and I wonder actually going back to some of the points that we heard there from Mr Evans whether that you know it's about other agencies having a more power and more confidence in taking things as well and that's because that's not necessarily maybe social workers or health workers faults if they think that something's a police matter and I think I was also what chime with me was the you know the thing again that Mr Evans said when he said you know that we're a society that can call on the police and that is something we definitely don't want to lose as well so that is quite you know a difficult balance to find but I guess what we're hearing today is we've heard the words burn out we've heard about the pressures that the police officers are clearly under and we'll all know police officers in our own lives I've got friends as well as constituents and I am hearing from them that you know that they are feeling still love their jobs the ones I've spoken to but they are feeling pressure more than ever and I'm also hearing that across a range of services so I wonder if they maybe for yourself as you see Hawkins if there's any analysis being done of what the main contributing pressures are leading to this feeling of burnout as it's been described I mean we've heard a lot about the dealing with mental health and more complex issues where does Covid come into where do resources come into is there been any overall analysis so there has been analysis yes there's analysis of the particular condition or challenges when someone is absent kind of it tends to be described by if you like the medical condition though anxiety depression kind of alcohol abuse rather than it's back to an earlier point what's actually behind that and caused that is it financial is it a family issue is it is a work related issue we don't have that level of analysis but we can break down and do look at the if you like the medical descriptor as I say the depression the insomnia the debility bipolar we have analysis at that level but but not that wider level it's similar to your question around the cause of suicide what's the actual driver no we don't does the analysis have a point or indicate as if you sort of made any as a force made any conclusions on that analysis even though it's maybe not as detailed as as you said there is we know anxiety is the number one cause of absence through a psychological disorder followed by depression and then a number of other factors postnatal depression post traumatic stress schizophrenia a range of of psychological disorders and have you it is a has there been an increasing in there have you noticed a market increasing name over if you did the thing yes there is there's an increase in in terms of working time lost due to psychological disorder working days lost in 2021 2022 was was 50,000 just over 50,000 working days lost which which is about 1.6% of total working time lost so so we do analyse the day it's it's a it's a big figure and and we seek to address that through the arrange of support measures we have in place um whether that's financial support support and advice around any number of contributory background kind of conditions that might be behind those disorders yeah i'm sorry to keep pressing you on this because i know that it is a very difficult and sensitive area and appreciate the responses you're given but in terms of so we're getting a clear indication and thank you for that the anxiety is in depression are increased are you going back and asking those officers who are maybe off with anxiety depression when the time's right of course i'm not expecting it when they're when they're obviously suffering if they can give any indication if there's any work related pressures that they felt led to and then try and pull that together is that something so that that kind of thing does i'm there's obviously patient confidentiality and medical support to people in their moment of need but but we do seek to try and understand any any work related matters we've another process called trim which is the the response provided to officers who've dealt with a particularly traumatic incident kind of where we have a provision an intervention that takes place that seeks to try and help individuals process and and and if at all possible minimize the impact and that's subject to ongoing review and refinement so there's a number of mechanisms and we certainly do seek to to learn and to improve as we go yes and i suppose i was nearly finished convener and then the last answer's given me another question because that's i think a really good point as well because i imagine that you and your officers are dealing with a really what the rest of us would consider really traumatic experiences regularly has there been an increase in those those experiences that you know really traumatic ones i think because i've obviously heard about the increase in the mental health of the members of the public contacting i think we're going to hear later about some quite disturbing increases in issues affecting children is that something that is on the increase certainly those trim as we call it the trauma risk management intervention we saw a 32% increase in 21 22 compared to the year before so now again in part i would hope that is growing awareness and willingness to refer and to use but undoubtedly that speaks to an actual increase as well so we are seeing an increase in that sort of high end trauma support being provided i think plenty of issues there for the both the committee and the government to consider i think martin there was a lead coming on this but we've not got a lot of time so we can keep our hands very brief it's not the evidence question in the evidence comes from Durham University is seven thousand police officers in scotland interviewed about what what they how they felt they were and the asset based the positive view i take on this is police officers were clearly resilient committed in pride in their job and we should celebrate that because that's a great now the two strands that came out of issues were how wearing the futility of some of their job was which is what we're discussing now you go there you you respond to vulnerability and your hands are tied in that there's nothing you can direct somebody to happen so you're with them and that frustration and the second one is trauma a smaller number of people but trauma traumatising police is quite different it's actually quite similar in forensic services you are traumatised by an instance and you're retraumatised by having to relive it investigate it and repeat it in court so that's very unusual to have that kind of retraumatisation so this is a simplification it's the futility of not having the services available and you're left with the with the vulnerable person and then there's a traumatisation in terms of the solutions the evidence based solutions are in it's before my people committee on the first of June the organisational implementation plan 20 ambitions champions identified milestones for improvement and we're always going to be interested this is going to be a continual improvement process of how do we support staff who have as I say that asset to us resilient pride in their job committed to support them through the stresses through futility and the trauma through the very unusual job they have to engage with hugely unpleasant scenes and difficulties so we'll wait to see how that happens but I'm very pleased with the milestones are in there and the measures are in there and the Federation and other other staff associations will be at that meeting there I have been sure they're invited to the people committee they are able to be there as well so I'm very pleased with that talking of the Federation I think David Hamilton wants to come in on that also. Thank you David. I think one of the one of the challenges that the your voices survey had is it didn't go into the times of granularity which I think Mr McGregor was looking for in terms of the causes and so on. The Scottish Police Federation did however do a survey just before it unfortunately it's not I wouldn't say it's exactly been taken on fully by Police Scotland in terms of its outcomes but in that we are seeing 45% of officers experiencing higher moderate levels of burnout and a third are going saying that they're going to work mentally unwell. You know these are pretty devastating you know in terms of what we have as an organisation but when we did further analysis as to what it was first of all one of the things that came forward was that whilst we expected the pressures to be on our female officers particularly with families who were trying to juggle that through a time of Covid and so on actually it was the male officers the single males who were in the worst condition and our researchers from from Carleton University in Canada they they put this through clinical measurements and I've come up with some conclusions from that and we think that the the big change here is about post and role and the difference here is that it's young men who are more likely to be in the front line for a longer period of time women tend to go into back office roles and support functions in proportionally more and that seems to be skewing it so this is a front line problem that we have in mental health. When we go further into the qualitative data within that the key messages come out are that insufficient staff the inability to say no either by choice or by by requirement the public expectation aspect and also this the volume of work and it's it is burning out in terms of the the type of work which they are doing and not getting a chance to get away and to get that breather is everybody is talking about their leave being interrupted their rest is being interrupted the court system and it just compounds and compounds and compounds to the point that we're getting to a difficult position with our workforce in terms of their wellbeing so factors that's very much we've got that data and we would be happy to facilitate any input from Professor Duxbury at Carleton if the committee would want that. Thank you very much and Collette Stevenson would like to ask some questions. Obviously offending and mental health go hand in hand and it is pretty fair to see that many offenders will be suffering from a varying degree of mental health at the point of when they're offending. What approach are the police taking in the partner agencies as well when it's obvious that mental health is a huge contributory factor to offending behaviour and one of the things as well I would like to explore further is so at the point of when that they are charged and obviously the police are writing up their reports do they specifically put in place that there was a use able to do that use able to put that down so at the point when it gets to court that there's notes on that person's file that there has been some you know you know area of mental health that that person is actually you know distributing. I don't mind. Sorry. If that's a black and sorry maybe Mari could come in with a bit more the detail but I mean you're quite right 40% of those people who come into custody self-declars haven't had mental health at some point when you add on additional complex needs you're getting up to around 60% so a very high proportion of people who come into police custody have mental health issues that's a fact now typically they've been arrested because there's been a situation whereby broader public safety concerns had to be addressed and that was deemed by the officers as the most appropriate way to deal with that to diffuse the situation. So and then we have a number of of various approaches training support for officers assessments that are done in custody but but Mari I don't know if you would mind giving a bit more detail with your with your forbearance deputy convener maybe Mari could give you a wee bit more around that. If there is symptoms or they're recognising that there's a mental health issue first and foremost it's getting that care for them because we will have that initial on-site assessment for the healthcare practitioner and then potentially what I referenced earlier with the secondary off-site potentially going to the hospital out of that we will get an assessment of whether or not that person is fit to be detained or needs to be elsewhere and that doesn't necessarily mean that they're fit to be interviewed but that is obviously not the consideration of the care that they are getting when they're in custody. Once they go to court whether or not that is referenced in the police report depends probably on the scale of it and whether when they go to court what that what the follow-up is what happens then to that individual's mental health we don't know because it's a very purposeful mental health assessment that we have carried out purely for when they are in our care. Can I just come back on that? They're in custody obviously and you've touched upon the the DBI, the stress brief intervention. Is that awarded to the people that are being held in custody so like third sector organisations coming in during that period when they're in custody at the level 2 aspect as well? It depends where you are depends what then the third sector provision varies right across Scotland so it depends what referral options are there and whether or not they actually come on-site it doesn't always happen on-site quite often that happens after they've been to court or once they're out of custody but we can put that referral in. I quickly just want to ask a wee bit more about the pilot schemes that you've touched upon the DBI and also the other pathways mental health pathways. It was really just to see how effective are they at the moment and lessons learned in terms of what could be doing better so for instance should there be a dedicated line notwithstanding the NHS, notwithstanding the police, notwithstanding the ambulance as a dedicated emergency service line would you see that being effective for mental health responders? I'm going to ask John. No happy to take so the mental health pathway I can speak to so that at present is for non-emergency calls so remember the public can dial 111 and go direct into NHS 24 and seek that resolution. Really really impressive provision of a clinically designed model by health colleagues that does navigate the caller towards a lot of self-help preventative kind of intervention so my sense is that emergency stuff is probably dealt with pretty well treble nine blue lights whether it's police or ambulance I think if we could collectively push that non-emergency lower level kind of which is by far the biggest volume of mental health related matters if we could push that in terms of our focus or provision I think that would have a huge a huge impact and so it's we recently in the last two or three months went into the second phase of that where we've brought community psychiatric nurses into our control centre and that's encouraging calls to be transferred because we have a sort of an organisational culture where many police officers would rather go and just check because that's in our DNA but actually we're trying to encourage that transfer into health for the lower level matters because we think that's where the best resolution so that will be subject to detailed evaluation when the pilot's finished which will maybe give you more of an insight into how well that's working or what we need to do next that's all planned and in place that evaluation okay when is the pilot actually being it's running now it will the evaluation the second phase will finish in about four months we've had to just this week re-assess our plans because of struggles to recruit mental health nurses partly because of of covid partly because of demand on that particular skill set it's easier said than done actually recruiting so my sense is that will continue for about four months and then there'll be an evaluation process okay thank you thank you we've got four and a half minutes left so jamie over to you i mean can i just ask a basic question is it time for fundamental reform of how people access emergency services and by that picking up your point around 101 versus 999 is it not the case and having gone through the experience of calling both numbers in the last month and had vastly different experiences the 9991 being in a medical emergency where the police turned up because there were no ambulance and the 101 being a police situation where an ambulance turned up that wasn't needed so it's utterly bonkers situation is there is it time for fundamental reform of that you know could we actually have a proper tri eyes system which deals with non-urgent access to all emergency services and public services where it is properly tri eyes to filtered out to the appropriate public service which is a 24 seven service that therefore doesn't fall back on the police and if so who would need to lead that lead the charge for that which ministering government do we need to tell lobby for it and who's and which fund would you think it should come from because that's obviously the most important question I you're smiling at me so I'm going to point at you first so minutes night answer that so well in short I think yes I think kind of we've and we've got an opportunity in Scotland with the creation of national services which are increasingly mature increasingly willing and keen to work together I think what needs to be deconstructed is some of the organisational and departmental boundaries some of our own self-imposed restrictions on how we describe and view these kind of issues because I do I do sense in it country the size of Scotland we should be having the conversation around travel nine one oh one one one one one that puts the the citizen at the heart and works at how best to provide support in the moment of need okay if you both would like to respond very very briefly so it's just in terms of the question about vulnerability to mention a strategic framework that police Scotland of those last year very impressively at forge with public health Scotland I think that is a major change it will create a public health approach to offending and to criminality and non-criminality it's early days yet but it's an indicator or despite what David says of the step changes that are happening in relationships often because of a single police authority the second one is a point about pilots made very well in the apps in years association police truth superintendents pilots take a resource human and financial resource and they're not often able to be continued and so pilot have learning refinement and replication I think we often fail in the refinement and replication side of this I'll be very worried at some of the great work and this is stacked full of piloting doesn't get replicated the third point to make about one oh one I look at the other end as well the hyperlocal I think we've got some very good example of local police plans and community planning partnerships where this actually does happen in real time there's real cross-sectoral responses to distress and vulnerability often with the third sector and community sector engage so I think you need both and what we lack in some ways is a social capital or the organisation structure to actually have that hyperlocal delivery where it works well it works incredibly well one of the things my cosled colleagues tell me as they are under funding constraint they take they take out their voluntary resource because they have to concentrate on the statutory responses thank you very much and we'll finish off David and then Inga if that's okay thanks yeah I mean just it's an interesting question I think the difficulty I see you that I was instinctively I'm kind of drawn to the the concept of it the difficulty is that it's not just emergency services it's it's the local authorities is the more I think is it primary care sort of aspect of things as well so it's how you actually in reality blend all that in together into something that could work as I think is a challenge but it may be worth exploring further but just very briefly I think there's an opportunity for a collaboration at a really strategic level and so that a salamalti agency hub that you know that comes together to have those conversations instead of them all quite happening quite separately that it sits very much from a strategic level and I think there's already really good examples of collaborations public health Scotland working with police Scotland that that's a really good start for that and there's these great initiatives that are happening in the work that John's doing is really important that we we continue and extend that work but also think that other partners that need to be part of that study from a strategic level so cosla whatever working together and trying to to work instead of doing it quite separately as we are so from a strategic perspective I think there's huge opportunities to collaborate at a different level maybe go back to our original position having in government having them working together you're saying didn't really work very well but I think there's evidence that there was actually huge bits of work came out of that collaboration particularly around the mental health pathways thank you very much now as ever we've barely touched the sides there's so much more we could have gone into but appreciate everyone's time today and if there are any issues that need to be followed up please do so in writing so thank you all for your time thank you and we'll just suspend and move into private for a handover thank you our next item of business today is around table evidence session on online child abuse grooming and exploitation and I refer the members to pay purse 3 and 4 it's my pleasure to welcome to our meeting Stuart Allardice the director of Stop It Now Scotland Alison Penman of Social Work Scotland Gina Wilson the children and young people's commissioner Scotland ACC Beck Smith of Police Scotland Miles Bonfield of the national crime agency and we're due also to be joined by Joanne Smith of NSPCC Scotland who will be with us soon thank you all for providing the committee with written evidence and if you'd like to answer a question please catch my eye or that of Stephen Henry the clerk to my left here and we'll do the best to bring you in now we've only got about 80 minutes for this session and as the previous session showed members we we just don't often have the time to cover everything we'd like to so we just keep the questions short and focused and the answers as brief as possible we'll move directly on to questions and I'll perhaps kick off with a question for Mr Allardice stop it now now page 4 of your submission states that this issue of those who have a sexual interest in children it should it should be something that was beyond one of law enforcement being being the quote I just wonder if the general public are with you on that at this stage or what work needs to be done to persuade people of that position well I mean I think that there's good evidence of this clearly police colleagues will present information about the number of individuals who are arrested for crimes in relation to online sexual exploitation of children and in viewing in decent images of children but those figures are just the tip of the iceberg we didn't mention it in the evidence we provided but you know fairly big study from Germany three or four years ago of around 8,000 individuals about their online behaviour all of the men around 2% has said that they had viewed child sex exploitation material and indeed about 4% of the overall sample which was a kind of normative sample said that they had sexual fantasies or thoughts in relation to children in some capacity so we know that there's a massive issue here and therefore we will only be addressing the the tip of the ice I spoke through law enforcement which clearly needs to be an aspect of solutions but we need to pivot towards prevention as well whether the public is with us on this I think that sometimes an assumption that organisations such as ours which work directly with those who perpetrate such offences are vilified we've not seen as much evidence of that as of that as you would customarily expect so I think that there is quite a lot of support for the idea of prevention and the contribution that makes to the protection of children from harm your organisation provides support to people who come to you but are also referred to you I believe by the police criminal justice system is your service ever provided as a form of as part of sentencing very rarely in fact most of the individuals who contact the scotland team have just been arrested and are given information about our services by police scotland colleagues at the time partly because there's a significantly high risk around suicide amongst individuals who have been arrested for the these offences so most of the people who contact us have been signed posted by police but not referred directly from them we don't work as a further downstream if you like because actually the criminal justice social work system usually picks up those individuals further to conviction but there is a discussion to be had about whether things like divorce and from prosecution could have more of a role in this space I think thank you very much we've got a lot to get through but there's evidence to the committee from the internet watch foundation on page 16 of their evidence it says that in 2021 they investigated more reports of suspected child sexual abuse imagery than the entire first 15 years that they were in existence which I think goes some way to explaining how widespread this problem is so I suppose the question is open to anyone really perhaps Mr Bonfield but what are the resources and the investigations matching the level of prevalence of criminality we're seeing so firstly I thank you very much for the opportunity to give everyone some Mars Bonfield for the National Crime Agency and part of my work is to command the units that National Crime Agency has that involved in investigating child sexual exploitation and abuse online so I think the NCA position would be that we agree with the estimation of threat we're seeing a steady increase both in the scale and the complexity and the severity of of the offending and offending online and that's with the the growth of social media and applications for collaboration online but that also provides us with opportunities to do more as well and so as Stuart was saying that that's more opportunities to cooperate with industry in order to change the circumstances and prevent that offending in the first instance it it provides us more opportunities to support parents and carers to protect their children and it also provides us as police more opportunities to investigate online and to disrupt and deter offenders so whilst I see there is an increase in a threat there is also an increase in opportunity to do more about it in terms of the resources that that were applied I think again I refer back to an earlier answer to the committee there there needs to be a choice that's made by those that are democratically elected by the public as to the level of investment they make in a response and whilst with more resources I think any law enforcement officer any police officer would say with more resources we could do more there is a point of limited where there is a decrease in the efficiency and effectiveness of that law enforcement response per scale and also a choice to be made of by democratic representatives as to whether that's the right level of investment so that's as far as I would comment on that I don't know if other colleagues I was going to suggest yes indeed thank you I guess from my perspective I think in terms of giving evidence towards this committee I just I want to I guess reassure everyone that online child sex abuse is a massive priority for police Scotland I think you'll see that in my written submission just in terms of the fact that it features really highly on our strategic assessment it's it is key front and centre in terms of our strategic workforce plan around how we allocate resources and I think that probably goes to the heart of your question really in terms of do we have the appropriate resources to match the demand that we're seeing and we know that demand is increasing and you'll have seen the statistics within my report I would say we're not there yet but we're absolutely prioritising this as a real threat facing moving forward it's it's really high up front and centre on our cyber strategy which with ACC Free Burn and myself we work together really closely to ensure that we allocate adequate resources to this growing threat I'm really happy to talk a little bit more around that in terms of demand and resource we are starting a piece of work in public protection at the moment to look at our resource right across public protection to understand what that looks like so that we can ensure that we've got the right resource to the demand moving forward and that that is future proof because as we know online crime and cyber crime is only increasing and will do as we move more into the digital space moving forward so I would say we're not quite there in terms of resource yet but we're definitely moving in the right direction that's great thank you and I wonder from the perspective of child protection I wonder if you believe there's enough resource into investigating this type of stuff I think the fundamental challenges in resourcing this is in relation to the type of approach that's needed to this kind of work with families and that's about relational practice relationship based practice which takes time it takes time to build up relationships of trust with families whether that's the perpetrators the victims family members from a social work perspective that requires a significant resource that we probably aren't resource for at this point in time the other thing I did want to highlight in relation to your original question was the prevalence of this type of dangerous behaviour by children against other children so that's obviously a significant area of our work but again that requires time to build relationships of trust so that we can intervene effectively rather than tokenistically or superficially thank you very much unless anyone else wants to come in on that I'll move on to my colleague Rona Mackay who's got questions thank you thank you convener I just wanted to ask Stuart Allardyce I'm just interested to know how you can prevent someone from being an online child abuser and when someone's referred to you or if you hear of someone or however you make contact with somebody what form is your is it counselling you give them or you know I'm just interested to know what what your organisation does and at what point you did say that some people have been arrested and at what point does that kick in if you can maybe explain a wee bit the background of your work no thanks Rona and and I mean there's a few different strands to it so we have a UK helpline which is funded by the home office in moj which is based down in Epsom and indeed that that helpline does make referrals through to the scotland services that I manage the helpline last year got 14 000 calls from about 7 000 individuals calls in contacts emails and live chats and so forth calls from people referring themselves is that what you mean so this was from a wide variety of different kinds of individuals were concerns around child sexual abuse but around half of the calls were from individuals who were worried about their own sexual thoughts and feelings towards children the majority of whom were involved with online activity in some some way many of whom had been arrested already but a significant proportion had not been arrested and they're given an anonymous and confidential space because they're reaching out for help they're told very clearly at the start of the call if you identify yourself and give us any information about about a crime then we'll have to pass that information on but you don't need to identify yourself in this call so that's how we we provide that anonymous advice and then and I think that there's an important point here which is that we normally think about people who are committing these kinds of crimes as being very similar to contact sex offenders but actually the evidence is stacking up that this is quite a different kind of population that we're looking at looking at and these are often individuals who are quite worried about their own online behaviour and looking for help and support to stop so we provide advice that that really can start with what the person is looking for in terms of supports to stop that behaviour at that particular stage in terms of our work in Scotland the majority of the cases we work with are people who have already been arrested and we work in that space between arrest and conviction getting the right kinds of helps for people at the stage when they need it because at present it's taking around two years for individuals who are arrested for these crimes to attend up in court and is this like a one-off phone call or is there an ongoing dialogue with people who call up so the people who call up it can be a one-off call and we'll certainly for all of those individuals we will also signpost them towards online resources we have a resource called get help which is in effect a manualised treatment programme online that people can do anonymously themselves but many individuals do keep on calling back and we have a call back service meaning that actually although we never find out the identity of the individual we can do telephone support with them over an extended period of time and if you hear of something and I'm sure your councillors will but you know particularly alarming it would all be alarming in my estimation but you know if you hear of something that you think this is really dangerous this person's having really dangerous thoughts what do you do then if you're allowing them to remain anonymous so we will always in every call that takes place to the helpline make sure that at the end of the call we are getting the individual to sign off some actions in relation to safety what would make the situation more safe but clearly if we need to kind of preserve people's anonymity because if that wasn't on the front foot in our work then people wouldn't call in the first place fortunately the kind of situations you're describing Rona are very few in far between lots of concerning information that comes into our professional team of helpline staff but in terms of situations where somebody is actually presenting a significant risk to a child and we don't know who they are or who the child is it does happen but it's relatively rare thank you thank you thank you very much I don't know if anyone would like to come in with a question Jamie Greene just as a supplementary to this opening line of question I think clearly you're working in a very difficult area of health stroke justice prevention which at their site some people would find controversial in its approach to be quite frank and there's clearly a wider societal moral philosophical discussion about how you treat or deal with people with these types of thoughts stroke actions I guess my question is we took evidence I believe or my understanding is that evidence has been given public from the national crime agency that there are around half a million to 800 possibly 900,000 people individuals who pose a various degree of risk to children what sort of numbers are you dealing with and my I guess I asked that because it feels disproportionate to the amount of people who are actually out there who could be helped and I say help in the sense of those who have not committed a crime I think I think you're right with that I mean you know I think uh when we talk about child sexual abuse in society um there's almost a kind of wee wee inevitability that kind of comes into the conversation an assumption that this kind of issue will always be with us but we in Scotland we've really shifted the discourse for instance on violence um where I think there is recognition both in professional populations but also in the public more generally that actually we can treat violence as as a a public health problem it's a treatable issue um and we need to think about child sexual abuse in in that way as well and I think that would be the way to increasing the number of people who contact our service but as I said the figures are around 7 000 calling our UK helpline um much larger figures in terms of those who are using our online resources um we would always be pushing for those figures to be much higher because of the the scale of the problem as you described it and and you know so what's lacking then in your paper you say that the key challenge is a lack of an overarching strategy uh to tackle online sexual abuse um and that there's no government leadership to straddle multiple government departments and ministerial portfolios uh so what are you asking effectively asking the government to do and would you say that the lack of take up on your service is a lack of awareness amongst that the community of those who may benefit from it um or simply a fear of contacting you for um what may happen thereafter if they do pick up the phone or click on a website? Well you know I didn't want to come here and have conversations about resourcing of that and indeed you know I think it's it's not about organisations just such as ourselves but how how we work in partnership with other organisations so and I'm sure police colleagues can can speak to this but the the town's campaign um that we um ran with police Scotland um hashtag um get help or get caught I think was remarkably successful um and indeed um I just looked at the figure last last week and um um we had over 9 000 people in Scotland so it just under 9 000 people in Scotland who went on our online resources because they were seeking help in relation to the online behaviour that has really been driven by a police scotland led campaign let's be absolutely frank about that that's not been driven by us so it absolutely has to be about partnerships but I do think there is something about how this issue sits across different silos within the Scottish government as indeed violence does as well if you think about health education law enforcement and justice and and how all those spaces are important around the violence debate this is also true with respect to the prevention of online harm as well we did have a national action plan in relation to online safety which ended a year ago two years ago people could perhaps correct me on this and also an action plan in relation to child sex exploitation once again silos they're kind of separated they do overlap but they but we think about these things in different ways in different in different um contexts of government both those those plans now would no longer exist um the danger with action plans is that sometimes they just become a list of things that we're ticking off rather than actually um us trying to evidence impact and change um so with caution I would say I think a national action plan would be important here but we would certainly want that to be sitting next to a very strong strand around research and evaluation because I personally think we don't really know enough about what is very effective for instance around preventative work with families and with children themselves and indeed as Alison was saying young people who might present a risk of harm to others in online spaces so lots of stuff we still need to find out about um but actually so let's not just get on with lots of activity but an action plan would be a good start we might come back later sure thank you I think acc smith would like to come in on that I would um if that's okay so just in relation to that I really agree with what Stuart is saying um from my perspective I think it's really important to understand that policing is just one aspect of this issue and actually we can't arrest our way out of a problem here it's it's a much wider societal problem and I think the partnership approach is is really key and we've seen that be really successful Stuart mentioned the campaign that we ran we're running another one in 22 23 to focus on perpetrators and we rely heavily on our partners in this space so that the working together approach is is genuinely really important we've seen the success around using joint interview models joint training um and and I would be really really keen on on pushing that further forward from my perspective in a policing sense so I'm really supportive of of Stuart's point there just wanted to to add that thank you very much and Rona has a supplementary question I was wondering if Stuart could say how do you measure your success rate how your your service success rate um well with individuals that that we work with we we use pre and post measures with with with everyone just in terms of our individual work with with people in Scotland um who have been arrested for online offences and um and also the group work that we do so we look at kind of mental health and we also look at kind of risks that those individuals present and and we look at reduction uh of of of these kind of factors over time that there are significant issues I'm sure you would appreciate about how we evidence impact in terms of reduction of of reoffending in this area which is which is a key question for for this committee here but but the evidence that we have so far is that um the majority of individuals who are arrested for for online offences only a minority seem to go on and commit further offences um and the figures are usually below 10 percent in most of their the international studies that have existed so far and interestingly the the the majority of them go on and commit the same kind of offence again there's an assumption that there will be an escalation for those individuals to go on and commit contact abuse that does happen and and we need to be very good at assessing the um these kind of situations to identify the minority who present really significant risks around contact abuse but the majority don't so the baseline is actually really low in terms of um uh reoffending thank you thank you for that um we will move to Pauline then Katie uh followed by Fulton thank you very much convener um good morning I want to explore what gaps in the law there might be and also I suppose what is the root of this and I wanted to take something from your submission which I did find quite shocking a lot of it is very shocking anyway um perhaps I'm not surprising about the state to which you know girls females are the victims and may intend to be a perpetrator so that's not a shock but the one that did surprise me was self-generated child sexual abuses up by 374 percent in the last two years disproportionately affecting girls so that's imagery produced by webcasts by children themselves um so obviously adults are taking advantage of that and the child is still the victim I wonder if you wanted to have some attempt to to try and give us any insights at all into why you think there's been this rise in the last two years and why children are what's driving children to do this do you think I'll say something to that but but miles might be in a better position to to to talk to it but yes the the internet what's foundation data suggests significant increases in what we're seeing around crimes involving self-generated images by children and probably most shockingly younger and younger children that are being kind of pulled into the space as well I think there's two different components to that one of which is a relatively recent one which is the impact of Covid and lockdown where more and more children have been at home spending more and more time online often in quite unsupervised ways and we did a bit of research looking at callers to our helpline during the first six months of Covid lockdowns and indeed individuals who were worried about their own online behaviour were talking about follow isolation anxiety and then sexualising some of those kind of stressors and spending more time online looking at pornography and indeed drifting into more and more extreme material so there's a number of factors that we need to kind of accept around around Covid but I think the the reality is that as smartphone accessibility for children and young people has become more and more available over the last 10 years and as we see young people increasingly expressing themselves in terms of intimacy and relationships as they go through adolescence in online spaces there are adults who are taking advantage of that which is leading to some of these exploitation so some of its technology and some of it is how technology is beginning to impact on children's sexual development I think I'd agree with Stuart I think there is a point here that's about the wider availability and use of technology and the use of technology by young people I think it does link to the wider societal issue that we talked about in the previous question around the normalisation of this behaviour as well and that's a very concerning wearing issue for us all I'm sure there is a part of it as well though in terms of how we are getting better at identifying this material so National Crime Agency has put an awful lot of effort and working to work it with industry so that they can identify that material for us and refer it to us and therefore refer it to us in an efficient and effective way so that we can do something about it so that has seen an increase in reports of this material and an increase in that aspect of it. Can I just follow up by asking if you think there's any gaps then that need to be plugged that aren't already by the online safety bill and if you think that you know some of the social media companies like Tik Tok push probably a big one for younger kids it's just meant to have age restrictions but I mean fully aware that it's much harder to catch that when there's live streaming and ways in which people can be ingenious around it just as a lay person that strikes me that it doesn't seem like these companies are doing enough and do we need to bring more laws in and I do appreciate that Tik Tok's not a UK-based company because it would need to be international collaboration. I speak to the online safety bill but I wonder whether others am I also so it's from a National Crime Agency perspective we don't see an legislative gap so we don't see an issue that's not being filled we've put an awful lot of effort into working with government around the online safety bill and I think that will make some changes in legislation which will be very important and have an impact but we are not relying just on legislation to change the circumstances one of our priorities is to have industry engagement with social media companies and to make it very clear to them what the threat looks like so we have that shared awareness to direct them in terms of the work that they can do so have a common purpose and to have an effect therefore in changing that offending space so we can prevent opportunities for offenders and people can protect themselves but we're very clear that we feel industry can do more and we are working with industry on a daily basis to keep on with that and ensure they do more and that's in terms of working in partnership with Police Scotland you know that's a job for a national crime agency to do but on the national international level with industry and law enforcement as well thank you so absolutely miles highlights that nca do the engagement in terms of industry industry level and I think that's only right and proper just to ensure consistency and that we're going into these big tech companies in one way only but there are some gaps in legislation I think which sit within Scotland specifically page five on my written submission highlights some of those for example section 52 of the civic governance Scotland act 1982 came in before the internet and I think we're in a position now where we understand that there are definite workarounds in terms of the legal system we know that this abhorrent act is definitely taken in terms of prosecuted as far as it can around the current legislation but there are gaps and I think perhaps we are definitely working with Scottish Government around that understanding what those gaps are and perhaps pushing those for but there's a couple of things I think would be quite straightforward around there's no Scottish legislation specific to prohibited images for example that's a gap and the current criteria for an application for a risk of sexual harm order doesn't cover online offences and I think that's something that would be quite straightforward to close that that we would be interested in seeing and I think to reassure this committee there is a lot of work a lot of communication that goes on around around that and we have a multi agency group which we discuss the legislation and the gaps and we're looking at kind of how we can do that but ultimately there are some quite straightforward gaps I think which need closing and I suppose for me the risk is that if we don't do that then legal challenges may prevent us using the legislation that we currently do at the moment we haven't seen that but I suspect that that may only be a period of time before we see that so we're really keen to understand what that looks like and how we help close those gaps moving forward. Thank you very much. Thank you. I just come back to Pauline's original question about the significant rise in young girls in particular who are following victim stuff online. I wonder first of all if I could turn to Joanne Smith from the NSPCC I think from memory your organisation is a very useful website for parents of young people who might have concerns can you just expand a bit on the scale of the threat and what can be done to help protect children. Yeah well I would absolutely concur with everything that's been said already in terms of our organisation has been aware of a growing trend towards taking enabled forms of child sexual abuse for many many years now but did see a significant spike in referral rates at the point of introduction of lockdown measures to prevent the scale of Covid and as Stuart mentioned you know it's a perfect storm around children and abusers spending more time at home and online the exponential growth and the use of smartphones and then the new more sophisticated types of technology such as live streaming that means that rates and forms of abuse can escalate with real virility because of the ways in which groomers are able to move people from one rather open platform onto much more private and encrypted forms of communication which is a really worrying trend and all of that can feel really overwhelming I think because it does feel very entrenched but actually I think it's important to say that online sexual abuse is entirely preventable in many ways you know that there is a lot of what we're seeing in terms of the rapid rise in online offending is that corporations have set their responsibilities and that there's really important that they step up to the plate because as you say we hear from professionals and parents who are desperate for information and tools to help them better protect their children we're overwhelmed by the demand that we see for that type of material but realistically the scale and the pace of the development and the aim around online sexual abuse is such that that is insufficient we really do need platforms now to take responsibility just as we would expect some safety measures to be implemented in children's spaces offline so too we must expect that same kind of level of rigor online but I would just say that I think that in terms of gaps Scotland we have a real issue in that despite having really high quality practice pockets of really expertise and brilliant work done by Stop and Now and others we don't have that coordinated overarching strategy that we need to see that brings together these disparate strands of work so that we have a cohesive coordinated programme of national activity and strategic leadership that includes that brings the responsibility of all agencies working with children with families with communities and critically with industry to make sure that we are seeking to prevent hand before it arises the scale of the problem is such that we're not going to arrest a way out of this we do absolutely need to be looking at preventative measures that better protects victims support and the feral tools for prospective offenders we have to be honest about what's required of us and that's a much more cohesive and collaborative national strategy trying to keep children safe. Thank you very much and I wonder if Gina Vosan would like to say anything about either the the rise of children becoming victims and what can be done about that and perhaps also just what John was touching on in respect of a coordinated approach and what how that would look. I wholly support the comments from NSPCC there. I think this issue speaks to the fact that law enforcement alone isn't going to solve this issue the huge increase that we're seeing around children's self-generated images is one of huge concern for a number of reasons. We would have concerns that there's inconsistent and non-child-centred approach to how those situations are dealt with and we'd always welcome sensitive and inclusive approaches to awareness raising amongst children and young people with a focus on healthy and safe relationships rather than punitive and criminal approaches so law enforcement as an approach alone isn't going to resolve in this area. I would absolutely concur with NSPCC about the need to shift expectations to digital service providers and resource towards education and technical solutions in this area. Digital service providers must be held accountable and liable for the welfare of children and young people who are using their services. The digital world wasn't designed for children and they are at significant risk of harm in accessing it, but it's important to consider all of children's rights in the round that while they have the right to be protected from harm, they also have the right, autonomous right to access and make use of the online world so it's absolutely incumbent upon those service providers to make sure that they provide safe environments. We spoke a little bit about the online harms bill, off-com is the regulator for the online harms bill and will be tasked with producing codes of practice for TikTok and other organisations to follow. We would really want to see children and young people and the organisations that represent them involved in producing those codes of practice that this is a hugely fast-paced and changing environment. We need to understand directly from children and young people themselves how we can help to protect them in the online world, so that we really want to see them as part of that process. Just probably back to an original point this year, it was making in relation to children who display harmful sexual behaviour online. At any strategy, we'd really need to take cognisance of the different pathways by which children come into it, taking into account the context of online relationships, peer relationships online and children having normative expectations and becoming desensitised to what is harmful behaviour and what is not harmful behaviour, but also taking into account interventions where we need to take into account child development, children's brains still developing, but also taking into account trauma. We would need to approach that from a trauma aware and a trauma informed perspective, but also remembering that a number of these children will also be experiencing undiagnosed speech language and communication difficulties, which will then significantly impact on how they view peer relationships and their understanding of what is harmful and what is not. We have a significant number of children and young people who become involved in harmful behaviour online, but do not realise that it is harmful, so it's how we then approach that from a preventative approach as well. Thank you very much. I was going to ask about organised crime, but I don't know if I'm going to come on to that later. Before I do, I would find it quite interesting to hear from those involved in those issues as to why they think that perpetrators are created. We've heard a lot of parallels in relation to violence. There's obviously been a lot of work in violence. We know that poverty, trauma, and the experience of violence itself lead people to be more violent when they grow older. Are there themes that come through in terms of why people move towards being perpetrators? Is it because they've been victims themselves? That may be one factor, but there may be other factors. In terms of a co-ordinated strategy, obviously, we need to understand that to be able to frame out what that strategy might be. I just wondered if any of those who've got direct experience have got anything that might be of use to the committee in terms of that. I don't know if Stewart would be best to come in to start with. I'm happy to start the ball rolling on that. It's probably worthwhile saying that the research into why people commit online harms is contested and there are lots of different arguments. There are some academics who would come at this from a position that is always about pedophilia and people having a significant pedophilic profile, which might be something that starts in adolescence and continues across the life course. We would push back against that in terms of what we see in our work. We certainly do work with individuals who we describe themselves in that way, but we need better and more nuanced descriptions that are congruent with what we're seeing in practice now. You mentioned trauma. We know that trauma is significantly overrepresented among adults who commit contact sexual offences, particularly adolescents who display contact harmful sexual behaviour. It's not as overrepresented perhaps in the population of online offenders, but it's there. We did a study recently of 800 people who we had worked with at Stop It Now Scotland over the last 10 years. 12 per cent identified themselves as being sexually abused in childhood, which is roughly around three times what you would expect in terms of the Scottish population. Stuff from diverse childhood experiences is certainly there for some individuals, but the key factors are about the way that the internet provides opportunities for people to anonymously do things online, sometimes over sexual nature. The story that we hear day in and day out at Stop It Now Scotland is that adults who describe being involved with huge amounts of consumption of legal online pornography and over time becoming desensitised to that and looking for more extreme and transgressive material. It's not to say that these people don't have a capacity then to be sexually interested in children because they are, but they didn't set out on their pathway to look for this material but drifted towards it over time, which is why there's lots of opportunities for deterrence and disruption and all of this. The other thing just to say is of those 800 individuals that we worked with, we also saw for at least half of them quite significant low-level mental health issues for many of those men. They're almost all men, but issues of depression and anxiety predated their offending behaviour. A collision of online behaviour and low-level mental health is often an explanation more congruent with what we see than arguments on pedophilia. That's quite interesting. I think that this is a massive topic that we probably don't have the opportunity to explore properly here. We've been having discussions in relation to organised crime and obviously there are links between organised crime and some of the issues that we're discussing today. Is that something perhaps, I don't know if Bix Smith would be a good person perhaps, to maybe talk to us a little bit about that? Just in terms of organised crime, the way we function, as you will know and I think you've heard evidence recently around the way we tackle organised crime in Police Scotland, we have a separate command that will deal with that. There are certain ways that we would do that, as in we would do that covertly, we would do that overtly, but we would look at the risk posed to individuals and ultimately if there is a safeguarding risk to children and there is an organised element to that we would absolutely deal with that. It's something that we would look for and we would prioritise over other areas of organised criminality. That's probably a real cultural shift in policing over probably the last 10 years, I would say, where we would focus a lot of our organised criminal activity on more traditional organised criminals such as drugs or firearms for example, but absolutely now I can hand on heart say that if we were to face organised criminality in an online child sexual abuse case we would deal with that as a priority in terms of the safeguarding issues absolutely and I think important to bring Miles in here a little bit as well. Some of the unique capabilities that the NCA have, we would utilise those in Police Scotland. We are really well linked in to the national and international aspect of this because as you will know a lot of this offending occurs overseas. I think in the brief there is information around some of that, so that's definitely something that we would look to to work in partnership with but for me we would absolutely tackle organised criminality in an online child sexual abuse function. Miles, do you be able to perhaps speak about how beg a factor organised crime is? So organised crime in relation to child sexual abuse is a more loose and disorganised range of offending rather than the highly structured hierarchical offending you might find in a drug trafficking network or firearms supply network. So we see at the higher end of offending that loose social networks of offenders working together so they may in their offending behaviour, so sharing things like tradecraft, how to protect themselves from law enforcement interests, how to distance themselves, how to show out law enforcement activity and we're seeing more and more of that higher sophistication, higher end offending and use of that tradecraft. It also does present an opportunity for us to use some of the high end national capabilities and national security capabilities that we've got in order to disrupt that offending and pursue those offenders. So over the past, over the recent years, we've formed really strong relationships with GCHQ and intelligence community partners in order to disrupt that activity and we're using techniques that we would use in serious organised crime offences such as firearms and drug trafficking in CSA cases now and I think it comes back to Bex's point for Police Scotland, for our national crime agency, for law enforcement generally, UKPLC. CSA is one of the highest priorities and therefore if there is any opportunity to use any capability to disrupt this offending it is applied. I don't know if Gina would want to come in this at all whether from your perspective this is something that's a major issue on your radar. I think the only thing I could add maybe on this point would be that we have been aware and are concerned that some asylum seeking children have been prosecuted when involved in criminal behaviour and some instances have been detained in adult prisons pending trials. So there is a connection there to victims of trafficking and online grooming and the way that we're then responding to them. So I don't have anything else I could particularly add to that other than to say that that is a factor that we're aware of and concerned about as well. Thank you very much and I think Fulton MacGregor would like to come in. Thank you, convener, and thanks to all the panellists for your evidence so far and thanks for coming to speak to us about this very difficult subject, but it's very, very important that the committee does hear it. I should also say outside that I chaired the adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse cross-party group in this Parliament in Collette Stevenson as it is also a member of that group. Obviously, there's real concerns from that group just now just about some of the stuff that we've heard today about the increase, particularly over Covid. I wanted to ask about that increase because it's been talked about by almost every witness and I think this would be quite good to have on the record. I think I know the answer, but it would be good to have on the official record. Are we talking about a real increase overall? I think that it is, but are we talking about that or are we talking about better detection methods, particularly from the police? The police have actually come to this several times and talked about how they have really, over the last few years, been able to employ or deploy technology that they would have never thought possible before. I wonder if the committee would want to comment on the increase and what the scale of that increase is. Are we uncovering it more or is it an actual increase because of Covid and other factors? Just from my perspective in terms of Police Scotland, I think that it's a combination of those things, if I'm honest. I think that we're absolutely seeing an increase. I think that Covid highlighted from perhaps a parent perspective where children were at home a lot more under their eyes of parents doing homeschooling and parents became a lot more aware of what their children were doing looking out on the internet. We saw an escalation of referrals into Police Scotland from parents and individuals who were concerned about what their children were accessing or had found images, for example. I think that's a factor. I think that our detection methods are better, absolutely. When I spoke earlier about culture, policing is a lot more alive to the fact that we can use our techniques that we would use in traditional methods of law enforcement more successfully now in safeguarding arena, and that's what we're doing. We're really pushing the boundaries and trying to understand that around organised criminality, but also detecting that kind of offending. If you look across the piece, I think genuinely, from my perspective, there is a real increase in demand, but there is also an increase in reporting, understanding, societal increase, understanding a little bit in terms of this horrendous offending, and people are a lot more aware and able to come forward and report. I think we've opened our reporting channels a bit more as well now, so people can report in different ways. People are a lot happier to come forward and discuss it in different ways, whereas they weren't previously. I think that society is a lot more able to talk about this. I would suggest that it's a combination of all of those factors. I'm sure that colleagues would have a view on that as well in terms of that. That's really, really helpful to have on the record, because I think that it's important that, when we come away from this, we can clearly say that we hear the evidence that there is an overall increase. Certainly from the group that I mentioned at a chair, and I know that Collette will agree with me, that is what the agencies who are represented in that group are certainly very much reporting and fuel that actually we're on the precipice of another pandemic in the period to follow. I wonder, in terms of substantial question, convener, on the young people using the internet and what we can do to increase safety in education. We've talked a bit about it and I'd maybe like to bring in some of the speakers at the top half of the table, because there's probably been real focus on yourselves down here so far. I wonder if I could come to your self, Alison, about what more we can do to make sure that young people are safe. I've got three young children myself, the one that the fallen discat agrees my eight-year-old to, who has actually asked me several times for a TikTok. Absolutely no chance, I don't have a TikTok, I don't understand it, but realistically speaking, I won't be able to continue to say no to him forever on whether it's TikTok or some other thing that replaces it. So what can we do to make sure that our children are educated? I'll be frankly honest, and I'm probably not the only parent that would say this. My eight-year-old's more tech savvy than me. That is a worry for me as a parent, it's a concern for my peers and friends that I speak to, and it's a concern for many constituents, so I wonder if you've got any advice there. I think it does come back to that educative programme, and I suppose it's about recognising the role of schools in delivering this. I'm quite sure everybody is very well and aware of this, and I wouldn't want to be patronising in terms of what people might already know, but there is something about addressing the culture in relation to online use. There is something about how we support our education staff, we need to be thinking about building up their resilience in terms of delivering some of this work. I come from a rural area, I come from Dumfries and Galloway, where we don't have as much access to some of our third sector providers as some of our other colleagues do, so a lot of this work will come directly from schools in relation to what they can divide from the curriculum. We need to be thinking about this as well in terms of the workforce of vicarious trauma, and several people have mentioned today that this is a horrible subject, this is not easy to talk about. I think that if we were to put ourselves in the position of a class teacher, maybe having to have these conversations or having to recognise what they might be seeing, but maybe don't want to quite believe what they're seeing, this might be a child that comes from a nice family. How do you then have those conversations with parents? It's very, very difficult, so how can we support particularly the education workforce in terms of supporting them to have an open mind to be able to recognise and to be able to respond appropriately when we do recognise it, but also to be supported thereafter? The other thing is that we need to think about from a strategic approach is about support and recovery. What support and recovery can we put in place for families as well as for individual children? Children who are victims but children who are behaving harmfully as well, how can we make sure that they have access at the time that they need that access to supports that will prevent their own behaviours escalating? I think that Stuart in your paper, you speak about the sort of devastation that this behaviour can have across families for family members and your organisation does provide support to family members as well, so it's how do we continue that? How do we support schools? How do we support youth workers? How do we support people in a way where we're opening up the conversations but almost opening people's minds and allowing them to think them thinkable, but making sure that there's an infrastructure in place to support them to do that because education will be the frontline response in many of these situations? I think that the whole area around children, the display of harmful behaviours is such an interesting one because it is one of those areas where society as a whole recognises that you've got both a victim and a perpetrator wrapped up in a really serious situation. I'll put out there what would usually be for discussion in private but I'll put out there to other committee members that I think that it would be an area I think that we would find of great interest if we were to take evidence on that solely. I wonder on my substantive question about helping families cope with the new age that we're in and we are in it, and then our next is going to be here forever. Gina, I wonder if you're able to talk about anything. Peer education is going to be hugely important to us in this area. One of our young advisers put this brilliantly. She said to us, adults have lots of opinions about how the online world affects young people's lives but so do young people themselves and it's vital they get a say. I think part of the issue that you've addressed there that many of us can recognise is that young people, children are in some cases far more advanced in their knowledge and understanding and use of the internet and are able to do things their parents and families around them don't understand. They aren't seeing everything that's happening and that those young people are involved in and it's really important for us that we've got children and young people involved in developing peer education programmes and really helping adults to understand how are they using the internet, what is it that needs to happen to keep them safe. They're largely absent at a domestic level in the UK from those decision making processes. Interestingly, last year, the UN, in its new general comment on children's rights in the digital environment, worked with hundreds of young people across the world to create international standards about what children's rights in the digital environment should look like. Children of all ages were involved in that and have come up with fantastic ideas and suggestions about what they need Governments to do to keep them safe, but we need that same kind of involvement at a local level in terms of peer education programmes. I absolutely agree that education is going to be the front-line response to this, helping children, parents, families, everybody understand how the internet is being used and how to keep children safe within it. Thanks, convener. I know we're short on time but I think Joanne's wanting to come in if that's all right. I just say briefly that I completely agree with that. NSPCC has worked in collaboration with a range of tech companies to provide a population-level parenting programmes for raising awareness and providing tools to help to navigate the online world. However, we know that that's only helpful where children have a responsible adult who is proactively seeking out this information, so the importance of peer support can't be underestimated. The NSPCC has done a really innovative partnership with Dundee City Council called Our Peer Skirlls. It was a group of self-identifying young women who'd experienced peer on peer sexual abuse, who came together and created a movement for change that was really about recognising the discomfort that some professionals have in terms of having these conversations within schools around handful sexual behaviour around peer on peer sexual abuse and trying to facilitate some of that conversation led by the young people themselves. It's been hugely successful in Dundee. We are seeking to roll that out further and the Scottish Government is supporting that. However, I'd say that there are more types of tools and grassroots forums like that locally that could make a massive difference in terms of children feeling able and supported to be better protected online. I speak for all members to be interested to hear more about that particularly as it comes into our local areas. Thank you very much. We've got about 20 minutes left and I'm going to move on to collect then Audrey on line followed by Jamie. Thanks, convener. I'm just going to ask about the actual definition of what actually constitutes online sexual abuse and exploitation and the people here today. If we have currently got a consistent and easily understood definition of that as well. I mean, I've watched the video on your website. Is that something that's used by multiple agencies? Is that a consistent approach or are we muddying the water somewhat by what we're doing? I'll maybe come to you first on that one. I'll be particularly interested in Alison's view on that. We have a definition of online abuse in the national child protection guidance, which is very broad and you then need to link it to the definition of child sexual abuse that's within the guidance. Actually, the definition of child sexual abuse is very much about contact behaviour. It raises that question about whether, in child protection guidance, the viewing and production of child sex exploitation material in decent images of children is encompassed by the definition. Having said that, I'm not aware of any operational issues that come up in relation to this. Speaking as a social worker, I think that practitioners in the field have a pretty good rule of thumb about what is abuse in this area. I don't think that there needs to be much tightening in definitions. Come back on that. For instance, are we sending the right message here? For instance, you'll have your child who is a bit like buying the nappies, but it's my child that's actually using them. Are we, in terms of sending that message across from parents to children? Is it consistent? Should it be different? Are we hitting the right spot there? In terms of the video, for instance, on your website, the one where the doors lie in open and the girls upstairs in our bedroom on our iPads. That's a good point. I think that there's a risk that we try and motivate parents in relation to safety by ramping up a discourse around fear. Clearly, that can be effective. I think that the Internet Watch Foundation video that we're talking about is a good example of that, but I wonder whether we need to be a little bit more savvy than this and to connect it back to your last question, Fulton. I think that the conversations that we need to have as parents around online safety with our children need to have, as a starting point, us having an interest in our children's online lives. If my child goes to school every day when they come home, I ask them how their day was at school. I have to say that my kids don't tell me very much when I ask them that. We also know that our kids spend an incredible amount of time online. Do we know who they're spending time with? Do we sit down and play games with them? Do we have a curiosity about their online lives? I think that the discourse that we have around online safety has, unfortunately, sometimes been defined by people with tech backgrounds. There's a discourse about how we make sure that we have the right restrictions on devices. That stuff is really important, but picking up an Alison's point from early on right at the start of this afternoon, the answer is impart relational. There's a discourse about how we make sure that parents are actively thinking about gap-keeping, supervision and monitoring of young people's online walls as they do with offline walls. I'm going to say absolutely, but further to that, Joanne pointed out earlier, that not all of our children have a reliable or trusted adult caring for them, who will take that approach with them. That's when we would be looking for the likes of youth workers, educational staff and they also need to apply that relational approach. I think that there are nuances, but I would agree with Stuart that they're broadly the same. Maybe we're missing a trick in terms of the legislative definition of what would constitute a crime, but what is the impact on children? That's maybe what we need to come back to when we're thinking about definitions, and actually I was thinking about yourself, Gina, in terms of maybe children would be better to tell us what a working definition of that would be rather than us as adults. I think that as adults we probably understand what we mean by online exploitation and abuse. I think that the difficulty is, and Stuart highlighted earlier, there are so many different strands to this. We have child sexual exploitation, child sexual abuse and child criminal exploitation. We have online exploitation as a part of that, so it's how do we bring that all together? How do we make sense of that? If we're going to start this discourse with children in relation to peer support and peer education, what does that mean to them and how do we make sense of that? How do they help us to make sense of it in a way that we can have these conversations meaningfully? I was listening intently. I'm quite interested in this. I suppose my view is that in terms of my officers and staff going out and dealing with children and looking at fences and working out which parts of the law fit with what we've got, I think I can hand on heartsay that that bit almost comes later. For me, I agree with Stuart around that. I think sometimes the definitions doesn't matter. If you've got a young person or a child in front of you and there's been a report of some sort of abuse and something's not right and you know that, I think actually talking to that child and listening to their experience and their journey, you understand what's happened and you use the legislation around further down the line to understand what that looks like in a criminal context, but actually the most important bit is listening to the child and understanding, making sure they're safe, I suppose. So I think policing's changed a lot in the last few years around that. I think our focus would have been much more around a criminal justice outcome, but I can absolutely hand on heartsay that now the voice of the child and the experience of the child and the safety of the child is key, and if that doesn't result in a criminal justice outcome because it doesn't quite fit in terms of a legislative outcome, then I think as long as that young person or child is protected, that's what we would say as a success. I think that's a real culture change in law enforcement, so for me, in a long-winded way, I don't think the definition is important. Yes, there are gaps and there are loopholes in the definition that we have at the moment in terms of things that we could close to make things easier, but in terms of a definition, I would say most professionals will work around listening and understanding to the child, and then the legislative side of it comes a bit later on, is my sort of sense and view. Thank you very much. I think that Audre would like to come in, followed by Jamie Greene. Thanks very much, convener. I'd like to just go back, if I may, to the discussion at the start of the meeting. You're self-community picked up on the issue of resources, and I know that that is an issue that we've looked at in committee previously during a session with Police Scotland and the NCA, and miles you were involved in that. We've also looked at that in our pre-budget scrutiny, so recognising that part of the overall response to child sexual exploitation online is one of enforcement. In terms of making sure that we have that bill's body, if you like, that is able to undertake that investigative role, given the international dimension and the sort of underground dimension of it. I'm still not totally clear what we need to be thinking about as committee members and also from the perspective of the Scottish Government, and I'll maybe ask Miles first of all, and then maybe hand over to Bex. What skills do we need to be recruiting and thinking about in terms of filling the skills gap, to ensure that we have an investigative capability? Secondly, how do we make Police Scotland almost an employer of choice and not Google when it comes to attracting that skills body into the workplace? I'll maybe ask Miles first of all. Thanks. We should be really clear that our assessment is that the threat continues to grow, the complexity continues to grow and the severity of offending continues to grow. The challenge is really out there for us. It's really important for us and I'm sure Bex will agree that what we need to do between the national crime agency and Police Scotland is have a good line of delineation demarcation around what the NGA can do and should do, what Police Scotland can do, so that we work efficiently and effectively as a law enforcement system to protect the people of Scotland. We're very clear in our agreement with Police Scotland that what Police Scotland wants us to do and what we will do is to do the things that you only really want to do once. You only really want to have one international liaison network and have one set of strategic relationships with international partners law enforcement wise. You only really want to have one set of national security capabilities that are technical things for doing stuff on the internet. You only really want to have one strategic assessment that you work together on and so we're very clear that we have a delineation of capabilities and capacity to do that and Police Scotland has a direct call into that capability. In terms of the skills and capabilities to do that, what we rely on being public services is the mission and the vocational pull of protecting the public in this particular space and that really does work for us very well. I'll be absolutely transparent and frank with you that it is difficult to retain our colleagues, particularly those colleagues with social work experience because of their retention allowances and the comparative pay, but we are very keen to attract the right skills to retain those right skills by giving colleagues the opportunities to do things within the NCA within law enforcement that they can't do elsewhere by reinforcing the importance of the mission and how important it is to protect the public. It's really clear that our investigative doctrine, particularly in this area, is starting off from protecting the child and the first thing we want to do is to get to the position where we've got actionable intelligence in order to protect the child and have that child focused element to it. Being focused on a mission and making that clear to our people and treating our people well, that's their wellbeing and looking after our people. That's really important to us and I think probably Bex will reflect that in the work of Police Scotland as well. Thank you. From a Police Scotland perspective, it's a really interesting question and law enforcement has always struggled with recruiting experts in the digital space because of the pay structures that we operate in and you will understand that. I think Police Scotland's done under the cyber strategy has looked at actually can we bring people in who have got the skillsets that we need and have them for a period of time where we train them, we invest in them with the knowledge that perhaps they're going to leave the organisation and go on and work in different places and I think we've got to be a realist in this space. We're not going to be able to retain talent in the digital space for more than a couple of years. People will go off and they'll earn more money in different jobs and they'll move around and we know that from patterns of young people, the way they work these days. Policing is no longer a 30-year career and I think that absolutely fits with the cyberspace. We are looking at utilising young people, we're looking at going out to universities, using academia, bringing people in in short-term contracts to be able to focus on specific pieces of work so that actually in the cyberspace we can utilise their talent and their skills and then understand that they will walk out the door and we'll have to bring in new people. So it's a different way for us for recruiting, for retaining staff in that area but we're alive to that, we understand that. We're looking at also using ethical hackers, people that have a real sort of strong moral sense of purpose around this and actually Miles hit the knell on the head when he said a lot of people come and work with us for a period of time because actually they want to make a difference, they want to feel like they're getting out of bed to do something that really means something to society and ultimately that's what we capitalise on. We bring them in, we can offer them different types of training, we can show them different skills that they won't get in the private sector, especially working with the NCA, that's really important for us. So that's the path that we're going down. It's a long road, it's going to take a while to be in the space where we can say we're really happy with the number and amount of people that we've got working in that area but we're definitely on the right track and I think that will only improve moving forward. It's a really good question and absolutely one that we're considering definitely. Thanks very much, that's really helpful. If I may just come back on a quick follow-up and it's maybe one for yourself Bex and that's in relation to the welfare of not just officers but staff who are involved in the investigation of often complex and quite harrowing inquiries. Just before this roundtable, we were discussing policing and mental health in our first roundtable of the day and so I'm just interested in what provision you were able to make or you have in place to ensure that the welfare of officers and staff who are involved in investigating cases of child sexual exploitation is monitored and supported. The wellbeing of staff generally is a massive thing for me and for Police Scotland. We know and I from personal experience have worked in the child protection arena for a number of years and know how difficult it is sometimes to switch off when you get home and the impact it can have on your friends and family can be really tough especially when you feel like you're trying to make a difference and somehow you're not sure you're doing that when you look at the volume of work that we deal with. For me personally and in terms of Police Scotland, this is a real commitment that we're making to the point where around the public protection review we're looking at wellbeing and coming up with a completely different way of looking at it across the department in terms of a new strategic plan and then underneath that within each area we're looking at kind of how can we support officers and staff so we have the psychological assessments, we have the trim process that you'll probably be aware of and I think ACC Hawkins gave evidence about that earlier but for me it's also about looking at the demand of those officers so what are we currently asking them to do, what's their workload like and the public protection review has a big strand around that so I want to be in a position where I can hand on heart say that I've got the right officers with the right skills with the right workload demand on them so that they're not under the significant pressure that they feel working in that area could have consequences for them in terms of their mental health and how they feel at home so all of that work is linked together under me in terms of a strategic board so that I can understand the workloads, the pressure, the psychological support that we're putting in place moving forward we're not there we're getting there it's a work in progress and it's something that I'm I'm really really keen to push forward on so I think I can probably reassure you that absolutely it's a real priority for me and it's definitely something that I'm looking at hence why it's a really important strand in the public protection review that we're currently doing thank you thanks very much thank you thank you I think we've got time for a very brief question from jimmy green thank you okay I had lots of questions but everyone's used up my time so thanks can I ask a slightly left field one have we seen a rise in vigilante behaviour in terms of either online or physical approaches from members of the public trying to either in capture or tackle or deal with for want of a better word predators people self-policing this in effect and if so what has been done to tackle or prevent that sort of activity yeah so I am I don't have the statistics in terms of that specific crime type to be able to sit here and tell you whether we've had an increase in that my sense is probably I can I can get that information and get that to you if that's something that you're interested in we are absolutely alive to the fact that there are vigilante groups operating and in fact recently I know that there's some covert there was some covert work ongoing in that space to understand what that looked like I think what I can say is that actually it's really important that we understand that so that we can protect people because sometimes mistaken identity can be a real problem in that in that area and we wouldn't want to be in a position where member of the public gets harmed because they're mistaken for somebody who has a sexual interest in children so in fact we had something similar a couple of weeks ago where that was the case and we reacted really quickly in terms of protecting and then putting out some really strong messaging around you know that this is not right this person has not done what you think they've done so I think from a public reassurance point of view we will absolutely do that I there is work on going in the in the cyberspace to look at that in terms of what sort of a problem we have as to the nature and scared of that in Scotland currently I don't have that to hand but I can get that for you definitely but it is something that we are aware of and looking at moving forward definitely thank you I just thought I'd raise it it's a slightly different area of questioning but also I wanted to ask the NC one final question that's around the complexity of the enforcement landscape and by that I mean you know if for example an image is discovered on a site or through an app whether that's mobile or fixed base isp access it's perhaps not often clear who's responsibility is in terms of the escalation whether it's the website operator where it's the internet service provider whether that's then governed by off-com or the internet watch foundation or ministers or police or the nca to the point of where no action has been taken you know it's not obvious always always clear to the consumer necessarily how to escalate these things and other than in the first instance where you can report something in the immediacy but then perhaps no action is taken thereafter and it's not an obvious path to escalate the responsibility of how the provider or the website is held to account and I appreciate that's crossing a whole range of policing devolved and reserved matters but do you think there could be a little bit more tidying up of the pathway so that people know exactly who does what who regulates what and what what can and will be done if no one else takes action so in in a with an eye on the clock I'll keep this very it's a very very complex cross-use addiction issue very simple and just say yes that could we could do more in that space and I think we said in my earlier response that we are very clear that we feel industry can do more in this space but I think what provides us the the the opportunity here is to see things very simply and so across policing and that's a culture change that Bex was referring to that's been brought about by working together across an entire system we're very clear that it's about protecting the child and put the child interests first that makes it very simple for us it doesn't really matter where that image is and where that's being reported or how that's being reported what we're looking at is the severity of the offending the complexity of that offending the scale it offending and therefore you know who is best placed to protect that child and and take the take the action and so that makes it quite clear for us and I do think that part of the increase in reports that we've seen it is about us working more efficiently together with industry law enforcement in Seattle in Police Scotland to see more reports because we worked together in a more efficient way thank you very much I just say quickly that you're absolutely right it is a huge kind of great area and we do need to see that tightened up and in our asks to the UK government through the online safety bill we are calling for. I mean it's to make sure that senior managers and in-scope services hold liability for where there has been a failure on the company's part because too often it's about sidestep and the responsibility so we do need a clear line of responsibility and we think that the online bill may provide the vehicle for that but we just want to finish on the point that alongside that we really need to see much more emphasis on prevention of harem and that is about a concerted coherent bringing together of all agencies in Scotland to make sure that we are identifying risk early and preventing unnecessary harem thank you very much now unfortunately we're out of time but it's worth putting on the record that we expect to look at legislative consent issues in the online safety bill in the middle of next month and I want to conclude also by thanking everyone who gave evidence and if they feel there's anything that they have not touched on and they want to expand on in any way please do so to the committee in writing and we'll now have a five minute suspension to allow the witnesses to leave so thank you again the next agenda item is consideration of a statutory instrument which is the Scottish fire and rescue service brackets framework order 2022 ssi 2022 forward slash 119 and refer members to paper five and ask members if they've got any comments they wish to make otherwise we will consider the ssi as coming into force and jimmy greenwood thank you convener so my understanding is that this instrument allows the government to introduce its framework document setting out the priorities and objectives for the Scottish fire and rescue service as it is required to do subject to the 2005 act following centralisation I have a question I guess and that's the framework document was originally published and then subject to consultation which received a number of responses can I ask if the and it's unclear from the papers if the framework document that the fire and rescue service itself will then be mandated to deliver on in terms of its priorities and objectives is the same as that which was published prior to consultation or if the framework document setting out those objectives has changed or altered in any way subject to the responses in the consultation and the reason I mention it is because some of the measures that it had been suggesting to explore new ways of how the fire service should work were not entirely positively received by some who responded to the consultation so I wonder if the government has reacted or responded to into those responses and therefore produced the document in line with the feedback it received through the consultation otherwise the consultation is pointless and that's a question for the government I push it as no government minister here due to the nature of the instrument but it's a question that I would ask the government had we been able to thank you for that yeah I'm advised by the clerks that we don't know the specific answer to that but we can seek to get an answer from the government and perhaps also input from Scottish fire and rescue sorry no thank you specifically the main protagonist to respond to the consultation and if they're happy with the framework as we have been asked to pass it or if they have any observations reservations etc that they may wish to take into consideration before the instrument passes okay thank you in which case is that something that can follow that yep okay thank you and that therefore completes our consideration of the SSI now the next act of an agenda is in relation to our visit to the wise group last week I refer members to paper number six and I'd like to put on record our sincere thanks to the wise group for hosting us and telling us about the important work they do I personally found it incredibly interesting I'd like to just open up to other members about what they took from it or any observations so Pauline yep yeah I'd like to endorse what you said convener it was a really fascinating visit which learned a great deal I'd written to convener or do you nickel just to the three points that came out of the group discussion which I do think the committee should take further I remember two of them one was prescriptions that weren't available on release which meant that particularly if there were drugs for for for people who needed them immediately it seemed to me that they could have almost put them back in jail again because they couldn't get them on on time and the second one was Friday release which has always been an issue but why can't we do something about that to make sure people have either got the services or like to explore is another way around that third one maybe someone could remind me what the third issue was one what it was eligibility for for work it just seemed like these are common sense things that we could maybe write to the minister about and see if there's a way forward yeah indeed I think in respect of the first point there's a letter in hand to the sps about that issue of prescriptions the second point I think Stephen can address thank you thank you convener thank you convener so yeah in terms of your other two points Ms McNeill so Friday and bank holiday liberations that's covered in paper six so there's a suggestion for the committee to to follow that up with the sps and the scottish government I believe that particular provision might be in the forthcoming bail and release bill that this committee expects to see shortly so there's a suggestion at paragraph 17 in the paper about how you might follow that particular one up and in relation to access to work and the employability programme again at your suggestion Pauline that's referred to in paper six in paragraphs 18 19 and again there's a suggestion there for the committee's approval that you might want to follow that up with the with the scottish government so if the committee agrees all of those recommendations we'll follow up on all those points thanks thanks I agree with everything that you've said and that Pauline said is there any way we could also maybe include the the issue of you know interaction between the scottish prison service and the wise group or further through through care services because you know when we ask the question was there was there much cooperation that was quite a a sort of negative answer and you know I think sometimes offenders had to go and search for the information or or you know that kind of thing from the prison service so maybe just sort of to try and get more coordination there if we could if we could highlight that it might be quite good because they do provide a fantastic service I think that could perhaps be included in the letter to the SPS about the prescription issue identified by Pauline but yeah absolutely and Fulton you would yeah it was just I agree with others on yourself convener that I thought it was a very very useful visit last week and I want to put my thanks to those that gave us evidence and sometimes sharing their personal stories which obviously is very helpful for ourselves here but also that they talked about there being a national through care service in place and they're already providing that so they asked us to take that into account as we take forward the legislation which I thought was a very interesting point so I wanted to highlight that that's good thank you very much and collect thanks convener and just to say as well totally concur with everything everyone said today it's an absolutely excellent visit in terms of the recidivism rates that they've got was amazing to see that you know that that's fantastic that that's a measure of how how good they are and and just on that as well the plethora of talent and experience as well that the actual mentors had I was kind of blown away by that I was that was amazing and then again even some of the services that they've provided through the prison service like email a prisoner what a fantastic initiative as well so yeah absolutely totally taken by them and I've also emailed Charlie and Sean to see about during recess going to visit them for the full day and just connect to see what actual work they're doing so I'll keep in touch with them yet I think there was an open invitation to members to go out and shadow some of the work they do which I'll certainly also be taking up in respect of the email a prisoner I didn't appreciate that was a wise group initiative and in terms of the re-offending rates it's one question I perhaps didn't ask when I was there it was about how that's measured just exactly what that percentage relates to whether it's re-offending full stopper within a certain time period or but that's just a consideration sorry jimmy I just apologize for being unable to make the visit both apologies to the committee colleagues but also to the wise group but equally to make it open offer that I'd be very willing to go back with other members or visit on my own accord at some point at a suitable time I'm happy to arrange that through the committee clerks or directly with wise group themselves that's great and Audrey sorry just switching my mic on yeah I would just like to endorse colleagues on the committee convener in relation to the value that I certainly got from the the visit I have to be honest I didn't know much about the work of the wise group before the the visit and I learned a lot an awful lot about in particular their through care provision one thing that I would be quite interested in is perhaps learning a little bit more about the wider reach of the wise group across Scotland so for example up here in the northeast I'm quite interested in in what work they're doing or perhaps planning up in this area obviously we've got HMP champion near near my constituency so a wee bit of background in relation to that wider work I would find very helpful thank you that's great thank you very much I think we can certainly ask wise group for some some more information in that respect finally I'd like to ask members whether we agree with the recommendation in the paper at paragraph 22 which is page 4 of paper 6 yeah everyone agree great thank you very much and therefore that concludes the public part of today's meeting and we now move into private session