 Welcome to the Justice Committee's 25th meeting of 2018. We have no apologies. I can invite John Vinay to declare an interest. As ever, we have a considerable amount of information before us today. One of the pieces of information that I have relates to a missoric case. I have too much interest in declaring it at one answer that I was involved especially with the Scottish police Federation official. I have at one point an MSP for the area. I have no active involvement in that case now. Okay, thank you, Julie Noted. Agenda item 1 is post-legislative scrutiny of the Police and Fire Reform Scotland Act 2012, and this morning we will be focusing on police complaints handling process. I refer members to paper 1, which is a note by the clerk, and paper 2, which is a private paper. I welcome chief superintendent Mark Hargraves, head of professional standards Police Scotland, and Lindsay McNeill, director of governance and assurance Scottish Police Authority. I thank the SP for the written submission, which, of course, is always very helpful for the committee. We are going to move straight to questions. Can I start by asking you to perhaps outline, in the very broadest and briefest terms, how Police Scotland's complaints handling process and the role of the professional standards department works and where the SP fits into the process. Just to get us started on the overview, who would like to start with that? Okay, so the role of Police Scotland in the complaints handling process refers to complaints received by officers below the rank of chief superintendent, so from constable to chief superintendent, anything above that rank would be undertaken by the Scottish Police Authority. My role is a head of professional standards. I report into the executive ACC for professionalism assurance, who in turn reports into the deputy chief constable for professionalism. I have responsibility for the efficient and effective handling of complaints received for Police Scotland. That is dealt with by you, and if it is below a certain level, then it is done internally. That is correct. Complaints will be managed by either local policing divisions or, under certain circumstances, they will be managed by the professional standards department, which is a smaller unit that we will deal with, primarily criminal complaints or more complex complaints. Can I ask you then, before I go to where SPA fits into the process, is it different if the issue is a public complaint or a conduct issue, in other words, an internal police complaint? Is the process any different? So, if it is a complaint about the police by a member of the public, then it would be recorded as such. If it is an internal complaint, we would have to ascertain the nature of that complaint, whether it is grievance-related and we have a separate process for that, or if it is identified as a conduct matter, again, there is a separate process for that as well. Complaints, conduct and grievance are three distinct and separate processes. Could you explain how that would work in the example of each? Yes, of course. For example, if a member of the public wanted to complain about the actions of a police officer, that would invariably be recorded as a complaint about the police. There are numerous options for how that is investigated under our six-stage process. We would have the initial notification of that complaint, we would then record and initially assess that. Prior to the full investigation of a complaint, we had the opportunity to resolve that through what we would determine a front-line resolution, which is only used in certain circumstances. For example, if the complaint was certainly non-criminal, non-complex and what we would determine non-serious, so if it was a matter of, say, in civility, that might be appropriate for local resolution. That would take place primarily by our Complaints Assessment and Resolution Unit, within professional standards, who deal approximately with 40 per cent of the total of complaints that come in throughout the year, and those are resolved at a local level, which is actually to the satisfaction of the member of the public and impacts less on them and the officers. Any witnesses concerned, we found it to be an efficient and effective means of resolving what you might term perhaps a less series of complaints. Can you talk me through an example of that and how it would work? Sure. What would happen was that normally complaints are recorded online, we would assess that complaint, and if it was deemed suitable for front-line resolution, a member of my team would contact that member of the public and attempt to address and resolve that issue, understand what the complaint is and whether, as an explanation or an apology required, that would be offered in that attempt. If the member of the public that would be confirmed in a letter and if the member of the public is satisfied at that point in time, then the matter would be concluded at that point. If they are not satisfied, as per the letter, it informs them exactly what they need to do, they would then state that they are not satisfied. We would then instigate what we would call the full six-stage process, which would allow us approximately 56 days within which to conclude that complaint. We will maybe touch on the timescale later, I just wanted to know. Are there other categories that you have done, if it is serious but non-criminal? If it is serious but non-criminal, then it would not be suitable for front-line resolution, that would automatically go into that standard complaint process. If you like, whereby we would allocate that to either the local policing division or in the case of criminal or specialist investigation, if that was felt necessary, we would allocate it either within professional standards department or to one of our local, regional or national specialist departments, depending on the type of complaint that was being made. Following the investigation of that, we would reach a determination and then identify any organisational or individual learning and then provide that notification to complainers, ideally within the prescribed timescales. If it was a criminal matter, it would come to us in professional standards to report to the Crown Office Procurator Fiscal Service for their determination on that matter. So is there a possibility within the serious and non-criminal, when it is referred to a local policing division, that division is actually investigating itself? We would always make sure that, for example, it is not taken outside of the line management structure, so that there is a degree of impartiality, notwithstanding that the investigation is explained in the final letter to the complainer so that they can understand exactly what steps have been taken to address that complaint. If they remain dissatisfied with the investigation or the outcome, they have the right and that is provided for in the final letter to the complainant that they can revert the matter to the police investigations and review commissioner if they remain dissatisfied. We found that only 5 per cent of complainants choose to take up that method. Given that 46 per cent of the complaints that are made are the internal police complaints, given the old system where you had eight legacy forces, that allowed a neighbouring force quite independently to look into the complaint of another force. Can I ask you to respond to something that we received in a submission from Karen Harper, which highlights concerns raised about complaints being dealt with impartially and transparently that she considered at times that there was a conflict of interest when investigating those internal complaints? I have read the submission that you referred to. In any case, when we identify complaints, we always try to identify the most suitable method of allocation to ensure independence and partiality. To take that one step further, where there is, for example, a complaint about a member of the professional standards department, which also incorporates the anti-corruption unit, then that matter would be investigated outside of the department. That used to be investigated within professional standards, however, that no longer happens. The SPA is also notified when we receive such a complaint. Can I ask the SPA to see where they are in this process? SPA handles complaints against the senior officers of the assistant chief constable rank and above about complaints about SPA itself and SPA members of staff. We follow a very similar process to how Mark Harbier has just described. In relation to our oversight of Police Scotland complaints handling, we have a regular performance report coming before the recently established Complaints and Conduct Committee, which Police Scotland professionals come along to talk through the performance statistics and allows for a deep-dive questioning by committee members themselves. We can also go into private session to discuss further details. We also have oversight of the complaint handling reviews that obviously go to Perk, and we see the results that come back from that. It also allows us to have a further questioning of Police Scotland where that is appropriate. SPA itself also conducts a dip sampling exercise across Police Scotland, across the national Complaints Handling Service, and that is using the system, a desk-based exercise, and it looks at the analysis of the closed complaints and their compliance against stated policies and procedures. Did I read that there was a Complaints and Conduct Committee and that that has been re-established? Indeed, convener. The new chair, since she came in in December, one of her first acts was to re-establish the Complaints and Conduct Committee, made up of some of the SPA board members. That now meets on a monthly basis at least, but it has been met 12 times since January of this year. It has a role and remit in determining actual complaint cases that come to SPA. They are considered in a private session. Can I ask why it was disbanded originally? I think that it was part of the previous chair's governance review. It was just decided that that particular committee was disbanded and the decision making in all complaint cases was delegated to the chief executive. And you do not know why that decision was taken? It was a decision for the previous chair. And did any of the board members question that? I could not comment on that. I was not there at the time. Could you perhaps write to the committee and get that further information going back, because I think understanding why things went wrong in the past helps us to understand if it has been resolved now? Certainly, convener, we will do that after. Thank you. Liam McArthur. Thank you. Good morning. You will be aware that the chief inspector of constabulary and auditor general identified the need for improvements in the complete handling process. There is not going to be great detail in terms of the concerns, but I think that some of them will be touched on by the convener and others will go on to consider through questioning with other colleagues. I mean, from your own perspective, do you see improvements in areas that need to be made? And if so, are those improvements that would require us to go back and look at the original act and make legislative change to enable those to happen? I can answer that first, Mr McArthur. By and large, the current process for complete handling within Police Scotland, of course, while there is always room for improvement, and in that regard, we would welcome the review by Dame Eilish and Julianie into complete handling, and we will certainly work with that team to try to improve anything in areas where we can. I think that the fact that we have a process at the moment whereby 95 per cent of people who engage in our complete handling process choose not to pursue the matter any further once we have addressed their complaint, notwithstanding that they certainly have that right to. It gives me some confidence that the process that we have in place is suitable, however, accepting that there is always room for improvements. When you mentioned Dame Eilish's review, and obviously that will take forward any considerations that arranges take holders may have, in terms of your engagement or Police Scotland's engagement with that process, are there recommendations that you are making today, Dame Eilish, in terms of the way in which the process might be improved, notwithstanding what you have said? I think that it would probably be a bit premature to comment on that, Mr MacArthur. I can assure you that we will fully engage and co-operate with the review by Dame Eilish and Julianie. In relation to SPA's point of view, it was part of our original submission to the committee, in which the chair is quite public on record, saying that we do not think that opening up this act is beneficial in the long term. However, the underpinning legislation, i.e. the regulations for performance and conduct specifically, could perhaps be looked at again. Again, a matter of the public record is very much keen to look at system wide changes in relation to complaints handling generally. Obviously, we welcome the Dame Eilish review as well, and we are actively engaged with her and her secretary yet. Obviously, SPA, as you have already alluded to, has been on a bit of a journey in recent times, and it had the compliance committee. That was then abandoned and a different process put in place, and now that has been re-established as well. Clearly, you have taken a view that things in the past have not worked out. What are you saying to Dame Eilish in terms of things that you and SPA would like to see going forward to improve the system? There are certainly some improvements that we have already identified, as I have mentioned, in relation to changes to the regulations in secondary legislation. There are also improvements that we are currently doing and are looking towards in terms of improvements ourselves, such as changing the complaint handling procedures, making them more streamlined, making sure that there is a director-level triage of complaints coming in, looking at categories of complaints, taking on board the perks feedback, and that, collectively, we are working towards that. We have our new complaint handling procedures out to consultation with stakeholders currently, and we will be taking lessons learned. Our complaints committee have also commissioned us to look back over the past five and a half years, particularly in relation to statistics, our lessons learned, our trend analysis, and that will be reported to our next complaints and conduct committee in October. All that information together is going to be analysed and fed back to Dame Eilish's secretariat, so that we can identify both things that we can do at our own hand, as well as what can feed into her review. In terms of the concerns raised by the Scottish Chief Police Officer's staff association in relation to changes that they feel are needed to the 2013 regulation, is the SPA or Indeed Police Scotland taking a view on that? I know that there are specific concerns about the way in which each stage of the process is marked with the release of notification to the press, and there are some concerns around whether or not that is prejudicial to the reputation of individuals involved. I would say that we are very keen and very robust to ensure the confidentiality of the process, both for those who make complaints and those who are complained about. All of these matters, especially when it refers to misconduct particularly, are very sensitive employment matters. We take our welfare of our officers seriously as well as taking on board that people do make genuine complaints. It is about having that time, fairness and proportionality to ensure that we can actually conduct those initial inquiries effectively so that we can bottom out those complaints. In terms of the practice of publishing a news release on the website at each stage of a complaint into a senior police officer, I can understand that there is a need to be transparent given some of the concerns that have been raised around the SPA, but there will be a sensitivity around the information that can be released at any stage in relation to an investigation that may have some way to go. How is that balance struck in terms of what is issued? Is there any sympathy for the concerns raised by the association that there effectively should be no information released until the conclusion of the investigation? I think that it was captured in our previous submission that confidentiality is an absolute requirement for this process. I think that there have been circumstances where things have not necessarily played out that way. However, certainly when we make references and referrals, we only ever refer to a senior officer unless circumstances dictate otherwise. You alluded to information that had been made public out with that process. How has that come about? Does that leak within the SPA, within Police Scotland and conjecture on the part of the media? I would not like to say something that I cannot prove otherwise. However, certainly internally we have conducted secure to leak investigations and nothing has been derived from SPA. I could not comment on anything else. Is there anything that you wish to say in relation to those concerns from the association in particular? I think that, Mr MacArthur, that the matter of complaints about executive officers is a matter for the SPA. I do not think that it would be appropriate for Police Scotland to comment that we deal with complaints up to and including the rank of chief superintendent. Just on that point, is the SPA revising this procedure where they issued a release, the refer to a senior officer and it is blatantly obvious to everyone exactly who that person is? I think that it reflects the small number of chief officers that we actually have and certainly when we make those conduct referrals to PERC, we are indeed revising those processes. We are taking on board all lessons learned from the past. So, is that yes? And you mentioned it reflects, what was it, the smallness, did you say? This has come about, what exactly did you see in your answer there? Sorry, with regard to the small number of senior officers. Is this because we are talking about a single police force whereas again with legacy forces there were a number of senior officers in various positions? I think that that is probably an area that does not necessarily reflect that it is a single police force. I think that it just reflects a matter of fact that we have a small number of senior officers and that is the number that the SPA is responsible for. Because that is how the legislation is constructed and that is what the legislation is. Thank you. Rona, convener, good morning. Ms McNeill in an early answer, you referred to the approach of dip sampling by the SPA. I am struggling to understand exactly what that is. Would you care to tell us what that is exactly? Of course, Ms McKain. Dip sampling is a process whereby the SPA complaints team of three members of staff will look at, on a quarterly basis, the number of complaints that have been completed and closed by Police Scotland. They can do a verification on the system against a sample size, so they go in and check the types of complaints received, the substance of the complaints, they look at how the process was closed off and the final decision letters that are issued to complainers to make sure that they comply with policies and procedures. Has there been any evaluation of that done into its effectiveness? The committee had this discussion with the complaints team at the last Complaints and Conduct Committee. Again, there are probably lessons to be learned there about how we can best conduct that going forward and that is part of our on-going internal improvement. Are you able to see what lessons were learned at this stage? To be honest, it is in terms of our presentation and our recording and how we present that analysis, so we are taking lessons on board with that. The actual practice itself, you feel, is robust enough? It has been to date, yes. How long has that been the process? That process has been going on for four years. I would like to begin by looking at the numbers. If you look at the submission from the SPA, it is dealing with hundreds of cases of complaint per year and tens of cases within the SPA remit. Can you just clarify how many officers at ACC and above are we actually talking about? It seems like a very high number for what is a relatively small number of people. Is that a fair reflection? Just to put some of those numbers in context, remember that the SPA accepts complaints against the SPA itself, SPA members of staff as well as senior officers, so those numbers reflect all of those cases. They also refer to historical cases that were brought forward from legacy joint police boards. In putting some context around those numbers, we are actually used as an escalation route when people are dissatisfied with Police Scotland, so it is not necessarily about senior officers. I was just wondering how that reflects, therefore, and indeed the fact that one in five cases raised with the SPA are actually within the SPA remit. How that reflects on the transparency, clarity and robustness of the complaints process overall, if people feel that they have to go to the SPA to complain? I think that, without going into individual complaint cases, since the inception of the SPA, we have been used as a place for people to land various complaints with without necessarily understanding what our full legislative capability and remit actually is, so there has been a misunderstanding. Going forward, again, one of our improvements would be helping people to understand what we can accept complaints about and what we can't. I would just like to put a similar point to Mr Hargreaves. I have to say that one of the things that is just reflecting on what you were saying is that you have got three different ways that complaints can be handled with a number of different procedures within that. It does strike me that that is quite a complex system. Is there an issue in terms of the robustness and transparency of the process, just in terms of its complexity in and of itself? Is that an issue in terms of the complaints process? What I would say is that the manner in which people raise issues to us, regardless of what they may be categorised, is reasonably straightforward. I think that it is well explained on our website. Most of our complaints come through the online system, and they are recorded and assessed as such. The inevitably are complaints. The determination within that is to whether or not they are suitable for, as I said earlier, front-line resolution or a more full and thorough investigation, depending on the needs and wants of the complainant. If the matter is grievance, it is an internal matter. It would be an officer's issue raised with another officer or a member of staff, and that is dealt with internally rather than the online complaints process. If a matter is identified as conduct, that can come about as a consequence of a complaint process, or it can be identified internally as a matter that we would deal with again separately. In terms of complaints that members of the public may wish to raise, there is a single route, and that is the online complaints process. Of course, they can write or telephone to complain as per the guidance on the website. What I would say is that there are well-established processes in place, should the complainant be dissatisfied with the original complaint handling method. If it is criminal, it can go to the criminal office and procreator fiscal service, or if it is non-criminal, it has that right of recourse to the park. I was just wondering if you could perhaps share with the committee the documentation around the distinction between the grievance process and the professional conduct process, because I do not want to bottom it out today, but I certainly would welcome that clarification. On the robustness point, it is hugely important that the subject of a complaint is then dealt with very carefully, and that details of that complaint are not shared with the individual until it is appropriate to do so, i.e., the nature and substance of that. Are you confident that those structures are in place to ensure that the subjects do not receive inappropriate detail? Do you mean that the officers are the subjects of a complaint? The process that we have in place means that, in the last couple of years, the process has been subject to a significant review. We have a process in place where we agree what we would call a heads of complaint, which is essentially a written agreement between the police and the complainant as to what exactly constitutes the complaints that are being made about the police. Once that process is agreed, it is at that point that we can then essentially undertake the complaint investigation, and we would then offer the subject officer a chance to comment on the allegations that have been made. I would also like to ask about whistleblowing. That is another form of complaint, but I did not really feature in your description of the complaints process. I note that the chief constable has made a specific point around that. Could you outline how whistleblowing fits within that? If someone approached a senior officer as a whistleblower, would those details not be shared with the ranks below that point, or the subject that may be contained directly or indirectly as a matter raised in that whistleblowing case? As part of the restructure of the professional standards department two years ago, one of the facilities that was introduced was a national gateway assessment unit. People and officers or staff can report matters either in name or confidential or anonymously through what we would call integrity matters. Again, that is an online submission through which they are perfectly entitled to give their details or not, as the case may be, and raise any issues or allegations. Of course, to have whistleblower status, we would have to assess that and determine what the allegation is and whether or not that individual should be afforded the protection of a whistleblower. It is not always a straightforward matter, but we would look at each individual's circumstances, but there would be that protection and that means to report things either confidentially and or anonymously through the integrity matters portal or through the whistleblowing form, which can be reported again to the exact same place, namely our national gateway assessment unit, which takes it away from the local area where they may be raising the issue. I guess that one of my concerns in all of this, and indeed the previous answers, is that somebody with a complaint has to make sure that they put the right complaint into the right process and have categorised it in the right way, and that there are essentially three or four different channels here, and that you might essentially be putting the wrong block in the wrong hole in the box, so to speak. If somebody either does not assess themselves correctly in the right category, how flexible is the process to redirect the complaint? I would say that it is very flexible. That online complaints process would come to our Complaints Assessment Resolution Unit. It would determine thereafter the most appropriate means of allocation and investigation. There is that single point of entry, if you like. Similarly, the integrity matters portal and the whistleblowing forms that we use would come into a single place, namely the national gateway assessment unit. There are two points of entry, both of which sit under the professional standards department under my direction, so that that consistency that you are looking for would be achieved in terms of who might be best placed to determine the most appropriate means of carrying forward that inquiry. Finally, Ms McNeill, how would the SPA reflect on the system? Do they feel that it is straightforward and simple to use? I think that it is slightly different from Police Scotland only because it is under the senior officer. Sorry, I was asking for your reflections on the way the police, the characterisation that we have just heard from Police Scotland and the way they handle their... Oh, sorry, yes, we would support Police Scotland's approach. I wonder if, Ms McNeill, I wasn't aware the SPA investigated itself. How many complaints have there been against the SPA and what's the process for doing this? I don't have those figures to hand today, so if you're happy then I can follow that up after today's committee, but the process is very much in terms of the same process that all complaints come in, so they come into a dedicated team who then assess them and then take the complaints case to the Complaints and Conduct Committee for a determination. Should any member of staff be part of that complaints case, they wouldn't actually deal with it. In some circumstances we've actually had our head of legal actually look at those particular complaints away from the complaints team themselves. I have to say that I'm disappointed you've come to the committee today to answer questions on complaints specifically and you're unable to tell us how many complaints have been lodged against the SPA. Where does the authority from this come? Is it in the legislation, is it in the secondary legislation that allows the SPA to investigate itself? I think that in the 2012 act it references that SPA has to have complaints handling procedures in place. For all complaints and in the 2006 act it talks around the definition of a relevant complaint and obviously the 2012 act talks around the misconduct allegations for senior officers. Certainly from my point of view there are huge transparency and accountability issues here. We sit in the sub-committee, I wasn't aware of that, I doubt that the general public is. Having said that, is this an area that the SPA is actively looking at? Obviously they're not happy with some of the regulations. We've talked about a lack of clarity and transparency and this seems to be an obvious target for looking again. It's certainly something that we would actively welcome and again our chair and our interim chief officer have looked to that in terms of our on-going improvement journey and are very much engaged with the day-mail-ish Angelina review. Could you provide the number of complaints against SPA and the nature of those complaints and the outcome, please? John Finnie. Thank you, convener. Good morning, panel. Ms McNeill, I wonder if you could respond please to a view expressed by the chief police officer staff association regarding regulation 8 and their view that a fair interpretation would be that the police authority undertakes some initial investigation prior to moving to a full investigation, particularly the express that view in relation to where anonymity applies, where it's an anonymous complaint. It's not an unreasonable position. Again, when we have been looking at our own improvements at our own hand and equally engaging with the day-mail-ish review, we have identified that there are issues with working with those regulations. We have received complaints through a number of routes and some of which come by named individuals as well as anonymous complainers, and we are actively looking at that and feeding back to our complaints committee around how we best deal with that going forward. That's part of our work with our new complaints handling procedures. I think that I'm right to say that historically there was a view taking whether an inquiry would be initiated. Just as a police officer, if someone comes and says that they've had my car stolen, they wouldn't immediately say, have you sure you've not left it? Some cursory examination surely is required for fairness to apply. Learning from experience, there has been a lack of clarity regarding how far we can conduct preliminary inquiries as opposed to tipping into what might be deemed an investigation, and that's where we're actually looking at what we can do in terms of our clarity understanding of our own process of working with Perk and also feeding in today's mail-ish review. Thank you very much. Can I ask some questions about Perk, if I may please? I'm particularly interested in the relationship, Mr Hargreaves, that there is about contemporary investigations and who would have primacy, because there might be issues about, for instance, the seizure of productions in a case. Can you explain how that works and how that dovetails with the complaints process? Clearly, there are concerns if the Perk is involved, for them to be involved, I should say. Yes, of course. In terms of Perk investigations, are you referring to Mr Finnie? Yes, indeed. Perk would obviously... The short answer would have to work closely together. It's very much a case dependent on what was required, but certainly we would always seek to cooperate with the Perk in terms of the provision of either documentation or any other ancillary evidence that would facilitate their investigation. Who has primacy, Mr Hargreaves, in any investigation? If it's a Perk-led investigation, then they would have that primacy and we would obviously fully cooperate with that. So it would depend on the investigation. If it's a kind of a destructed Perk to undertake an investigation, they would have that primacy. Has that always been the case? As far as I'm aware, Mr Finnie, yes. Is it your view, as someone who's in charge of professional investigation on behalf of complaints against the police, that would you express a view of whether Perk has a sufficiency of power to undertake their job? I think that would be a matter for Perk to comment on, Mr Finnie. I don't think that's for me. Has it been raised with you or your department at all? I'm aware of the Perk submission, obviously, in relation to this matter. And it's something that we engage in on a regular basis to try and obviously bring forward a process that is both effective and efficient in terms of both complaint handling and investigations. And do you have a view of the relationship between Police Scotland's inquiry system and a Perk investigation at the same time? Do you say that the process works well? Oh, so you mean whereby Perk are dealing with the same matter with— Yes, indeed. My personal opinion is that I think that a single process would be preferable. I think that would make sense if it's a victim-centred approach, then that would seem to me to make sense. And who in your view should lead that process? If it's a Perk-led investigation, then it would make sense that they would take that matter on. Right. Ms McNeill, do you have the authority to have any view about these matters, about simultaneous investigations involving Perk and Police Scotland? I regret that it's not something that I'm close to myself, so certainly we can get that view expressed back to the committee. Okay, thank you very much. Jenny. Thank you, convener, and good morning to the panel. This is a follow-up line of questioning on the back of John Finne's questions there. I'm interested in the process whereby somebody reports a police complaint for the first time. Would you expect Mark Hargreaves to be a certain level of investigation at a local level before it goes to Perk? Is there a standardised way that that is dealt with, that there's guidance provided to local forces, for example, to carry out a level of investigation before it's escalated as it were to Perk? Absolutely. The first point of contact of entry into the organisation for complaints is absolutely Police Scotland. We have that established six-stage process. As I was saying earlier, depending on the severity and nature of that complaint would determine the route that that complaint would take, but that would certainly come into a single source and be assessed. Like I said, it can be resolved at either a front-line level, so that would essentially mean a very expedited process, but to the satisfaction of that member of the public who had caused the complaint, they then have the recourse to, if they're not satisfied with that, that they can request a fuller investigation that we would undertake. If they remain dissatisfied with the outcome of that investigation, they have, of course, that right of recourse to the Perk for non-criminal matters, and if it's a criminal matter about which they are complaining, they have the right of recourse to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service. Just as a supplementary question to Lindsay McNeill, in terms of your evidence, I note here that you say that the SPA complaints team are a team of three people. Is there an issue around capacity, therefore, if you have only three folk investigating those complaints? Do you need more? I think everybody that goes before you to say, yes, we could always do with more resources. However, I think that we're looking at that as part of our improvement journey to assess who, what, why, who's best to do what and in which circumstances. I have to be careful because we have the different categorisation of complaints. We're not allowed to investigate misconduct, so that's a preliminary inquiry, whereas if it's a relevant complaint, i.e., a type of complaint that has a recourse option to Perk, then we do have to conduct some inquiries. We are streamlining our working processes, but additional resources are always good. Very briefly, to begin with, you talked quite a lot about the importance of process and sticking to it and the authority for the complaints process. Where does a concept of special leave fit in with that? Assuming that it's not a specific process that I can go and look at, who has authority to instigate a special leave against what criteria and what process will apply when the process has gone off-piste, as it were? We saw this time last year that, rather than a specific process being followed in a particular situation, a concept of special leave was used. Was that something that just came out of nowhere, or is there a process that I can look at to investigate special leave? That is with regard to a specific case. It is not something that I can comment on being at a set of circumstances and not something that I was part of to and not being at work at the time. I am not familiar with that process and it may be something that you may wish to take up with the chair when she appears before you at the end of the month. Let me maybe ask it a different way then, because it is not really about the specific case. It is more about whether we are looking at specific processes and whether they work or not, but it would appear from events last year that someone has authority to say, here are all our processes, let's do something different that is not mandated by regulations. Is that the case? If so, who has that authority? I think that that is something that I would have to take back and make sure that we look at in and around in terms of our on-going improvements. Moving on to something that came up in our papers, the complaints process is dropped when officers retire or when they resign. Some people have certainly suggested that this is deeply unsatisfactory, both for those who have made a complaint but also for those who have been accused. Do either of you take a view on whether that should change? If so, given your comments earlier, Ms McNeill, should this be by amendment to regulations? I can take that first if that is okay. What I would say here is that it is really important to make that distinction between complaints and conduct. If a member of the public makes a complaint about a member of the police or a police officer, then that complaint will continue and conclude even where that police officer leaves the organisation. It is whether or not that complaint amounts to conduct that is assessed as misconduct that would not be progressed in the event of the officer leaving, whether by resignation or retiring. Do you have a view on whether that should change in the latter case? I think that that is something that we would—I can see the frustration for both the member of the public who has had a cause to complain but equally to the officer who may wish that opportunity to defend his or herself. I think that it is something that probably needs to be explored in further detail. I do not have a definitive view, but I can see arguments for both sides. I have to concur with Mr Harrogreeves. We work very hard to work within the parameters of what we are and are not allowed to do, and certainly any consideration of future legislation or regulations could consider that in and around. It could consider it, of course, but do you take a view as the SPA on whether it should change whether it is unsatisfactory, as some have suggested? I think that we need to understand the broader issues, because we are looking at the lessons learned in England and Wales as well in terms of what they have done in the past and what they are changing, so I think that we would like to understand wider evidence review. Final thing from me. Do you have a view—the park has suggested that section 33ab of the Public Order and Criminal Justice Act 2006 should be extended, which they feel would enable them to investigate those who have previously been employed by a policing body? Do you have a view on whether that should take place? I am aware of Perk's submission, and I think that, as part of the email issues review, I think that that will be looked at in and around. Again, we will consider our position in regards to that matter and where resources best lie. Mr Harrogreeves, do you have a view? I am certainly aware of the complications that can arise as a result of what is essentially a twin-track investigation. Any process or any change that would result in an improved service to both the subject officers and members of the public is something that we would welcome and we would look at. I am a bit concerned, Ms Neil. You have now referred to the Dame Eilish review several times. You are here to answer questions about your processes in SBE from complaints to this committee now, not to look at it in a few months' time and consider it, but to answer those questions now. There are several things that we have asked you, but you do not appear to have the answers to. Can we have written evidence on the procedure for the special leave process on any on-going complaints? Could the committee have that in respect? Have we got the wrong person in front of us today? Do you consider someone else should have been here answering those questions about complaint handling? No, convener. I am the director in charge of complaints handling procedures. Having since returned to work full-time in June, I have worked with a team, worked with a committee and we are currently taking on board various lessons learned from that. We absolutely welcome the Eilish Angelini review because, as our own chair has said, since she took up post in December, she feels that the system is broken and she is very keen to look for system-wide review. I would hope that you would be doing that now and not waiting for a review and especially in preparation to appearing before this committee. I cannot put it any more strongly than that. John Swinney. Mr Harvie, there is a lot of commentary about the issue of officers retiring and, quote, avoiding proceedings. I wonder if you would take the opportunity to confirm my understanding. That is that if a member of the public makes a complaint that infers criminality, then nothing alters the fact that that will be treated as a matter directed by the Crown Office Procurator Fiscal Service, regardless of whether the individual retires or not? Mr Harvie, that is correct. If a member of the public makes a complaint that is considered to be criminal in nature, then that would be referred to the Crown Office Procurator Fiscal Service, in particular the criminal allegations against the police division of that service, and that investigation would continue because, essentially, it is a criminal matter that would be put before our courts if that was deemed the appropriate route to take, regardless of whether that officer retired or resigned. I would like to ask you about the time taken to investigate and conclude complaints. We have had written submissions that highlight lengthy delays that go way beyond the 56-day deadline, so I wonder if you could tell me your views on that and how it can be improved and why that would be happening. I think that there are a number of reasons why a complaint might extend beyond the 56 days. It would depend on the number of allegations, for example, the complexity of those allegations, the number of witnesses that are required to be seen, the volume of evidence that would require to be ingathered to ensure that a full and thorough investigation is undertaken. The time taken, in fact, to agree what I have referred to earlier is that heads of complaint, which can often be a lengthy process to come to an agreement with usually the member of the public about what it is that they would like us to investigate. All of that being said, I recognise that there absolutely is room for improvement, and that, on occasion, it has taken a lot longer than I would personally like. A lot of those complaints are dealt with by local police and division specialist areas of the business. In that regard, we are continually working with those areas of the business to identify areas of best practice to improve the process for complaint handling and, in ways that we can expedite that matter, although it is not compromising the quality of that investigation. Should there be different timescales depending on the complexity of the complaint? Surely it would take much less time to investigate a fairly straightforward complaint to something that is much more intricate, as you have suggested. The time period of 56 days refers to what I would call the standard complaint process, but you are right that that can be anything from something that is deemed either not suitable by the member of the public or by dint of it being known not suitable for front-line resolution. That would automatically fall into the 56 days. There are some complaints that are not suitable for front-line resolution that can and are completed within that 56-day timescale, but, equally, there are other complaints that are either criminal or non-criminal or, as a matter of fact, both in nature. That would require to go beyond that 56 days. I think that the key for us, and it is written into our standard operating procedures, is that we maintain contact with the member of the public, again usually, who is making that complaint, to understand that they understand why there is a perceived delay in the investigation and to ensure that we have the confidence that the matter is progressing at an appropriate pace. You mentioned the standard operating procedure. What is the status of that document? Is that complete? Is that what you work to at the moment? That is what we work to at the moment. That is under regular review, but that is what we work to at the moment. That was based on documentation initially provided by the PIRC. Should there be statutory requirements for the length of time taken to consider complaints, and should the Police, Public Order and Criminal Justice act be amended, as PIRC are suggesting, to define the timescales? You already said that you do not believe in amending that act, but should it be amended in respect of timescales? I do not necessarily think that it is necessary to amend the legislation, to be honest with you. I think that 56-day timescale is more or less suitable. There are, as I said, occasions when it does take longer than we would like, sometimes through necessity, sometimes there are absolutely occasions when we could improve upon that, and as I said, I am working with the local policing divisions and, of course, my own team to improve upon that. I am sure that you appreciate how frustrating it is if people make a complaint to have to wait three months and more for any conclusion, sometimes even response, to be quite honest. No, no, absolutely. That is why I encourage my team and the local policing divisions to where the complaint is going to extend beyond that 56-day period that we maintain contact, in the same way that we would with any other investigation, to ensure that the member of the public understands why something might take longer than that kind of average of 56 days that we use on that guideline. On the SPA, Ms McNeill, how are the timescales working there? I would reflect on what Mr Hargroves has said. Certainly, we are subject to the same timescales as suggested by Perk. We do endeavour to work towards them. The nature of some of the complaints that we get in do tend to be quite complex to try and unpick and compare with the regulations and standards of professional behaviour. Again, there are times when we have exceeded those timescales. We do endeavour to keep our complainers up-to-date once a month. Obviously, we give them a progress as to when complaints go to the Complaints and Conduct Committee for determination as well. Do you engage with the complainant once a month? Indeed. Can I ask if you keep a record of the timescales that are exceeded? Yes, we do. Can we have that, please? I can feel just a very short supplementary question, because I think that my line of questions has been broadly answered and I want to thank the panel for coming in. I would like to highlight as well that I think that it is important, as you mentioned last week, convener, that we always treat panellists with respect when they are in front of us. It was more a question for Mark Harveys following on from Rona Mackay's question. What contact with members of the public would look like in practice? I know that we talked about it once a month there, but what would it look like? Would it be a phone call? Would it be a discussion in person? Would it be a visit? I think that the short answer to that is that it really depends on what that member of the public would prefer, such as that medium, if you like. Some people would prefer a phone call, some people might prefer an email. Some people might prefer no contact until the complaint is resolved, or at least they have a response until the complaint is resolved. That might be too strong a word, of course, if they are not satisfied, but concluded, I would say, from an initial complaint handling perspective. We would encourage contact in whatever form is appropriate or is asked for by that member of the public, which can, of course, be different. Can I thank both panellists for their responses? I think that they have answered in an open and transparent manner. What is the SPA's role in scrutinising the time taken to consider criminal complaints? We have heard about the standard operating procedure in response to Ron Mackay's question earlier on, but I would like to probe a little bit more about how the SPA ensures that Police Scotland follows the standard operating procedure. If we are not going to have that in statute, how do we ensure that that is the case? What other levers can be used? In relation to general complaints handling, that is part of the regular performance reporting that Police Scotland brings to the Complaints and Conduct Committee, so they report in public on a quarterly basis, and that includes things such as timescales. You mentioned criminal allegations, so what we do both from an SPA's perspective in terms of our own complaints, but also in relation to Police Scotland's complaints that are referred to the Crown, is that we have regular dialogue with the Crown on an operational basis to work out where the status of different complaints are. We have recently started a four-party meeting between Police Scotland, Perk and the Crown to sit down with a professional round-table discussion to highlight issues across the system to work out where we can best improve collectively. Would you look at an analysis of those that are breaching the timeframes? Is that a warning flag that says that it is going to be breaching the timeframes? How are we going to avoid that happening? Is that what is happening? Absolutely. Within the SPA at the moment, the Complaints and Conduct Committee had commissioned us to do this five-year look back anyway in terms of what we have done before, what were the timescales, what were the lessons learned, but actually on an on-going basis just now we are looking at all our complaints to say, where are they, how much time have they been taken and how do we bring them to a close one way or another. There has been a substantive piece of work recently to reduce the backlog of complaint cases, which have been progressed at the last two committee meetings. That would include an analysis of where the problem lies and what is it that is taking the time, and how can that be resolved. I thank the witnesses for attending and we look forward to the additional information that you have both indicated that you are going to provide the committee. I spend briefly to allow the witnesses to leave. Gent Item 2 is an evidence session as part of our pre-budget scrutiny ahead of the publication of the Scottish Government's budget 2019-20 later this year. I invite Liam Kerr to make a declaration of interest. Simply to say that I am a member of the Law Society of England and Wales and, separately, of Scotland and I hold practice certificates with both. I refer members to paper 3, which is a note by the Clarke and paper 4, which is a private paper. We will hear from the first panel, two panels on this subject, the first one being from the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal and the Scottish Courts Tribunal Service for the Purpose of Tackling Sexual Crime and Domestic Violence. I welcome Fiona Eadie, Secretary Procurator Fiscal Society, Section FDA Union, Stephen Murray, Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service Branch and Brian Carroll, Scottish Courts and Tribunal Service Branch, PCS Union. I thank all the witnesses for the written submissions, which, as always, is very, very helpful to the committee. We now move to questions starting with one from Shona. Good morning. It is a question on funding and really to explore what the impact that is going to be of the in-year additional funding to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service of up to £3.6 million in this financial year. What difference is going to make, what will it mean for the service? I will start then. FDA very much welcomes the additional funding. We have been here on several occasions before arguing that additional funding was required for the Fiscal Service in order to tackle the challenges that it has in relation to the increase in serious and, in particular, the increase in serious sexual offending that we have dealt with. The committee will be familiar with some of the challenges that have been explained about the complexity of dealing with that type of case work. One of our main requests in recent years has been for an increase in staffing. The additional funding has been allocated to fund a recruitment of up to 140 new members of staff and around about 60 of those will be new lawyers. That, we hope, will alleviate some of the pressures on our colleagues who are required to deliver the service and also to alleviate some of the stresses on them in doing that. The intention, obviously, we understand that that money comes with a requirement to provide an improved service for the public. We hope that that will assist in doing that. I think that we have set out in our paper some of the words of caution that we would provide in relation to how quickly that transformation can be expected to take place. We do not think that recruitment in and of itself will be a solution overnight to that issue. As far as PCS is concerned, we are very much welcome with the increase in budget and the fact that the Government has listened to the concerns not only of the unions but of COPFS management. It is fair enough to say that the case work is changing within the service. There is an increase in more complex cases that take longer to get through and longer to get into court. While we welcome the increase in funding for sexual and domestic offences, we would like to note that other parts of the organisation have been asked for an increase in budget, and they have also been given it, which is very much to giving a better service to the public. As a union, we will be monitoring the situation to ensure that no special preferences are given to anyone at the expense of any others in the service, just to ensure that things are uneven in that respect. As the main union rep for PCS, I have had concerns about the number of staff who have been off with workplace stress in the past couple of years. Since the days of austerity measures in the last 10 years or so, there has been a lot of pressure on our members in PCS, and the increase in budget is very much welcome not only for the service but for the staff and for the unions. That is quite a large number of additional staff, including 6,740, will be lawyers. Presumably, in terms of the priorities for that spend, it will be aligned with the priorities that are set out in terms of what the priorities are for the service and, indeed, the requirements to improve. You said that there might be no quick fixes, that it might be going to take time for that to show an improved performance and a better service to the public. What kind of timeframe would you think is realistic in that respect? I think that perhaps some of my colleagues in senior management of the organisation would be better placed to provide you with that sort of estimate. What I would say, though, and we have made some observations about it again in our written submission, is that, as has been previously observed and accepted, you cannot grow fiscals overnight—they do not grow on trees, I think, was the term used by a previous solicitor general. Beyond the regular training that is required for all solicitors, there is a very specific post with specific demands, skills and expertise that you develop over a period of time. I think that we have indicated that we do not support our current accreditation system that operates in COPFS. Accreditation is a requirement for a further two-year training period to acquire some of those skills. We have some issues about how that operates. In particular, we do not think that it is fair that it comes with a financial penalty. It is on a suppressed salary. However, it is a two-year process. It would probably be for others to say what time expectation there would be to provide the changes that are referred to. However, I would have thought that that kind of two-year period is the period of time. Assuming that we can recruit all the required staff that we need, you would expect to see more experienced legal staff dealing with those cases within that sort of period of time. Presumably, given their permanent staff, that would be a baseline within the budget going forward in order to maintain the assumption? Yes, that is the assumption. I am here representing PCS members from the Scottish Courts and Tribunals service. From our perspective, we welcome the increased funding for COPFS, and there are no issues around that per se, apart from the fact that, if there is to be the increase in staff that is anticipated here, including 60 new lawyers, we anticipate the capacity for the business to be dealt with by COPFS to increase, which therefore may increase the business coming through to Scottish Courts and Tribunals service. Not only in court business, and indeed, as we are seeing on trends at the moment, the business is getting more complex, therefore taking more time to go through the courts. Therefore, there may be a need for increased staff, as we would see it for Scottish Courts and Tribunals service, to deal with that increase. Also, depending on how cases are marked, it might not just be the business going through the court that would increase, but also fines enforcement might increase in that respect as well, because, obviously, when ffiscals are marking papers, they do have the opportunity to put things to direct measures. Therefore, there will be an increase on business there. I would also like to mention the electronic monitoring, which may come on later from other questions, but it may be worth mentioning that just now. In that, I think that it was in one of the responses that it was mentioned that Scottish Government are anticipating that if electronic monitoring increases, there would be no impact on the or little impact on the agencies dealing with that electronic monitoring. However, in Scottish Courts and Tribunals service, we deal with the imposition, the revocation and possibly the reimposition of those orders. Those orders are very complex. Taking overall, if you have got 10 orders coming in, that does not look very much. However, it is about the administrative work that goes behind that to put those orders through the court, so we are anticipating an increase in business in that respect as well. We would like to see, if there is increased funding for one part of the justice sector, then there should be increased funding for other parts of the justice sector. I would also say that, in relation to what Stephen said previously, we would not want to see that increase funding to the detriment of any other funding, including revenue funding, which includes salaries. I think that you made in your submission the impact of breaches of electronic monitoring. Given that there are some financial constraints there that you are already identifying, have you made any representation to the Scottish Government in that respect, that additional resources will be required? Not personally. I do not think that our medium would be through the justice committee. It may be that Scottish Courts and Tribunals service themselves have maybe had discussions through the Scottish Criminal Justice Board and other mediums, but it is certainly PCS, not at this moment in time. That is why we are obviously here today to mention it to ourselves. You have certainly got it on record today. Okay, thank you. Liam Kerr. Very briefly, if I may convene, just Fiona Eadie on the 60 new lawyers point that you are making to my colleague. You talked about the training and how to get these people on board. The current reality is that it does operate, as you have described in your submission. I do not think that there is any realistic prospect of changing that or any move to change that in the near future. Given that it would be fair to say that it is not the best paid branch of the profession and elsewhere in the submission a significant number of left to join the Scottish Government, does that not suggest that even if you can recruit the full 60, what is going to change to improve retention going forward, such that we do not end up recruiting the whole lot and then off they go again? Can I agree with the main thrust of your question there? Can I just check when you say that the current reality is operating and that nothing is likely to change in the near future? To what are you referring? I am not aware of anything. You may have a different view, which I would be keen to hear. As I said, there are the two separate stages for training for solicitors and, in particular, for procurators' fiscal. There is the first stage, which is just your trainee solicitor that you would do if you were going to go and work anywhere as a lawyer, as a solicitor, and then the COPFS themselves have their own system, which is called accreditation. That particular system is something that we hope to keep on the table for review, so I would be hopeful that we can continue discussions on how we might be able to improve that particular aspect of training for our lawyers. Going back to the rest of your question, that is absolutely right. We have just undertaken a recruitment exercise in the past few weeks. It was confirmed yesterday that it is round about 24 new staff and new lawyers that we are taking on, which, as I said, is very welcome. I do not have the precise figures in relation to those who have left, in particular, to go off to the Scottish Government, but anecdotally, I know that it is a significant portion, and we outlined in our submission that many of those have gone off on significantly increased salaries. Our point is that we do not wish to devalue the work that colleagues in the Scottish Government undertake. There is value in the work that everybody there does, the legal department and those in the various policy branches. Our point is that how can it be right for the lawyers who have to deal with victims and witnesses of crime, who prosecute child sexual offences, and some of the most serious and violent offenders in Scotland, to be remunerated so significantly less than their Scottish Government counterparts? That is something that we will continue to make the case there. As we again outlined in our written evidence, we know that when the business case went in to the finance secretary in relation to the additional funding, it was very much specifically for recruitment. It was not for enhanced salaries for existing staff. Our concern is that recruitment is only part of the solution. Retention is a key part of it. Unless we can retain our existing staff and unless we can be the most attractive employer and be competitive in that particular market, the commitments that were made in relation to the business case to secure the additional funding may not be deliverable. On the admin side, PCS is very concerned about the level of staff turnover of staff who are leaving for Scottish Government places. It seems to be down to pay disparity, but it is something that we will be looking to raise in future pay negotiations. It should also be noted that, despite the extra finance that is very welcome, COPFS is still continuing with its review. As a union, we will be vigorously opposing any proposed office closures that might affect the service that we provide to the public and to the impact that we should have on PCS members. Finally, on the subject of pay, we would like to state that future funding for COPFS has to meet ministerial commitments on pay, which have been given to PCS officials previously. I would just like to echo what Stephen said just now about the staff within SCTS. Staff going from other departments into Scottish Government is not unique to COTS or SCTS. We have staff who are regularly transferring over to Scottish Government main because of the better pay scales. That is an argument for having a cohesive pay policy across Scottish Government main, taking into account all agencies in the Scottish sector, which would assist in the issue that Liam Gray raised. In respect of that, we would like to see the Cabinet Secretary for Finance live up to the commitments that were made to staff about restoring the value of public sector workers' pay, especially in the justice sector, where all three organisations in the justice sector had difficulty in meeting the base requirements of the pay policy. I will follow up a couple of lines of questioning. First, in relation to the additional capacity that is going to be enabled through the in-year funding, do you have a sense of the proportion of where that is going to rest? You talked about the complexity of cases, but also the growing prevalence of sexual and domestic violence abuse cases. I am sure that you will not be able to put an actual number on it, but the proportion of the extra staff that are coming in, how is that going to be split in terms of meeting that demand in relation to sexual violence cases and other pressures of demand in other areas that Stephen Murray was talking about? You are right. I cannot put a figure on it. Senior management from COPFS may be able to do that when I am sure that you will hear from them at some point in this process. I can give you a feel for it and the kind of information that is coming to me from members. It is borne out, I think, by the department's own stated commitment to tackling serious crime and, in particular, the serious sexual offending. There has been a lot of movement internally within the organisation of people moving into our high court function and, in particular, into those teams that deal with sexual offence matters. That is where I would say that the majority of the focus has been in recent time. We have asked the question and received some reassurances that that should not be at the expense of other parts of the organisation. Our work is split up into three main functions, which are our local courts, our summary courts, our sheriff and jury courts, and then the serious case work and the high court work. Our concern goes back to the point that we are making about training and development and where people are likely to be located when they are recruited. We would be very concerned, frankly, if people were inexperienced staff for being recruited into the organisation and placed directly in to deal with the serious case work and the sexual offence cases. Again, there are reasons why that should not happen in terms of our own internal procedures. The anxiety that is coming to us from members in the local court function is that they will be the ones who will bear the burden of doing the majority of the training and development and coaching, mentoring and developing colleagues in that part of the organisation. In the main, what we would expect to see is the experienced prosecutors moving in to deal with the serious case work and the high court work. I cannot really be any more specific than to say that that is the picture that we have seen and some of the potential areas of concern that we are monitoring. In terms of Mr Carle's point about the volume impact of the investment going into CLP and PFS on other parts of the system, notably the courts and tribunals service, there is a suggestion that there are cases not being taken forward at the moment because those resources are not there in COPs or is the additional resource going to lead to a more efficient running of COPs that therefore should not create a bulge elsewhere in the system? What is your impression of that? I would not suggest that there are cases that are not currently being progressed but for additional funding or additional staff resources would otherwise have been. I would say that there are work on going and looking at some of our internal processes to make them as efficient as possible. One of the areas that we very much hope that the additional funding will provide is greater capacity and resilience within the organisation so that what I would be wanting to see and I think what all of us within CLP and PFS would want to see, because our staff are hard-working committed professionals trying to deliver the very best service that they can, is to provide additional time for preparation. It is an area of our work that we have been talking about for some time because we know that it creates significant stress for our members when they have any adequate time to prepare cases. We would be hoping that, in fact, the additional staff will provide some extra resilience and capacity for people to be well prepared when they go into court. Would that reduce the problems of churn that we have heard about in our earlier inquiry, or would it speed up the time taken to take cases forward, which might address what Mr Sakal was talking about in terms of the volume that they are seeing? It is quicker, it is not necessarily more, but it is coming through the system. Churn is quite a complex issue. There are a lot of factors that influence it. However, I would say that the more time staff have to prepare the cases, the better that is for everybody. As a factor that contributes towards churn, that should have a positive impact. I can see where you are going with that, Liam. I would come back and say that the Scottish Courts and Tribunals service work collaboratively with all justice partners. One of the areas is looking at trends and the business coming through. Certainly from a PCS administrative point of view, we want to see the service to the public being the service that the people of Scotland want and deserve, being the democratic nation that we are and justice being part of that democracy. What we need to deliver to the people of Scotland is an effective, efficient service. However, I feel still that notwithstanding what has been said, there will be an increase in business coming through, not just in high court cases but also possibly the summary cases, because we cannot forget that there are the JP courts here and the sheriff courts, as well as the high court. All I feel will be affected by the increase in staff, although the focus will be—I accept that—on the high-end cases. However, I think that over time, as I have put in my submissions, as that gets better, time would be freed up to focus on other areas of the justice system. I just really wanted to go back to a comment that Fiona Eadie and Stephen Murray alluded to in terms of pay disparity. I was just wondering if you could quantify that both in terms of lawyers and administrative staff in terms of the disparity between the COPFS and Scottish Government? Yes, I can. It might be better perhaps following this session that we could provide copies to the committee that show the pay ranges. Even roughly? Is it 10 per cent less? Is it half? What I can say—we mentioned it in our submission—is that we have colleagues who have moved over from COPFS, and it is the first lawyer grade in COPFS, who have moved over essentially on a level transfer to the Scottish Government, and they are being paid in excess of £10,000 more. That is helpful. It is a big difference. In my experience, first hand, from speaking to people who are leaving the service and the admin grades, the reason they are leaving is not because they are perfectly unhappy in COPFS, but because there is more money being offered by the Scottish Government across the grades. I do not have any specific figures for you, but we are talking about feedback from people who leave. It is becoming a concern in both unions. We are losing a lot of good people because the perception is rightly wrongly that they are earning more money with the Scottish Government in another department. Can I just also briefly ask—you mentioned workplace stress. How significant a problem is that? What is the source of it? Is it workload or are there other issues at play? I am the main PCS rep for the admin grades. In my workload, there has been an increase in the number of people who have been offered workplace stress. It is down to various factors. It could be down to pressure of work, relations with managers and so on. I do feel that now that we are getting extra funding and extra staffing coming in, that is something that will help to alleviate that. It is very much welcomed across the board by staff and unions alike that we are getting more staffing to help. In terms of the pressures that staff face on a daily basis, that can only be a good thing. Can I perhaps just come back on a point there? It was really just to say that you are absolutely right. It is not my place to put down or criticise in any way the work being done in other parts of the public sector and other sort of government lawyers. I think that there is a particular stress that prosecutors have to face because of the nature of the work that they are dealing with. Particularly, we have already explored the increase in serious cases and serious sexual offending cases. We have arrangements in place for vicarious trauma support for people who are undertaking that work over a lengthy period of time. It is also a factor that plays in people's minds when they think about, well, actually, I could go over and I could sit in an office dealing with routine—not routine—a different type of work that does not bring those additional stresses and anxieties and be paid more. I think that we understood that as a point well-made. We have covered quite a bit of ground already. I was going to ask about whether the targeting of funding was appropriate to placing. It seems to be that there is general consensus that a business case was built around that and that there is support for it. However, I am interested in the issue when we looked into, when we did our review and we were concerned about the number of temporary staff that were in place. Are those additional posts going to be offset with that? Perhaps Mr Murray, if you could expand on your comment that you made if I hopefully noted you correctly what you talked about, concerns about special preference being given? It is not much special preference as such. It was targeting areas of work. I mean, it is mentioned in the sexual offences domestic cases, which are very significant crimes and should be looked at separately that serious stuff. However, my role as a union rep is to ensure that, if there is any pressures, that does not get transferred to somewhere else in the expense of other areas. I do not believe that to be the case at the moment, because COPFS management has assured us that across the board they have been given the extra finance that every function that is asked for the increased finance has been given it. I hope that that being the case, that that will not be a factor. In terms of the temporary staff that you mentioned, that has been an issue particularly with the admin grades for some time. I do have to say that the good news is that there has been recruitment and it is permanent recruitment and the Crown agent himself is given as a guarantee that he is very much interested in having people who are going to be placed there permanently because it gives him more of a stake in the organisation and you probably get more from them. Can I just clarify then that there was concerns expressed in our report about those numbers? Was that a process that was put in place or the replacement of some of those country contracts with permanent staff, part of that 80, if we take away the 60 new lawyers from the 140? Was it happening anyway in advance of this? It has been happening in advance. I have to say that it is something that the PCS is very much welcome. We are on the right track in that respect. I do not think that there is any great desire to go back to the days of having great numbers of temporary staff there, which is not good for anybody's concern, whether it is the individual employee or the actual employer. In the main, my question is going to ask whether the funding needs to be long-term. I think that you have already answered that, but I am just wondering if there is a view as to whether or not the increase in the volume of serious sexual offences is something that is going to continue into the future, or whether it is a short or medium-term bulge in demand? I am just wondering whether there is a view on that. I do not have the figures immediately to recall now, but there was a report by the inspectorate of prosecution last year, possibly the year before now. In the last couple of years, there has been a report by the inspectorate that looked at the caseload of COPFS in relation to sexual offending. Interestingly, in that report it was identified, the categorisation of that work was identified as being a trend rather than a peak or a blip. It is something that we expect to continue. That is the reason why the internal structural changes have been made to the organisation and the business case to support some of that. I am sure that colleagues from senior management could elaborate in greater detail for you, but, yes, it is something that, based on current information and the most recent assessment, we would expect to see to continue. Is that a view shared by PCS? It is very difficult to envisage what can happen in the future, but I do have feedback from speaking to senior management, whose opinion is that, as Fiona says, it is a trend that is not going to be a peaks and troughs. It is going to be something that is going to be steady work coming through, and that is why I think that the advice to address it is such a fashion. I would just also like to drill into the numbers. When we are hearing loud and clear that the additional money is welcome, that the additional resource is welcome, but if you look at the budget for COPFS over the last few years and you look at it in real terms, in 2014-15, the budget was £120 million in real terms in today's money, and it is essentially going back to £116 million. In real terms, that is £4 million less, so that is just over 3 per cent decline. Is that a concern? To what extent are the additional resources, real additional resources, just a restoration of the resource that was there back in 2014-15? There are a few things. If I may, I would take you back even further than the 2014 figures back to the 2009-2010 figures, because we analysed there that had our budget kept pace with inflation today, or by 2017, which was the most recent inflation figures that I could establish. It would have been £150 million, a difference of over £35 million, and a real terms cut in the COPFS budget of over 23 per cent. In real terms, the inflationary pressures, and the fact that a far greater percentage of our overall budget is spent on staffing, the pressure on the organisation has increased. To be fair, when you talk about restoration of figures, we had some toonion flowing with the department when we were preparing our submission about whether that would simply restore our staffing figures to a previous high, or whether it would take it to an all-time high. I am told that I am reassured that it will take it to an all-time high, but the proportion of our budget in previous years that was spent on staffing was, I think, 59 per cent, and it is now approaching 70 per cent, I think that it was 67 per cent or something, at the amount of the budget that goes towards staff costs. Just on that all-time high point specifically, is that an all-time high in headcan or FTE, because I think that it is always important to be very clear on that point? I am told that I am reassured that it is full-time equivalent. I will be grateful for the PCS view. I just want to say that restoration in terms of staff, we have been given guarantees that it will be an all-time high, and senior management has given us a very positive outlook on that. The point that I would make is that when you talk about real terms and things like that, wages have not kept them less than 10 years, and that is something that the PCS is a union that is very much concerned about in the wages for members. That is something that we will be pushing for in the months ahead. Just on the point about the need for real terms increases, certainly for SCTS, the inflationary pay costs alone are £3 million to £4 million a year. Certainly, PCS, SCTS branch feel that there is a need for real terms increases in revenue budgets to account for rising costs, including inflation, as opposed to reductions to budget in real terms. SCTS, like all other justice partners, have long-term fixed costs. As far as our information is concerned, SCTS does not have any room for absorbing future inflationary or staff costs. I am just going back to the point that I made earlier. From an SCTS perspective and from justice partners perspective, there needs to be a real terms increase in costs, including those for staff salaries. Although we are here talking about the justice sector in terms of criminal business, SCTS has responsibility for tribunals and the office of the public guardian. The tribunals, as the justice sector committee will know, are ever expanding at the moment, not only for tribunals that are responsible for Scotland in terms of devolved responsibilities, but they are reserved tribunals to possibly come on stream in 2021 as well. In respect of the office of the public guardian, we have seen recently from the mental welfare commission a report in September 2018, which has seen an increase of 149 per cent of powers of attorney registered between 2008-09 and 2017-18. That was guardianships. There has been an increase of 149 per cent between 2008-09 and 2017-18. Powers of attorney registered have risen from 47,000 in 2012-13 to a projected 82,000 in 2017-18. That is an increase of 71 per cent. At the moment, the staff in the office of the public guardian have not seen an increase in staff there either. We are covering that with temporary staff, and we would like to see the funding for those staff to be converted into full-time staff as well. The point is well made where there is an increase in work road because of trends, because of issues in society that should be reflected. I wonder before we leave the staffing issue, if Ms Eadie you could tell me. Have any of the COPF staff been seconded to the inspectorate? We are done in the past that that was quite common for this to happen. How many? I do not know the numbers. It is a couple of staff. It is done by advert an application as opposed to a tap on the shoulder and a secondment. This is where you are going. When vacancies have arisen there, they have been advertised and being available for COPFS staff to apply for. Would the pay skills be the same or higher than they would initially be getting? That is a very good question and one that I do not know the answer to. We would be delighted if you could find out and get back to us. Liam Kerr. Just a couple of wrap-up questions from me. Just on that point you just made, Brian Carroll, about the other tribunals having an increase in workload. I think I am right in saying that the UK-wide statistics of employment tribunals might have a more narrow understanding of the Scottish picture, but I think that there has been a 170 per cent increase in claims filed in one year. In any event, has there been any increase in staff as a result of what has been one way or another a significant increase? Employment tribunals have not been devolved to the Scottish Government as yet. We are expecting employment tribunals to come over in 2021. That is one of the reserved tribunals that we are expecting that they will possibly come over at that point, along with immigration in one or two others. Right, but when we are talking about funding at the moment, we do not need to engage in that discussion. In terms of the Scottish Courts of Tribunals, we have responsibility for, for example, housing and property. The chamber is one where at the moment we are expecting an expansion of staff. That funding in terms of that expansion may already be taken care of, because I think that the chamber has been made in terms of the very recent housing and rent and landlord legislation, which is moving from actions going through court to disputes being taken through tribunal. For example, over the last few years, SCTS has taken on the Scottish Land Court. We are due to take on the parking adjudicators in 2019. There are reserved tribunals in terms of employment, for example. I think that there has been that increase in the employment tribunals because of the fees for employment tribunals being taken away. That would be a concern for the Scottish Courts and Tribunals service about the funding of that when they eventually come over. I want to go back to the point that you made earlier, Fiona Eidy. In terms of the recruitment of ffiscals and bringing people in rather than having to move out, let's assume—as you heard at the start—that I am in private practice for 17 years, but I am not in this area at all. Let's say that I wanted to go the other way. Presumably, I would be looking at a base salary scale, but for the first two years, not withstanding 17 years as a qualified lawyer, the first two years I would be on this reduced salary for the accreditation scheme. Is that correct? That is correct. I wonder if I can ask the panel to comment on a submission that we received from the Miscarriage of Justice Organisation Glasgow, where they say that the COPFS is under-resourced, requires a different standard, and they welcome the additional funding, but they are deeply concerned about the lack of any similar proposal for criminal legal aid. They are talking generally and more specifically in the context of the duty solicitor scheme. I know that there are currently nine bar associations who have not participated in that. Is that something that has impacted that you are aware of in your experience? I do not feel I am well placed to answer questions on that, I am afraid. That would be legal matters in video with admin side, so I would not have sufficient knowledge to make a comment on that. I suppose that it was just to see if it disrupted any business, and I suppose that there was a knock-on if end, but we can take it out with the relevant submission. There were just two other things, and that was just in the submission from PCS, continuing backlog and maintenance needs to be tackled. Are we talking about maintenance of the estate? Yes, it is the SCTS estate. That is the SCTS estate alone. There is a continuing backlog maintenance of £39 million currently. My information is that SCTS needs to spend at least £5 million a year on backlog maintenance to maintain that level alone. What would be the implications if that is not addressed? The backlog maintenance will just keep going up and up and up. What that would mean is that services for the public and indeed the accommodation for the staff that are working in the buildings would deteriorate over time. Could it get to a point where it was holding up business, potentially? Possibly. Can I ask you about the retained fines income and the shortfall of £1 million? That was something that we had picked up from board reports. It is because a lot of other direct measures are being used rather than complaints being served for people to come through court. In respect of the shortfall, one of the direct measures that are being used in favour of others was police warnings. Instead of fines being imposed, police warnings were being given. That is for lower-level crime. Is it a case that a level was expected to be projected because there has been a change? I do not know that it was expected that an FSCTS or coming along to speak to that to the Justice Committee. They may be able to give more information on that. I think that the trend was expected to remain possibly constant if not increase that more fines were going to be collected. What I would say on that is that sheriff court fines collected are not retained. They are remitted to the UK Government as far as I am aware currently. It is only since the courts unified that fines, for example, such as JP court fines and other fixed penalty fines, some of that income can be retained by SCTS. In particular, I notice that you make the point in the submission that the SCTS branch or the view with the increase in funding of the COPF is bound to have an effect on the throughput of business and whether that would affect possible increases in business in terms of an increase in fines enforcement work in the court. I mean, it depends on how the fiscal mark the cases for coming through, but what we were anticipating was that an increase in staff could have an effect on both the business going through the courts as well as direct measures being used. Therefore, that would have an increase on fines enforcement. Would it be possible to give some more information on the shortfall of £1 million? I could certainly find that out and put that information in if you are wanting that, yes. That would be helpful. Okay, thank you. Are we any of other questions? No further questions, it only means to me to thank the witnesses for a very good evidence session and to spend briefly to allow for a change of witnesses and a five-minute comfort break. Our second panel on pre-budget scrutiny will focus on funding of the third sector organisations operating within the justice sector, and I welcome Chris McCully, Development Coordinator, Criminal Justice Voluntary Sector Forum. Casework team miscarriages of justice organisations Scotland, Stuart Valentine, Chief Executive, Relationship Scotland and Tom Halpan. Tom Halpan, Chief Executive of SACRO, you are all very welcome. I thank you again for the written submissions. They are tremendously helpful for the committee to be able to look at those in advance of the evidence session and pick out elements that we want to ask you in more detail about. We will go straight to questions, starting with one from Rona. Thank you, convener. Good morning, panel. Can I ask you whether you think that the current funding of third sector organisations helps to support the development and continuity of good services? Given the huge scale of great service that the third sector provides, do you think that you are receiving adequate support, and just anybody who wants to start? Good morning, convener, and thank you very much for the opportunity to appear before you today. It is quite difficult to know what level of support there is available for the third sector out there. At present, the Scottish Government does not provide detailed breakdowns as standard of budget, so it is quite difficult to know what support goes out to the sector as a whole. I think that we can generalise that there are some bigger headline items that they have provided support for over the previous last couple of years. They have done quite a lot support around funding individual organisations. In 2017-18, they provided £3 million to seven different organisations. They have provided funding to the national mentoring public social partnerships, which have run shine new routes among others, and HMP LoMOS. They have also provided funding to the prison visitor centres, all of which are provided by the voluntary sector in partnership with the Scottish Prison Service. There is also the work of the third sector division of the Scottish Government to support the voluntary sector in that way. However, in terms of whether or not that supports enough, we are getting into the essence of the submissions about what the issues for the voluntary sector are at the minute. Those issues are quite considerable. If we look at funding cycles at the minute, we are tending to see them having a very considerable impact. If we are looking at local services and local supports, there is a real issue at the minute of a loss of funding for voluntary sector services, particularly services provided by local authorities. You have seen the Social Work Scotland submission that, by its submission, is leading to a reduction in voluntary sector service provision. The Scottish Government is providing considerable support across a number of different areas in the justice system. On the ground, we are seeing considerable loss of services. I thank you for the opportunity to come and speak to you this morning. A direct answer to the question from our perspective is that we are inadequately funded to the extent that our service is now under serious threat. We have been encouraged to see that there has been significant funding made available in the broader context of victim support. We welcome that. We entirely welcome that. Really, our position is that we would like to see ourselves as being regarded as mainstream in that context, in that the individuals that we represent are most certainly victims, and yet we are almost entirely excluded from the mainstream funding that is available to other organisations. We are, as I say, significantly underfunded, and that is the one great issue that faces us just now. It is actually an existential threat to us, and that is why I am particularly pleased to be able to come and talk to you about these things today. Can I ask how long your organisation has been going? We were founded in 2001, so 17 years and counting. Have you always struggled at that funding level? We had funding that was more appropriate to its time earlier on in our life cycle. We also were providing, as a start-up, a perhaps less sophisticated and less widespread service, but the demand for our service has now increased to the extent that the growth is significant. We are growing in terms of client demand at a rate of perhaps 30 per cent per year, and the funding has not grown in any—in fact, it is one could almost say in real terms—it has diminished over the time, so that we are facing increasing pressure just to provide the service that we have, either to be in providing. Thank you. Can I ask Mr Faluntham? Yes, happy to come in. I think that across the voluntary sector, the third sector, the issue of core funding is very key. Now, my own organisation in Relationship Scotland, we do get money through the Cora Foundation, through the Children, Young People and Families Early Intervention Fund. Many other sources of funding of the scale that would be required for our network is very hard to find, so you have the big funders of the Scottish Government, the big lottery. Beyond that, it is very difficult to see what funders are out there that can provide funding on the level that organisations like ours need. One very live issue for us is that the big lottery currently gives Relationship Scotland Network £750,000 a year for our child contact centres. That will run out over the next 18 months, and it is unclear. Certainly, the big lottery is saying that it will not be able to continue to provide that level of funding. In terms of where else to go, there are very few places to go. Clearly, to the Scottish Government is one route, but there are not a lot of options for funding of that level. In particular, for the voluntary sector as a whole, as I mentioned, the core funding issue, many funders want to provide smaller amounts for new innovative projects, but across the whole sector, there are vital services that need to continue on an on-going basis and will be needed for many years to come. That core funding needs to keep coming through or else the foundations that organisations are built on would not be able to continue. My experience would reflect what I am hearing from colleagues today. It would be realistic to say that the overall funding picture is impacted by the availability of money in the system. We understand that that is a contract in different areas. Scottish Government has been consistent with some support to my organisation with core funding through Gran every year, so I have stuck with that. That has been very welcome. One of the features of that, which you might want to reflect on, is that you then have inconsistency across the country, because when you have 32 authorities making their own local decisions and some prefer in-house and out-house, you then have funding decisions being made at that level, which can be quite catastrophic for services where the most impact is at the local level. How do we raise that conversation up to what do we do with the resources that are available across the whole system and ensure that the third sector voice is heard in those discussions? The biggest concern that I would have is that you are told about the decision where after it has been made and you have not had a chance to be part of what would savings look like, what would a different type of service look like, it has come like no, we have made this decision and sorry that is it. Lee McArthur supplementary? On this one? Was it you and something right? Yes, no, it was not a supplementary on that one. Move on to voting. I was actually just, it goes on nicely from Tom Halpin's point there. I know that most of the submissions have welcomed the Scottish Government funding and I should have sent community justice, but how do we think, how do the panel think that we can better utilise third sector organisations along with statutory resources? As I gave you the links right back, it is about being seen as an equal partner and not something that is not statutory and you have to be very careful what conversations you have because of unfair advantages. The great experience, the bits of the public social partnership and the change fund that clearly did not play out as it was intended in terms of sustained funding, but what really, everybody involved said really works was the initial co-design stage and the coming together of a solution. If you just look at that one experience, and I am not talking about just one public social partnership, a number of them were able to tackle gender inequality across Scotland, across all of Scotland in a very quick period of time and get it up and running now. That was where the third sector were able to come to the table with partners and local authorities for very effective solutions very quickly. So it is more about the involvement in the conversation and in the co-design. I think that partnership was very key, not duplicating, having different organisations providing roughly the same thing, making it more focused is very helpful, and also following on from the recommendations of the Christie commission, having services integrated as much as possible. I can speak most closely of course with the work of Relationship Scotland. We were formed through a merger between Relate Scotland and Family Mediation back in 2008 and what we are now able to do is provide a whole range of family support services from the one hub, a different hub across the country but integrated at the local level as well. I think that results in certainly cost savings, a clearer route through for clients and overall a more efficient service. I would just add to the comments already that obviously that sort of process of allocating funding, deciding what resources are targeted where and commissioning process, and the involvement of the voluntary sector in that process is really vital to understanding first of all the need of people going through the justice system, and then secondly about what is practical to deliver. Picking up on Tom's point, that sort of conclusion and collaborative approach to service design development is fundamental, but there is a question about the support available for the voluntary sector locally and the voluntary sector nationally. To be able to engage in processes, to be able to allocate the time and the resources to developing a new service or a particular programme, you need to be able to dedicate staff time and resources. We are talking about commissioning activities, really, really considerable amounts of time having to go into writing bids to developing services to all those sort of merry-go-round of services that then the funding cycle means that you're having to do it every single year, you've got a considerable period at the start of the year ramping up and ratcheting up your services, and at the end of the year you've got a considerable period of time potentially winding them down. We'll need to be told at the last minute that actually your funding has been confirmed. It's fairly standard practice for voluntary sector providers to have to issue redundancy notices come February every year because they haven't got their funding confirmed until they have to retract those notices later on by the time they get to March. Ultimately, that has a significant impact on people's lives, not just staff members, but it also has a significant impact on the people using the services, because many services particularly say something like addiction services have a base on that. It would be wholly unconscionable to accept someone on their service and to start them on a period of support to then have to retract that because your funding teases to exist as of the 1st of April. One way that we can get the most out of the third sector is making sure that those funding cycles actually work effectively and that there's not this tremendous amount of wastage that goes on. I think that that's something that certainly the Scottish Government can leave from the front on and make sure that they don't replicate the sort of mistakes that are possible. I'd like to associate myself with Mr McCulley's remarks there in relation to the funding cycle. In the particular nature of the work that we do, every new client that we take on is by definition a long-term commitment. You're looking at a period from perhaps a minimum of five years to a lifelong commitment and the absence of a commitment to the funding that we require to do that creates exactly the problems that Mr McCulley was talking about. In terms of integration of our service with others, I'm not trying to claim any uniqueness of status yet. Perhaps our service is perhaps a little different from the other services being examined just now, but we do, in so far as possible, dovetail with the publicly provided service in that we seek to bring our clients to that service. These are clients who are, by their very nature, distrustful of any agency of the state, and a large part of what we do is to support and to system simply integrating with services that are available. The difficulty for us arises where the very specialist services that our particular clients require do not exist. That, I suspect, is however more an issue for healthcare provision than justice, so perhaps I should leave it at that. Thanks very much for those answers. I did go some way to set the national scheme and there was also some discussion about what was happening at local authority level as well. I wanted to ask for where it's appropriate for your organisation about how you can impact on at the very individual level, if you like. There was a lot of talk about the community payback orders that are being used on an individual basis, and community payback orders can bring in a variety of services. I know that that might be quite specific, but I'm even thinking in terms of some of the funding that has recently been announced for female offending, for example, when it's been set up in several local authority areas over the country. Is that an opportunity to get involved in that for your organisations and other third sector, or do you see it as a further challenge? We'd like to—yes, Mr Allan. So that question directly impacts on the work of my own organisation, so we have the experience of it. We supervise unpaid work in the City of Glasgow. We have done it in other local authority areas, and we along with other third sector organisations provide support to other activities and other bits of the order. The benefit of the third sector involvement in some way is the added value that brings to the table beyond the statutory requirement. There's huge innovation in local authorities' work in delivering unpaid work. This is in no way diminishing from that in no way replacing that. Small things like the third sector creativity, not having the statutory controls in some ways and in others, can bring other players to the table. You see examples like groundworks in improving the physical location, etc. Even having those contacts of bringing further education colleges to the table with access activities and stuff like that, is that creative thinking beyond the demand that you've got every day just adds value. That's not always just got a pound sign. That's joining up dots. It goes back to my fundamental theme of not being afraid to involve this broad sector in these conversations. I wrote a piece about power to the people. It's very important that no one body at the table holds all the power here. If you're a citizen that really needs help, you want to be really in control of yourself and your own destiny when it's going. If you come to that table with the conversation of, I've got the statutory authority and you are coming as the third sector and you're not the statutory authority, whether it's intended or unintended, there is a consequence in that dynamic. As a Scotland, it's going to build the Scotland that we all want. It's got to be something where we're all equal on this. That fundamental bit of involving the third sector in the conversation is really quite deep to the design of the services that we all want in Scotland. Anyone else? Yes, Mr McHann? I think to pick up on what Tom said about the potential unique role that the third sector can play in working with individuals, there's quite a bit of research. There's certainly an emerging body of research about a distinctive role that the voluntary sector can play in relation to working with people in the justice system. The first thing that you find is that you've got a relationship that isn't characterised by coercive control. It's not the same way that a prison officer or a social worker might have an ability to breach or to determine additional punishment for an individual, so that sets up a very different relationship in terms of services. It also then means that you can build personal relationships in a way that you can't perhaps necessarily do with other services. It allows one piece of research by Dr Philip Tomzack at the University of Sheffield. The voluntary sector is particularly good at allowing people to build social capital through bringing those things, like Tom said, those additional resources into the table to allow a more holistic look at support for individuals. In terms of whether or not those things are opportunities, I think that the third sector could be front and centre. We've got the relationship, we've got the skills, as well. I'm sure that most of my colleagues at the table would agree that in terms of the actual services, most services have to report to very high standard in terms of demonstrating their effectiveness. That's usually done through an outcomes focus, so that sort of proven success as well means that this is definitely an opportunity for the third sector. Mr Halpin. Just to complete my reflection on that one, it's an ugly truth in recent times of the additional moneys of command, etc, with pressure, everyone's on, where we would have previously seen a flow of a portion of that coming natural to the third sector. It does, at the moment, appear to be the first reaction, is that we do it in-house because of all the pressures we've got, making use of the teams that we've got, and whether it's intended or not intended, the third sector is increasingly not involved in those new initiatives at the moment. Ms McElride. If I could just speak again from our own experience, I think that the particular service that we provide is one that can effectively only be provided through the third sector, simply because of the nature of the problem. Our overarching function is to seek at least to reintegrate damaged people back into society. The problem that we have is that the people who are seeking to reintegrate have a well-founded mistrust of almost everything that is society, certainly all the institutions and agencies of the state. I think that the trust that is absolutely critical to the work that we do can really only be engendered in a voluntary organisation situation, rather than attempting to develop that through an agency of the state. In that sense, I agree with what my colleagues at the table have said. Anyone else? Yes. Very briefly, just to say that our work at Relationship Scotland, we work very closely with the courts. For example, in our child contact centres, 80 per cent of the referrals to our child contact centres come directly from the courts or from solicitors. There is a key role in terms of the way in which we can work with the people who come to us. Many are extremely vulnerable, they have a whole range of different issues that you may expect. Our ability to work very closely with them over an extended period is a real strength of the voluntary sector, and that strongly complements the work that the courts are trying to do around all the issues of child contact. Two supplementaries, Shona and Daniel. Just to build on what has been said, you have all recognised that funding is a challenge, that it is impossible to fund everything everywhere. Therefore, a different approach needs to be taken to how you work together with each other as third sector organisations and then how you interact with statutory services. Tom Halpin mentioned an example earlier on, which sounded a very positive one around effective partnership. It would be helpful either at the moment or following up from the session if you would be able to furnish us with other examples of where you have proactively collaborated as third sector organisations. Whether or not in your future plans you have those for the next couple of years, because I think that it is about avoiding duplication, but it is also about building plenty of strength. It would be helpful either now or as a follow-up to get that. I do not need to apologise. I can follow up happy to do that, but there are huge amounts of examples. Shina mentioned is a collaboration of eight organisations. In the city of Edinburgh here we have a collaboration of bright choices of across four organisations with six women from BME communities who speak 20 languages, support and survivors of FGM. Those are real collaborations that are on the ground and the thing that is increasingly difficult at the moment in bringing collaborations together, because although money is contracting not just across local authorities spend, it is also contracting across independent funders being available. Have you heard about threats from the future or the feeling of risk for projects such as big lottery funding and so on? I think that the funding issue in terms of collaboration, but when you go beyond a specific intervention and collaboration around an intervention is one of the easier ones. It is when you collaborate in broader things around resources, around bank office functions and things like that. Government, third sector division and others, as well as the third sector of a role to play in how we support organisations and understand that better. Collaboration is broader than just the service that we deliver. Tom, you brought to life quite strongly how the third sector is quite critical or certainly adds value in terms of community justice orders. We also hear quite regularly at this committee that one of the things that holds them back is simply the understanding of what is available to them. To what degree is the instability of funding holding back the use of community justice orders and, furthermore, their effectiveness because of a lack of funding? That is a very good question. I hear about perceived rocktons of sentences to engage. My experience of it is that if it is a credible and consistently available intervention, sentences have no difficulty with it. It is when it is not credible or it is not always there that they lose faith in that. We need to always go back to what is our strategy and what is the aims of Scotland's justice strategy. The preventative spend, which is the low-hanging fruit, and if I ask organisations like me, we are really under-pressured now in terms of those types of services. It might be said that it is good in the house, but we know ourselves that it is withdrawing from it. You look at issues that the Government and Fairness are looking seriously at just now, but it cannot be the Scottish Government that is holding that it needs local authorities for things like bail supervision. Raman has gone back up. We very recently have had 400 women in Scotland's prisons again, yet that is the areas where we have suffered the biggest funding cuts, bail supervision. The strategy and the decisions around that are not joining up, so those are the areas that I would welcome more scrutiny of. You make a good point and timely, given that we have a debate on Raman tomorrow. Can I ask one final cheeky question in this session? If community justice services receive £35 million a year, but the Scottish Prison Service receives £361 million a year, is that the right balance? If it is not, what should that balance look like? I would be interested in anyone's response to that. I do not believe that it is the right balance. It is a balance that you are trapped into at the moment because you have to make some really brave and decisive changes to be able to move. If you look at other Scandinavian countries and the prison population and things like that, it can be made where people fear that you will have a crime wave, that it will be more unsafe, et cetera. If we look at what has happened with the great story around youth justice in Scotland, we took young adults out of the court system and youth offending reduced. That was in Aberdeen with the whole systems approach at that time. It is about building confidence around us, but it will not shift that balance unless you make decisive change. You mentioned remand, and as Daniel said, we have a debate on that tomorrow. Part of our report was looking at the resources for through care after someone leaves remand, also for the opportunity to have some meaningful activity while people are on remand. The point was made that that would need to be resourced. Do you have a view on that? How could we do that? Does that need to go into the legislation? I suppose that my next point is that there might be resources for it, but if it is not given directly to the voluntary sector and it goes through the local authority, there is sometimes competition. They decided to do it in-house. How can you make your case? They will be good at some things, you may excel at others. How do you make the case for you being able to get that funding? The reason we had the Angiolini Commission was the gender inequality, but also geographical inequality of service availability, particularly in voluntary through care, which was always an obligation on local authorities. Remand is really an extension of that in my view. When we designed the SHINE partnership, there was a huge discussion about whether to include the remand. There was the group that said that, if you keep them out, they are too difficult, etc. I will tell you that we have stuck with it for five years. 76 per cent of women eligible for SHINE in Scotland's prison system voluntarily engage, and 76 per cent would come to a planned exit. We have included remand in that, so the idea that you cannot work with remand is difficult to work with. It is a challenge for everyone, because the uncertainty that the people are facing, etc. However, we know that through care and remand can be looked at more holistically. The thing about through care is that, if you only focus on the through care, you are talking about after the event. If you focus on the remand, you are getting ahead of the curve, and yet that is where we are cutting the money. It is an earlier intervention that brings me to the other thing that you mentioned. That was electronic monitoring, where we are looking to extend bail provisions by more electronic monitoring. When the committee visited the wise group, it was laid absolutely on the line to us that, if that is to succeed, there must be resources put into that, and the voluntary sector is going to play a huge part in that. I wonder whether the panel could comment on that particular aspect. Tom? I do not want to hog about that. This is probably relevant here. If you have a technical solution to controlling people without their support, you are going to increase your breaches and your remand population is going to go up. Liam McArthur? Just on the extension of that, the convener pointed to the proposals around electronic monitoring. We have also got a direction of travel in terms of extending the presumption against shorter sentences to out to 12 months. What you have already described to all of you is a funding landscape that is challenging, a funding landscape for statutory providers that might be put in additional squeeze on third sector organisations, as well as someone's certainty around the budget cycles that compounds those other issues. To what extent, in terms of the engagement that you have with the Scottish Government about the development of policy and proposed changes in policy, do you say that unless you provide some certainty around the funding, you cannot deliver the policy intention? In those instances, I think that most of us would agree that that is the right way to be going. To what extent, if you are giving that message, do you feel that that message is being heard and acted upon? Who would like to take that? You and them to go. We have made that very point. We have been supported by Modus, but we are grateful for it. Please do not misinterpret it. We have made the point, however, that the funding that we have is at a level that, as I said earlier, constitutes an existential threat. We have developed a model in close consultation with the Scottish Government. We have met the targets that they have asked of us. As I say, we have made the point in quite stark terms. That needs to change or we simply have to stop. I will be a way to respond to that at this stage. It is a general point that I guess about. If there are services that the Scottish Government would like the voluntary sector to deliver across the country, there is the issue about how that happens. We are fortunate that our core grant from the Cora Foundation goes to both our national office and every one of our services across the country. That is quite rare in the voluntary sector. Many other agencies will find funding more straightforward to get in some parts of the countries and not others. If there are services that the Government and others would like to be delivered across the whole of the country, often there may need to be a different approach taken to how they are funded. If it is solely left to the local authorities to decide in their particular area, there is many strengths of that approach, but it may result in the fact that some services will be available in some areas of the country but not in others. Thank you for that. I think that that is a point well made. John, supplementary. I think that Mr McCulley is wanting to make a point. Oh, sorry, Mr Stewart. I was just going to say that I would echo all of those comments. In terms of the necessity of support for these changes, whether it is something against short-term sentences, EM or supported bail, it is one that we make regularly and it is one that we make through consultation responses and it is one that we make through sessions with Scottish Government. In that sense, there has, at times, been very good opportunities for discussion with Scottish Government, but as to how often it is taken on board, given that previous cabinet secretary reinforced that there would be no new money made available to support things and chose it quite obviously, it was not taken on board. I should probably declare an interest. My wife is a mediator with Relationship Scotland, Orkney, so I would not like to think that I am making a bid on her behalf. Just in relation to that final point from Mr McCulley, the concern would be that the policy is policy proposals come forward in legislation with a financial memorandum attached to it but a level of uncertainty about the deliverability, which should be a concern to all of us, because we can sign up to the policy objectives but if the funding is not there to support that change, then the consequences are going to be fairly severe in an area as sensitive as criminal justice inevitably is. When you tinker with a system, you change a little bit of it, it can have massive impacts all the way across. If we look at what has happened with the Community Justice Scotland Act, I think that it has very laudable policy aims about making justice locally focused and about bringing a range of statutory and non-statutory and third sector partners around the table together to solve a problem. However, if the mechanisms for funding that and the mechanisms for deciding what happens within those local arrangements are not supported and are not funded and are not put in place, you end up with a situation in which it is the third sector that drops off the table first. It is the optional extras that make a big difference that drop off the table first and what you end up with is the statutory bare minimum that gets funded, which does not get me wrong. I do not want to be misrepresented here. It does fantastic work, but if we are talking about that unique contribution of the voluntary sector to improve people's lives and to help contribute towards reduction and re-offending, we need to make sure that that does not drop off. The worry is that, at the minute, with the move to the new model of community justice, particularly with changes to the section 27 funding for community justice, which has resulted in the removal of the distinction of core and non-core funding, which historically had gone to fund voluntary sector services, we could be sleepwalking and do a bit of a situation that ends up without massively reducing capacity in the third sector, and it could happen overnight. If you look at the transforming rehabilitation changes in England and Wales, I am not suggesting that it is anywhere near as drastic as that, but I am sure that the committee will be aware that that was a horrendous mistake and has resulted in massive loss of provision. The whole scheme has had to be brought forward and scrapped well in advance of what it was intended to do. If you change those things and you do not take account of what is happening, you can end up drifting into a very dangerous situation. John Swinney, you are slapping the menu. Forgive me, because I might struggle to try and put this together. In previous occasions, we have talked about a role that your organisation placed in turning around bail supervision in a number of local authority areas. We are scrutinising public money here, and of course we have the Scottish Government budget. There is the role for community justice, and there is the role for local authorities. Is the committee capable of audit trailing that level of scrutiny? The convener talked about electronic monitoring. No one wants to intrude in the decisions of local authorities to make their own decisions about taking things in-house, but who scrutinises that and the effectiveness? Let us stick with that issue where there was a commendable turnaround of figures on the back, and then it was taken in-house. Who should scrutinise that, if not the committee? Can we scrutinise it? There is a couple of bits of it. The proper role for scrutinising that is the local council. Officials should have to… If you make a significant change to a service on the ground in a local authority, that should be a report to the relevant committee of that local authority. For good reasons, not just for the challenge, but so that we understand the services that we are delivering. Could you do it in every committee, in every local authority? I think that that answers itself, but I think that this is an area where, in terms of this committee, it is about scrutinising the strategy, the Scottish justice strategy, and how that is going forward, and getting updates on that through Audit Scotland. Is it at that level that those decisions have been made at a local level? Do they follow the strategy? Is it what we are intending to do, or are they just… I have such a local issue, a local wish that I am going to go over this way? It might be justified, but it might not, but at least it should be scrutinised at that local level. If I may, does that suggest that there is some sort of oversight from the criminal justice collectively? You have clearly got me thinking in my feet about what does that look like. I am conscious that, on the particular example that you shared with the committee previously, I think that it was not just a single local authority, but a number of local authorities working together. If it is three or four, there are three reports, four reports to the committee. We want to understand that the money has been best expended and results are often a way of doing that. We have a structure with the new community justice arrangements, with community justice outcome improvement plans at local levels, and maybe changes of that nature should be reported annually within the lines that you would expect an improvement plan to report back, and that should be analysed. My fear is that, as we have seen over the years, those plans are all gathered and committed, but how much depth is there as an analysis over that to decide what are the plans for next year? It might be scrutinised locally, but does it look at it in the aggregated form? That is community justice Scotland's hope of them. I am just going to make the point that community justice Scotland has responsibility for gathering all the annual reports from each of the community justice partnerships, which should, in theory, state their progress against outcomes at a local level. In that sense, community justice Scotland will be doing a bit of work, I believe, over the next year. I am not quite sure of their timescales, but it is published in their work plan, which said out their reporting on progress against outcomes across the country. I think that that could be something that the committee could look into. I was going to say that it just seems a long way from here, if you like, and no one wants to tread on the territory of local authorities. Clearly, at some point, we will have the cabinet secretary for justice in here, holding them to account. We have other legislation on the way. Hate to use the place cluttered landscape, but all of us here are more interested in a situation where figures are turned around because of positive intervention. Whoever does that? The difficulties in knowing what is going on at any one part of the justice system at any one time is quite considerable, but I think that that is somewhere where community justice Scotland, as it continues to develop, will be able to perhaps provide a little bit of clarity. I would definitely echo Tom's point about not wanting to be too micro-level and getting in amongst local authority decisions. I think that there is definitely a role for both the Scottish Government and for yourselves to take out an overview of the system. If we can establish what trends are happening in terms of funding allocation, that can go a long way to seeing whether that is the direction that we want it to be. I think that the problem at the minute is that we do not really know what money is going where, necessarily. Thank you very much indeed. That was certainly a concern when we set up community justice Scotland that would be the overrhyw thing. We are concerned that it may dictate to local partnerships because they are based in 32 local authorities. Now I think that the question seems to be whether there is the flexibility there, but the question is where is the funding going and I think that we possibly need a mechanism to look at it being spent in the very best way possible because it is based on local authorities. Perhaps there is a tendency to look to local authority first to provide service, so I think that there is an analysis needed there to make sure that the third sector is not excluded from those non-statutory tight activities. As you said, Tom, you can make such a difference to preventing the escalation of crime and bad outcomes. Liam, I think that you have a very pertinent question. Me? Yes. Ah, yes, I have. I was not sure that you have. It is better to be good. I am going to start with a statement in the interests of complete transparency, which is that I was a non-executive director of family mediation, Grampian, several years ago, which, as you have heard, is now part of the relationship to Scotland. Just in terms of long-term funding, we have explored funding at some length, in terms of the fact that it seems to be short-term at the moment. Tom Halpin, in your submission, you talked about that it would be ideal to have a five- to ten-year funding cycle. How realistic is that, or is that somewhere that we could get to, both in terms of Government funding but also in terms of, say, big lottery funding? Are we ever actually going to get to the ideal? There are some different types of services. You know that there will be an initiative, you want to try something out, et cetera, so clearly you understand what you are involved in there. But if you look at a major change fund success, like the wise groups leading news routes or sacros leading shine, it is such a significant change that you have to invest in that. So why was it, in every single year there, we lost really good staff December, January, because of the young person starting a family, wanting a mortgage, and there's no certainty of our funding? In an organisation like mine, who has built up some reserves that we can take the risk of, there's not, I shouldn't notice these, but another partner in the same relationship says, why don't I have those reserves? I need to tell people they're at risk, I can carry that, and I'm having to negotiate within the partnership. So I do believe in that example, the Government could have invested for five years and allowed us to, because we're to design IT systems around us, but to integrate outcomes, evaluation methodologies into risk assessments, that was never going to happen in six months of the year. So I do think that we're shy away from saying that that's the budgetary system of the Scottish Government or the Scottish Parliament, and of course at the other end of that I've got some very vulnerable hard work in young people starting off in their life with no certainty. That's just not acceptable, and then you get in between that, that three-year contracts are the reality, but what we are doing at the moment is we are constantly managing change in the workforce. Stuart Valentine? I think in terms of Scottish Government funding, three years funding with no amounts would be an incredible step forward certainly for our network, and we were awarded three years funding from the Cora Foundation's fund that I mentioned previously, although you weren't told what you would get in the future years until about three months before that money would kick in, so you were given a three-year award, but there was no certainty for what years two and three would be, and you don't find that out until about the turn of the year. The big lottery has been one of the few funders that would give five years funding, and that is certainly extremely helpful for those services who have been fortunate enough to get it. One additional point that's worth mentioning is for those agencies who do get long-term core funding, who have had it year on year. Often there will be no cost of living increase, so certainly within our network there's been no cost of living increase for the past 15 years, which means year on year effectively it's resulting in a reduction in funding, which of course you just have to manage, but the whole issue of cost of living increase to funding, especially from the Scottish Government, is certainly a key one for the voluntary sector. Okay. Thank you. Patiently, and then I'll come to you. I should probably have declared beforehand that we do receive some money from Scottish Governments in that sense, and perhaps not entirely impartial, but the question of how long term can we be, if we look at, you know, we understand the realities of yearly parliamentary budgets and about how there's a limitation to that, and perhaps at the very far end of the spectrum it's not perhaps reasonable to be 20 years down the line, but at the risk of sounding slightly petulant and maybe facetious, if we would look at private company contracts to the justice system, for example, to provide prison services, to provide electronic monitoring services. I don't think that G4S or Circo are going to be on a one-year rolling contract that changes every year, so obviously there is scope within the system for flexibility, and I think I would encourage that flexibility wherever we can find it. Good point. Ewan. It's on the question of 10-year funding, and I have no idea how we would achieve that, but for our purposes as an organisation, even an extension from two-year to three-year funding would hugely enhance our ability to make commitments of the type that we require to make. I'll give you an example. Our lease is due for renewal. On a two-year funding cycle, we have to take a year-on-year lease, which is significantly more expensive for the same property, as against taking it on, say, a six-year term, but with a three-year break clause. So that one year of increase in the cycle would be a very significant assistance to us. I hear what my colleagues here say, and I recognise and sympathise with it. We don't have the problem of having to worry about laying off staff, because virtually all of our staff are volunteers. We can only afford to pay two salaries in our organisation out of a total staff of just in excess of 20. It is a matter of great concern to me personally that, of the two-salary staff, they are working now and have been for some time at a figure marked the less in the living wage. That has to change for our purposes. It's not just that it's unfair, it is frankly unsustainable. I'm sorry that I keep making that point, but that really is the central point that I want to get across here. If I might stick with you, Mr McOffright, on funding, but on a slightly different point, in your submission, you talked about legal aid and being underfunded. I just wanted to give you an opportunity to develop that. What do you specifically mean by legal aid being underfunded? As part of that, you suggest that experienced solicitors are deserting this sort of work. Do you have any evidence that suggests that that has increased since there were some regulation changes in January? No, we move and shake, as it were, in the legal profession. We have significant anecdotal evidence to that effect. I suspect that the type of written evidence that I can provide for you would not be entirely satisfactory in the sense that it is in the form of, for instance, postings on our Facebook page. I speak daily to solicitors. Solicitors refer us inquiries because they want to help the client, but they are not being funded to do it. That is one of the real reasons why we are finding such a significant increase in our workload, particularly over the past couple of years. The word that I hear from the solicitors that I speak to is that they simply cannot afford to continue legal aid work. You enter the Samarit Corsicourt, Glasgow Sheriff Court, and you will see that people doing the legal aid work tend to be more seasoned, gentlemen and ladies, because younger solicitors are not moving into that branch because there is no money in it for them. I think that perhaps the most stark illustration of that that I have come across in the last month or so is the announcement by the Law Society of Scotland that, in order to overcome the shortage of new entrants to legal aid work, they are proposing to have first-year trainee solicitors authorised to appear in court. When you put that against the other side of that equation, where the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service are being handsomely funded to properly train a number of more prosecutors, where does that leave your equality of arms? There is a serious problem here. I cannot really stand it up, if you like, other than by anecdotal evidence, but there is so much of that, and I see it washing through into our increased workload that I am in no doubt at all that the legal aid system is in crisis. I could ask specifically about the duty solicitor scheme. I am aware that eight bar associations asked a previous panel that they would not know about it, but Glasgow, Ms Carers of Justice organisations, said that they thought that that was a real problem. The duty solicitor scheme and where eight have said that they would not take part, and that that was as a result of the criminal legal aid not being solution. Yes. I can understand that legal aid rates, as I understand it, have over the past 20 years shown quite a significant real-terms reduction, and the rates that, as I understand it, are being paid to solicitors now are certainly not economic. I am an enrolled solicitor, I am not a practicing solicitor, so I do not actually do court work. We work in conjunction with, rather than in competition with, solicitors, where we get our casework to a point, but it is ready to be heard before a court. We then liaise with the legal teams who do that. In the context of that, we have a great deal of contact with solicitors and counsel in the criminal field, and they are all saying the same thing. We cannot afford to do the work as a result, were it not for us, the work would not get done. We are an entirely pro bono service. I would prefer that we did not have any casework to do it. I would prefer that properly funded solicitors were able to take it from point A to point Z. Regrettably, that is not how it is just now. Is there anything further that the panel would like to ask? We have no more questions. I thank you very much for an excellent session. I will suspend now to allow the witnesses to leave. Agenda item 3 is consideration of a proposal by the Scottish Government to consent to the UK Government legislating using the powers under the European Union withdrawal act in relation to two UK statutory instruments. The first is the civil jurisdiction and judgments hate convention on choice of courts agreements 2005 and the EU exit regulations 2018. The second is the international recovery of maintenance hate convention on the international recovery of child support and other forms of family maintenance 2007, EU exit regulation 2018. I refer members to paper 5, which is a private paper. Do members have any comments? We have submissions from the law society on both regulations and from Professor Janine Carullers, all of whom seem to be content with the instruments. That would be my only comment is that the submissions were, I found, extremely useful. Is the committee content to recommend that the Scottish Parliament gives its consent to the UK Parliament to pass those two statutory instruments? That concludes the 25th meeting of 2018. Our next meeting will be Tuesday, 23 October, when we will continue our post-legislate of scrutiny of the police and fire reform act and pre-budget scrutiny. I now close this meeting.