 The next item of business is an urgent question, and I call Russell Finlay. To ask the Scottish Government what its responses to reports from the Scottish Police Authority that 386 cases of potential drug driving cannot be prosecuted because of major delays in forensic testing. I was first notified of potential capacity issues last year, and in October last year I authorised an urgent additional funding of £325,000. In late April this year, the Government has alerted to a significant number of cases that had not been processed in time for the Crown to take further action, and I instructed my officials to urgently work with the SPA, Police Scotland and the Crown to assess the scale of the issue and determine what immediate and longer term mitigations were needed. Further exceptional funding of £370,000 was released earlier this month, and I fully support a commission from the SPA for HMICS, the Magistrate of Constabulary in Scotland, to undertake a formal review. Russell Finlay. Three years ago, Humza Yousaf staged a PR event alongside a police officer at which he said, and I quote, The police are ready, they have the tools necessary, and if you are caught there will be a zero-tolerance approach and you will face some hefty consequences. The police were indeed ready, except we now discover that the tools were broken and that hundreds of drug drivers faced no consequences for recklessly endangering others on our roads. We know that the SNP are great at announcements, not so good in delivery, so what is the cabinet secretary doing to now fix this? Will he reconsider his planned police budget cuts that risk making such failures more likely in the future? First of all, I think that I have mentioned the additional financing that has been provided to the SPA. That involves both a series of tranches of additional funds in terms of resources, but also additional capital expenditure. It is true to say, of course, that the estimates for this, how many likely cases would be, was formulated by Police Scotland, the SPA and the Crown Office, people that are much more expert than this than me. I cannot do an estimate of how many cases it is likely to be. It is also true to say that the police and the SPA and the Crown Office will say that it has been an underestimate. We have doubled the number of tests that have been done and people are coming forward with positive tests. They are the experts who do that. They are also independent. I do not know whether it is the case that Russell Finlay accepts the fact that they are independent, but we will do the two things that are required. First of all, to give the legislative tools that they need to do this, to make Scotland a safer place, which they have done. Of course, this is a serious error. The SPA has said that themselves. They have had their full meeting on Thursday to go over this in more detail. This is a serious error, but they have had the legislative tools in order to allow the police to make those stops and to get people tested for drugs. That has made Scotland's roads safer, but they have to correct this. We have also seen the commitment from the SPA to get HMICS to investigate what more can be done to make sure that this can be fixed now and into the future. It is the right thing to do. In terms of resources, the budget cut that Mr Finlay should have mentioned is the 5.2 per cent budget cut that we have had from Westminster, his colleagues, the Tories and Westminster. The police had the protection of the resources budget last year, and I am pretty sure that there was no amendment from the Tories seeking further budget for the police last year. We will see what happens this year. Russell Finlay. Thank you. I will not bother addressing the cabinet secretary's creative accounting. However, three of the dropped cases involved someone being injured, can the cabinet secretary explain whether those injured people have been told that their case was dropped? If not, will he commit to now doing so? Can he provide Parliament with a detailed breakdown of each of the 386 cases and, indeed, apologise to the victims and all law-abiding road users who have been endangered by this incompetence? I will note the point that is made about incompetence by Russell Finlay. First of all, the three cases that he mentions, I do not have the full details on that. It is information that is held, of course, by the Crown Office, but I do know that, in one of the cases, and possibly in the other two cases, the injury was self-inflicted and did not involve a collision with another vehicle. I am happy to provide more information about the figures. I have given them the figures that have taken some time to get those definitively as and when we get that from the SPA and also from the Crown Office because they are the only ones that will have the information on the stage that they are at in the prosecution process for reasons that I am sure he is aware of. I am happy to provide that information when it comes forward. There is no creative accounting. 5.2 per cent cut to this Government's budget. Despite that happening, we have protected the police resource budget last year. In fact, I think that in the last two or three years we have given more to the police than we have even asked for by the Conservatives. Of course, we have more police officers in this country and they are paid higher than they are in the rest of the UK. A couple of supplementaries first to Audrey Nicholl. It is welcome that the Scottish Government introduced drug driving limits and roadside testing in October 2019. However, we have heard that the demand for forensic testing has exceeded supply. Despite the budget constraints that the Cabinet Secretary alluded to earlier, can I ask what funding the Scottish Government has provided to the Scottish Police Authority to build testing and analysis capacity since the introduction of the new offence in 2019? Overall £1.9 million has been provided to the SPA since 2018-19 to assist them in delivering testing for the offence. That funding has been, in addition to the core budget SPA, received to ensure the delivery of policing in Scotland. The new offence required new forensic testing machines to be purchased by the SPA and we have provided capital funding totaling £572,000 for those machines. We have also provided over £1.3 million in resource funding through three tranches of funding for outsourcing, including £370,000. I have agreed to issue earlier this month. Does the Cabinet Secretary know if there are any other crimes beyond drug driving that are affected by this issue? I understand that in November the Government paid to outsource 30 per cent of testing to commercial forensic services to allow about 900 drugs driving cases to be dealt with in this way. Is that a long-term solution or is the plan to return to an in-house service? The initial intention was to have the in-house service. I should have mentioned that part of the problem is that the in-house lab used by Police Scotland did suffer a flooding incident which caused problems. It was also during the course of the pandemic and so the outsourcing which took place was in deliberate response to that to make sure that we had the capacity in relation to that. Part of the investigation by HMICS and the work that we will do with the SP will be to make sure that we plot out that way forward. I think that the main objective will be to drive out risk that this kind of thing happens in the future. As to other crimes, that would really be a matter for the Fiscal's Office to answer on that point. Briefly, Stephen Kerr. I know that the Cabinet Secretary accepts that the buck certainly stops with him but I think that it was disappointing that in reporting the statistics he did that he didn't take the opportunity to apologise to the public that there is a massive failure on the part of the whole system when it comes to prosecuting those who have been found to have been driving under the influence of drugs. Cabinet Secretary. I'm not sure there's actually a question for me to answer in relation to that, Presiding Officer, but of course I would regret any instance where the opportunity to prosecute a case of drug driving has been lost as a result of the issues that have arisen in SPA forensics. The whole point is to build on the success of over 5,000 people being stopped that would not have previously been stopped under previous legislation. Of course we want to make sure that every one of those that needs to be prosecuted is prosecuted. That's what the SPA is. It's not passing the buck, they are independent. I know that the Tories have a hard time getting their heads around this. They are independent as are Police Scotland, as are the Crown Office. We want to make sure that they have all the tools necessary to make sure that they can prosecute every case that they have to. I want benches changed and we move to the next item of business.