 Fy fragwp yw'r wyf ni'n gwneud, ac rwy'n gweithio i'r ffifio'r amser y Cymru Cymru. Rydym yn gweithio i'r gweithio'r gweithio. Efallai, y dyfodol yma yn y cymdeithiol a chynnydd i ddau 5 yn gweithio'r cymdeithio a chymdwysol o'r ffordd i'r cymdeithiol. Rwy'n gweithio'r ddau 5 yn cymdweithio, ac mae hi'n gweithio i'r cymdeithio yma. The next agenda item is around table discussion on priorities for domestic abuse, gendered violence and sexual offences in session 6, and I refer members to papers 2 and 3. We will take evidence today from a round table of witnesses who will be joining us virtually, and I'm sorry that you cannot join us in person, but this is due to the current rules around social distancing. A warm welcome to our panel of witnesses this morning. We have Rabia Rashan from Violence Against Women and Girls Development Worker, from Amina, the Muslim Women's Resource Centre, Ms Fiona Price, Procurator Fiscal for Domestic Abuse at Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, Mr Ronny Ranucci, QC vice dean of the Faculty of Advocates, Detective Chief Superintendent Sam Falls, Head of Public Protection, Specialist Crime Division at Police Scotland, Sandy Brindley, Chief Executive at Rape Crisis Scotland, Dr Marcia Scott, Chief Executive of Scottish Women's Aid, Professor Michelle Berman, Professor of Criminology and Professor James Chalmers, Regist Professor of Law at the University of Glasgow. We very much appreciate the time that you have taken to join us all this morning. I thank those witnesses who have provided written submissions, and they are now available online. I intend to allow about an hour and 20 minutes for questions and discussion. Please can I ask members to indicate which witness you are directing your remarks to, and we can then open the floor to other witnesses for comments. If other witnesses would like to respond, I would please ask that you indicate that by typing an R in the chat function on blue jeans, and I will be happy to bring you in if time permits. If you are merely agreeing with what a witness is saying, there is no need to intervene to say so. Other comments that you make in the chat function will not be visible to committee members or recorded anywhere, so if you want to make a comment, please do so by requesting to speak. We will now move directly to questions. Please, if members and our invited guests, if you can keep your questions and comments as always as succinct as possible so that we can have a free flowing discussion. I would like to begin and invite Rona Mackay to open up, and then I will ask Thornton McGregor to open up with some general questions to start with. Thank you, convener. Good morning, panel. Before I ask my question, I should declare an interest that I am a co-convener of men's violence against women and girls cross-party group. I would like to direct my question to Dr Marcia Scott and then to Rabbiah Roshan after that. Dr Scott, in 2014, the Scottish Government and COSLA published Equally Safe Scotland's strategy to eradicate violence against women. Statistics show that not much progress has been made on that since then. I want to ask if you could just perhaps tell us what you think the level and nature of violence against women and girls and what the main drivers are. Possibly just elaborate on where we are now, and if you could maybe bring in the Covid aspect of how that has exacerbated things, that would be good. Thank you. All of that in five minutes. Yes, well, the political strategies that we've had over multiple governments since the parliament was reopened are to frame how we look at gender-based violence. What we know is that women's inequality is the cause and consequence of domestic abuse, rape and sexual assault, and all the forms of gender-based violence against women and girls. Really, I'm sad to say that if you ask me what outcomes we've seen for women and girls since the first strategy or even since Equally Safe, I would have to say very little. What we have seen are some really important process changes, and I absolutely do not wish to minimise the importance of the new domestic abuse law of the work being done by Lady Dorian's group on sexual assault around a whole variety of areas, but the fact remains that unless we get serious about dealing with unpaid work, with lack of childcare, with the pay gap, with women's homelessness because of domestic abuse, with all of the things that enable violence against women and girls, then we will continue to be better at responding to it when we see it, but we will have done nothing about preventing it. I really do sincerely believe that this committee and that the Scottish Parliament in general is committed to that, and I guess the question really is, are we going to do the things that we need to? In terms of Covid, as our paper outlined, I think that our single biggest concern, others too, is that we don't really know how well the new domestic abuse law is working because it was really only enforced for a year, and of course that was the first year of implementation before Covid and the first lockdown. The impact of the courts changes to its schedule because of Covid have meant that we now have, I think, the last figure that I heard was 40,000 cases in the backlog and summary court alone. The bromide that justice delayed is justice denied has never been more true. We are already hearing reports from our services and from colleagues in the public sector criminal justice system that women are voting with their feet. The fact that they will not be in court any time soon and the ones who do come to court are almost all delayed means that there is no safety for them in calling the police or in asking for help from the public sector. I have a quick follow-up to that. In your opinion, have the main drivers for domestic abuse changed over the years? Are they different now to what they were five or ten years ago, because it has always been with us, sadly? If you could give me your opinion on that. No, they have not. I do not think. There is a whole process that has to happen in order for that to change. I do think that some of the really important early steps have happened. I want to nod at some very smart officials who, a number of years ago, began to talk about primary prevention in terms of violence against women and girls as addressing and reducing significantly if not ending women and girls inequality in our communities, our families, our Parliament and all of our institutions. Until we are willing to grasp that nettle, we will continue to have domestic abuse. There is just no getting around that. I know that it is a hard message for people to hear because it is easy to be against domestic abuse. It seems to be less easy to be against quotas to make sure that our local authorities have the proper number of women on their councils against childcare that is available and accessible so that women do not have to live in poverty with their children in such disproportionate numbers and therefore be vulnerable to abuse. All of the things that explain and are exacerbated by all the ways that multiple women with multiple identities experience that inequality. If I could move on to Robiah Ruschan and ask you, Robiah, good morning, are there any specific ethnic issues around domestic abuse? If you could maybe just talk a wee bit about what you do in your experience in Amina. Good morning, everyone. It is really nice to be here and to be able to contribute. In terms of specifics in regard to BME communities, it is so multifaceted. The fundamentals of domestic abuse are still the same whether you are BME or not, but the impact of being from a particular community, perceptions in that community, misconceptions, a lot of the time they come up against religion and culture being really intertwined and mixed and becoming really clouded for a lot of people. A lot of our work is about breaking down those barriers and separating the two and challenging those misconceptions the same way we would had you been doing prevention work within schools and you are looking at challenging young people's misconceptions. We aim to do the same within BME communities and we are hoping to move forward with some more men's work and looking to challenge right from the ground up. My background is supporting survivors of sexual violence. I am hoping to carry that a bit more forward in relation to my role at Amina, but there is so much that you can talk about but there are so many complexities when it comes to being from a BME community. Just understanding the lack of sex education to begin with, the lack of understanding of consent, the fact that it does not even get discussed within communities, let alone understanding and being aware of violence against women and girls within communities, is a big area that still needs covered. We are hoping to do a lot more than breaking that down and helping people from BME communities to understand that violence against women and girls is not acceptable even though it was accepted and normalised for so long. It is not something that is alienated and that is not reachable for BME communities. It very much does happen and that it should not be accepted. I hope that that has answered your question. No, thank you. That is it. I have just one very quick follow-up. Have you seen progress in the past five years on the breaking down barriers and the cultural side of things? Those are quite specific issues that you have to deal with. Do you think that things are getting better? I would like to hope so. Gaging progress can be quite challenging because it depends on what you are looking at progress within, but the fact that we have been able to grasp on more funding and reach out to more people and expand the organisation has been really positive because it means that we can make more progress. Whether there has been a lot of progress within the past five years is really hard to gauge. Even with Covid, Covid has impacted everyone in so many different ways and made it so much harder to reach women and even from a prevention aspect to reach communities and be able to do prevention work, because I suppose that it is a bit on the back burner. In terms of Covid, you are looking to firefight and support those women who are in crisis and are needing that immediate support, but prevention then does become a bit on the back burner. On progress in that sense, I would like to hope that in the next five years moving forward we would be able to make a lot more in hopes that we do not end up in another pandemic. We do not have the influence of that. I will hand over now to Fulton MacGregor. I think that you were quite interested in coming in with some general questions. If nobody else wants to ask some general questions, we will move on to looking at priorities for action and I will bring in Russell Finlay at that point. Thank you very much, convener, and welcome to our panel from online. Thank you very much for being here today. As the convener says, my questions are quite general as well, just to give panellists an opportunity to open up, if you like, and follow on from Rhona Mackay and the two previous speakers. I wanted, if any of the other panellists wanted to talk about specifically the impact of Covid on violence against women and girls. Before I do that, I wanted to reflect on the previous justice committee that I was a member of, and we talked quite a lot about that when we were looking at the Covid impact. I remember an instance when the first lockdown kicked in and there was a local park in my constituency. It was very popular and it was very busy on one day at the start of the lockdown. Of course, every day at that stage was the Facebook and Twitter police calling out how dreadful it was that people were going there, and it was mainly young women and their children. People started to comment on it and say stuff like, well, you don't know their circumstances, you don't know why they've left the house today, and made really powerful points. It certainly got me thinking, and I thank others as well. I just give that wee story because I know that the lockdown would have been particularly difficult for women experiencing violence and abuse, and I wonder if some of the other panellists are able to talk about the impact of Covid, particularly the first lockdown, and the overall Covid process. I apologise, convener, if I'm not picking any directly, but maybe Myrra prins to start with, if that's all right. Good morning. I think that it's well recognised that for victims of domestic abuse, the pandemic and periods of lockdown were very difficult and dangerous, and that was compounded by the fact that the criminal justice system's ability to progress criminal trials was also significantly affected, which then had the effect of adding delay and uncertainty into the experience of victims of domestic abuse who were waiting for cases to come to court. Dr Scott mentioned that there are a number of cases now in the summary court backlog. It's actually 40,543 cases awaiting trial in the summary courts, which is a 132 per cent increase in the position in March 2020 prior to the pandemic. The pandemic has also had a significant impact on the solemn business. The summary courts were able to continue with limited available trial space, and that space was given to priority cases, particularly those involving domestic abuse and child witnesses, but for many solemn cases, victims of domestic abuse and sexual offending in the summary courts were unable to progress trials for a number of months over the pandemic, which, of course, would have an impact on victims and witnesses. We worked very closely with criminal justice agencies and with victim support organisations during that time to try to support victims and witnesses who have undoubtedly been significantly affected by the pandemic. Thank you very much for that, and I think that you go into today's issues that might be around about reporting, and people feel unable to report during the pandemic, but I know that that will be an area that is covered later. Sandy Brindley, if you feel able to come in on my initial question about the general aspects of Covid and how it impacted in this area. Hi, good morning. I think that it had a profound impact on survivors of sexual crime that we are in contact with, not least in being able to access support safely, so we had people floating us from cupboards, from their cars, just trying to find a safe space during lockdown to speak, either because they were living with their rapist or because they hadn't told their family or who they were living with about what had happened to them. It definitely had a profound impact, but I think that it is important to stress what has had the biggest impact on what has been happening in the justice system as a result of Covid, particularly about the delays and uncertainty that it has created. Even pre-Covid, we had people waiting up to two years or longer for their case to get to court, and that caused a huge bit of distress even pre-Covid. Those delays are much worse now because of Covid. We can definitely commend the efforts of the Government and the court service and bodies such as the faculty working together to get remote jury trials in place. I think that there are major issues for us in terms of court scheduling. What we are seeing is that rape trials have been allocated to floating trial diets, which means that there are huge uncertainties for people about when their case is going ahead. Somebody has maybe waited two years to find out that they are giving evidence, but they say that every day they wake up thinking about what is going to happen. They are then told that their case might call during a two-week period. They are waiting every day for the call when they say that it is going ahead, and then they get a call saying that it has been put back another three months. I think that the practicalities of court scheduling and rape trials have been allocated to floating trial diets, which is routine now, is causing such a level of additional distress. You have seen in Lady Dorian's report that we are talking about moving to a more trauma-informed approach to justice. I would say that the current approach is really the antithesis of trauma informed. The final thing that I would say is that it might be that we are going to cover it more later. It is just about the frustrations around evidence on commission, which could have been a really good way to mitigate some of the distress caused by the uncertainty and the way of the pandemic by enabling complainers to give their evidence on a set day in advance of the trial closer to when the incident took place. Because of lack of availability of commissions, what some of the complainers we are supporting are being told is that you will be quicker on giving evidence on a live trial than you will be holding off on a commission, and I think that that is entirely unsatisfactory. Thank you very much for that. You are right to reflect that that is an area that other members are likely to pick up on. I think that between myself and Rona, convener, we have covered quite a lot of the general background. You can see that the panel is wanting to go into specific areas, so I am happy to leave it at that, unless somebody online wants to come in. I will bring in Pauline McNeill. I will pick up on the issues around delays to the criminal cases that our last witness just spoke about, and I will bring you in at that point. Pauline McNeill. Thank you very much. I was still sticking to the general background. I wanted to ask Dr Marsha Scott. It seems like a bleak picture that everyone is painting here, and I have been following the issue very closely myself. I have written to the Lord Advocate. I note the statistics that Moira gave, but it feels to me that violence against women across the UK, and probably globally, is getting worse. I wanted to add in to the mix of the narrative behind it that I have been reading recently. Again, Marsha, you talked about until women's inequalities resolve the underlying issues. I wanted to add in to what I have been reading in the press about girls and some boys, but girls in particular have been bullied to provide nude photographs of themselves at teenage girls aged 13 and 14. I am tying all that together in my mind that the underlying causes of violence against women by men seems to be that the whole backstory seems to be worse than it was when I first became a politician in 1999. I follow the international trends of girls across the globe, and it is quite a depressing picture. I just wanted to ask you, Marsha. Would you agree with that, or would you want to respond to that? I think that it is quite a difficult question to answer in the sense that violence against women and girls is an epidemic. Now that we are more familiar with the experience and the framing of pandemics and epidemics, perhaps we will take that seriously. We have all been saying that across the world for a decade. One of the things that is becoming clearer is that we are better at naming it and seeing it. We do not have any evidence in Scotland, for instance, that domestic abuse is worse, but we do not have a good way of measuring it. I know that justice analytical services will whip out the crime and justice survey and the police data, both of which have improved significantly in terms of their ability to measure domestic abuse, but are still far from good enough. The figures have been always shocking, which is one in four to one in five women in Scotland experience some form of domestic and sexual violence and that one out of five children live with it. How much more shocking can we get? We fail to take the steps that will stop it. Covid has exacerbated it because it has given women even fewer choices and it has given perpetrators even more tools for controlling and abusing. For me, it is absolutely—a member of politician once said in the Scottish Parliament not too long ago at a cross-party group meeting—that I do not want to do a research study that tells us how much violence against women costs in Scotland, because even if it did not cost us anything, it is wrong. I will go back to my background in New England if you can stop trying to weigh the sheep over and over and feed them or continually try to strive to count them. I think that the numbers are shocking. They are ridiculously leveled. I have not shifted in any significant amount. I think that we have had 60,000 plus police calls for domestic abuse pretty much in a trend slowly going up. The reality, though, is that it is an emergency situation. I would like to, just before I move on to the third time lucky, Mr Finlay. I will bring in Professor Berman. I think that you were quite interested to come in on this general discussion. I agree entirely with what Marsha has been saying. I wanted to just talk about some of the findings of our study, which is called Scotland in Lockdown, which did look at the impact of the coronavirus risk theory. We seem to have a problem with Professor Burnham. I hope that we will come back to her. In that case, if nobody else has got any questions, I will bring in Mr Finlay just to pick up on the point that was made earlier around the delays to criminal cases. I want to direct that to a particular witness. Yes, please. First of all, I would like to ask questions of everyone, but we just do not have the time, so this is really for minor price and Dr Marsha Scott. The issue of court churn has been with us for decades, perhaps forever. In my past life as a journalist, I often reported in cases that were subject of extreme delays without identifying individuals. One of those cases took three and a half years to conclude, and it was a victim of serial and serious domestic violence. The other just concluded this year, after four years, and it was an alleged stalking victim. Both those female victims talk of not being re-victimised as if it was a one-off occasion, but living in a perpetual state of re-victimisation and consuming their entire lives. In both cases, those women have said that they would not engage with the system again. I know that there have been improvements, and I know that there has been Covid. The question is to minor price and to Dr Scott. When you have male offenders who appear to use the criminal justice process to further sustain the victimisation, what can be done about that, minor price, and Dr Scott, what should be done about it? In the first instance, I would say that if a male perpetrator is continuing to commit offences and to perpetrate abuse, that should be reported to the police. The police, where there is sufficient evidence, will report to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service who will consider whether further additional charges or action can be raised. We have a range of criminal offences that we can use to prosecute such behaviour, and particularly now, with the course of domestic conduct that amounts to coercive control or abuse, we have the advantage of being able to use the Domestic Abuse Scotland Act of 2018 to bring a perpetrator to justice and to hold them to account. As to delays in the court, there may be a range of reasons for delay in any particular court case, so I could not comment in the abstract, but certainly if there are motions to adjourn existing trials by either the Crown or the defence, the court will hear the motions put forward by both parties, and it is a court's decision whether or not to adjourn a case. That has been compounded, of course, by Covid, where there may simply be a lack of court capacity to hear a trial in the same timescales as before. If abuse continues, it will be treated very seriously, and we apply a robust attitude to the prosecution of any instances of abuse or gender-based violence, as to Dr Scott. I was just going to say that I am perhaps a little less optimistic about the robust operation of the courts in terms of what they deliver for victims of domestic abuse and sexual assault. I think that it is unmistakable when you see how the system operates, that it is not just about smart perpetrators or using the system. The system is designed to be used in that way, and until we are willing to do something like Lady Doyle's group has done and say that the system works to prevent justice and access to justice, so we have to change the system, then we will continue to have the same kinds of outcomes. We were beginning to see some light at the end of the tunnel a few years ago when we had wealth supported and resourced domestic abuse courts in which cases came to court in a timely fashion, so eight to ten weeks. The prosecutor had special training to prosecute domestic abuse cases. The sheriffs and judges had special training to understand the dynamics of domestic abuse. In the Glasgow domestic abuse court, the attrition rate was higher for the defence witnesses than it was for the victim witnesses. We had a model, but the system did not like that model. We really need to take a look at that because it required funding, it required enough sheriffs, it required that sheriffs get training, it required a number of things. I think that we know how to fix a lot of this. We just have to have the political will. When we saw decisions being made during Covid by multiple actors in the criminal justice service, but I have to say that court service was high on this list, of making really difficult decisions that privileged the safety of those who are in the courtroom and work in the court system over the victims and witnesses who were told often with less than 24 hours' notice that their case was not going to go ahead and some of them were not even notified in person. It was a general broadcast as if victims keep an eye on a website just in case there's something of interest in them. Let's not fool ourselves. We're in a country that's at the cutting edge of work on violence against women. It requires that we do things differently. If we continue to say, oh, our system works okay, it just needs more people or more money or more this or more that, we will continue to fail to deliver our own ambitions. I'll bring in Mr Greene in just a second, but Mr Roshan, you were keen to come in on this. Yes, I just wanted to echo what Marsha was saying, 110 per cent. I think that when you be on the front line how women are being impacted and girls are being impacted by the system, you know how much it's failing. For us at Amina, a lot of our work cannot sometimes be around extended family abuse. It might not necessarily be a partner that's perpetrating that abuse, but it can be extended family. There's a massive loophole within the law that doesn't cover that. Victims of violence against women and girls who are having this type of abuse being perpetrated against them are then let down by the system again because there are loopholes. I just wanted to echo and completely agree with what Dr Scott was saying and just emphasise how so much more work needs to be done to make the system far more robust than it is, because we are really kidding ourselves if we think that it is at this point. You really see that when you speak to survivors on the front line and you feel how horrible it is, the experiences that they are going through, after having abuse been perpetrated against them, and then thinking that they can have full faith within the system but being really let down, and then the aftermath and how re-traumatising that then is moving forward. Thank you very much. I'll bring in Mr Greene now. I think that maybe Ms Stevenson you're quite keen to ask some more questions around the priorities of action. Thank you, convener. Good morning, panel. I'm afraid I may open a can of worms here with this, but I would like to take a step back. I think that we need to look at the bigger picture of what is happening in Scotland, the reality on the ground. The figures that I have from my brief says that only 6 per cent of reported rape cases result in a conviction. Of those who go to court, only 43 per cent result in a conviction, and that compares to 88 per cent of the overall crime conviction rate in Scotland. In fact, rape and attempted rape have the lowest conviction rate of any crime type in the country. We all agree that that's not acceptable. No one disagrees with that. We all know that something needs to change. We all know that we've been saying something needs to change for a very long time, but I want to try and hit the nail on the head a little bit more. What exactly needs to change? What do you need us to do? We are the legislators, we are the lawmakers, we are the policy makers. There's no point going round in circles talking and saying what a terrible world this is and why Scotland should be leading the way in this, but I want you to tell me why are we getting this so wrong? That's perhaps a question for the crime office. What is going wrong in the system? Those conviction rates are so ridiculously low, but I also want to hear from some of the organisations who are at the front line of this. What do you want us to do about this? Do you want to come in? Was it Ms Price that you were directing? In the first instance, yes, please. Thank you. I don't know if you can hear me. Yes, we can. Thank you. Offences of rape are difficult to prove because by definition many of them take place in private so that there may be factual difficulty in proving a case in law. That is one of the main factors that leads to the conviction rate. That said, the Crown Office of Procurator Fiscal Service has taken many steps to support victims and witnesses through the process. We have dedicated units who specialise in the prosecution and the investigation of crimes of sexual offence in the High Court. Our dedicated teams work to fully investigate and prepare cases and the national sexual offences unit within Crown Office, then prosecute those cases and they are prosecuted by dedicated specialist advocates deputies. I cannot comment further on the conviction rate because each case will depend on the facts and circumstances of the individual case and the views of the particular jury hearing the case, but we strive to prosecute all such cases where there is sufficient evidence. We also work closely with victims, support organisations and particularly rape crisis and have a protocol with them to receive anonymous feedback from victims and witnesses if they are willing to provide that feedback after court so that we can learn and continually improve the service that we provide. I should say that I know that there is a lot of good work that happens within the prosecution service in working with victims in those very sensitive cases and that is to be commended. I know that you are doing everything that you can at your end to improve those outcomes, but the numbers speak for themselves and that is what I am trying to get to the nub of. We all know that the numbers are unacceptable. If it sounds to me that you are doing as much as you can and going as far as you can, therefore there is still a blockage somewhere in the system. What is it about those cases at a technical level within the procedure of the prosecution that results in the low conviction rates? Is it the nature by which they are tried? Is it the inherent bias of juries? Is it the three-outcome system that we have? Is it the difficulty in achieving decent and substantial evidence? I am not talking about specific cases. I am afraid that I am talking about the generality and I would ask you to comment on the generality because the numbers speak for themselves. Something somewhere is not working. What is that something? What do we need to do to help you to increase that conviction? I do not think that I can comment on that simply because we respond to cases that are reported. A large number of the figures that you have referred to may never be reported to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service. Inherently, cases can only be reported where there is sufficient evidence and we can only prosecute where there is sufficient evidence. The question might be better directed at an earlier stage in the process in relation to what evidence is available, as opposed to procedures that are followed once the case is reported for prosecution, because once it is reported for prosecution, we adopt a very robust attitude to carrying out further inquiries to clarify if there is available evidence from any other source that might provide corroboration to allow us to take action. I think of a word to direct you to the official statistics for 2020-21. You would see from those and from the written response that we submitted that we raised court proceedings in 87 per cent of sexual rape or attempted rape charges with a domestic abuse identifier that were reported to us in 2020-21, which demonstrates a very robust attitude that we take on receipt of any reports of rape or attempted rape or other sexual abuse. It is also the case that, in 2015, the conviction rate was nearly 49 per cent and this year it has dropped to 43 per cent, so it is a downward trend irrespective. Here is a chance to open up to the wider panel to hear your view. What is it that you want us to do? What do you think the Crown Office needs to improve those conviction rates? What do you think legislators need to be doing in talking about in this session of Parliament? Is there a particular witness here? I think that this is a really key question in relation to access to justice for survivors of rape in Scotland. We often hear comments like these events take place in private or it is one person's word against another. I could not disagree more with that in the journality thinking about cases that get to court. They would not be in court if there wasn't support and evidence because we have a requirement for corroboration. We see acquittals and particularly not proven verdicts in cases that, in my view, have overwhelming evidence cases with significant physical injuries, cases where the whole incident has been audio recorded, cases involving stranger rape and juries just simply will not convict. I do not think that it is good enough to just say that those things happen in private. I am not saying that as a criticism specifically of the Crown Office. I am saying that as a criticism of our overall approach to accepting such a low conviction rate. Even the conviction rate that we do have is much, much lower than a single complainer rape case. As cases where there is only one complainer, complainers really, really struggle to get justice no matter how much evidence there is in their case. I think that a lot of that is because of jury attitudes. Looking at Lady Dorian's recommendations, there are a lot of really, really important recommendations in there that are to be amended. We absolutely need to reduce the trauma being experienced by complainers through our current system. It is unacceptable with the current cost of justice, but unless we engage meaningfully with the question of why juries are so reluctant to convict in rape cases, all we will be doing is reducing the trauma, but still having a process that gives very little chance of justice at the end of it. I do think that if we have a system with such a systemic barriers to justice falling rape, we are inevitably going to keep seeing guilty men walking free, and I think that that should concern us all. Thank you very much indeed. I have quite a few witnesses and members wanting to come in on the discussion. I am going to—if you do not mind, Ms Stevenson, I was going to bring you in, but I would like to bring in chief superintendent, Sam Falls, if I may, to comment, and then I would like to bring in Mr Ranucci after that. Chief superintendent, Fawlds. Thank you, convener. I think that I would probably echo what Moira has said and what Sandy has said, because verdicts are a matter for juries and the courts, and not really for Police Scotland, but I would like to emphasise that there is a lot of collaborative work on going, significant work on going, length policing response to reports of rape on serious sexual crime, and that includes engagement with Crown Office colleagues and with Sandy and her colleagues. Indeed, the wider third sector on Marsha included to make sure that we are taking that constructive feedback and improving continuously, improving our response to victims. I think that we have seen an increase in reporting of both recent and non-recent sexual crime. We have also seen an increase, thankfully, but it is still not the best. We have seen an increase in detection rates as well for the police, but I do have to echo what other people have said. It remains challenging always to corroborate the circumstances, particularly as Sandy says, when we have a single report, but I do acknowledge the challenges that that means for victims. On policing response, I think that that is what is really frustrating for us, is that we never get into the preventative stage, so we need to have much earlier intervention in terms of education, et cetera, before we reach this stage. I appreciate that I am perhaps perceived as coming from the defence side that we are not opposed to change, but what we are really opposed to is change that will perhaps weaken or devalue our criminal justice system. In relation to the figures that have been referred to in relation to conviction rates for rape and attempted rape, I am not sure whether those figures are a conflation of just ones that are reported without proceeding to court. I think that there is a serious danger of putting them together and then saying, look, the problems of the courts, it is the courts, it is the juries, it is the trials process that is not working. I have to say that I do not recognise that and I say that as a practitioner who has done perhaps more than 150-200 rape trials in my time. There has been a sea change in the way that those cases are prosecuted when they get to court and certainly the way that the police approach it with the proactive approach that they take certainly in relation to historical violence and domestic sexual crimes. In relation to the trial and the figures or cases that proceed to court, that is why I am saying that I do not recognise as a very low figure once a case goes to court. I am aware that there was a freedom of information request that was made to Parliament, Scottish Government and they responded in 4 June. Now, that was not anything to do with faculty. It was in relation to the data relating to not proven verdicts and guilty pleas and it gives figures for all categories of crime. However, I have to say that if you were to refer to that and look at it, for cases that have actually proceeded to court, the figures for conviction rates for rape and attempted rape are much higher than the figures that you are speaking of today. I would ask all members to look at those figures and see. I do not think that the problem is not necessarily once the case comes to court. It can often be before it gets to that stage for a whole variety of reasons. I am just anxious that it is not all thrown into one pod and we are saying, oh, the problems at the end process at the court, that is certainly not the way I see it. Thank you very much, Mr Runucci. That is very helpful. Stevenson, do you want to come in on this? Yeah, I am just quickly. Thanks, convener, and good morning, panel. It was really to look and focus in on the priorities for tackling violence against women and girls. It was touched upon throughout the submissions in terms of both within criminal justice and beyond and more generally. Dr Scott mentioned that there is a civil element to this as well, and how you are tying that up to trying to protect and obviously prevent that. Whilst I understand that this is the criminal justice committee, how has that been addressed? Do you have someone in mind to ask? Well, I think that Dr Scott mentioned it within her submission. I became to know. I did. We did. Actually, we were very concerned that the business of criminal justice and of civil justice have been separated. The reason for that concern is that domestic abuse cases travel from one court to the other. One of the biggest problems, especially in child contact cases, is that we hear routinely that women will be in court between 15 and 20 times in two years because of the use of the system by a convicted perpetrator of domestic abuse often. For getting child contact or just getting access to the child's mother to re-abuse. The problem that we have, or the most solvable problem that we have really, is the gap between criminal and civil justice and the fact that in the same courtroom—well, back when people actually went in courtrooms—a horrific case of domestic abuse is concluded and there is a perpetrator who has been convicted. Then you can have a child contact hearing in that same courtroom, not long after, in which almost none of the evidence that was raised in the criminal case gets raised in the court's consideration about child contact. We have been talking to this committee in its prior form about this issue for some years now. We had hoped in the domestic abuse bill that we could get children identified as co-victims, which would then carry over into any civil hearings that the children were involved in. I understand that it was about press of business and press of work and trying to get through the Parliament's business, but I am hoping that there can be some formal plan made for criminal and civil justice committees considering some of those issues together. We have found that it is really difficult to address from just one side of the aisle or the other. There are a number of things—one judge, one sheriff cases, a whole variety of things. There has been a question about an amendment to the domestic abuse bill that changed the status of children. There is a variety of things that could be discussed and that this committee could usefully weigh in on. That is helpful. I have no further questions. Katie Clark, you would like to come in. I will bring in Mr Chalmers on that. We will then move on to another area of questioning, perhaps looking at criminal court and reform. We will be asking detailed questions on Lady Dorian's report and specialist domestic abuse courts later on. Marcia Scott said that she thought that Scotland was cutting edge. My question is whether any of the witnesses have any knowledge of other jurisdictions, either from their own practical experience or through academic research. It may be that the academics are the people here. We have an adversarial system in Scotland. It may be that some of the reforms that are being suggested will significantly improve conviction rates, but it is quite clear that the system at the moment is not working. Other jurisdictions, for example France, have more of an inquisitorial system where the whole system is about finding out the truth. Without getting into some of the issues about single judges or corroboration or some of those issues, I think that we will pick up when we discuss Lady Dorian's recommendations. Do any of the witnesses have knowledge of other jurisdictions where they think that there are things that we should be learning from? It may be that some of the basic principles of the way that we do things in Scotland are maybe not right for some kinds of cases. It is really just to see if there are any areas that we should be looking at that are not particularly covered necessarily in Lady Dorian's report or the idea of specialist domestic abuse quotes that, for example, they have in places such as South Africa, or do you think that we are going down the right path? Is there a particular witness who would like to address that? I thought that Professor Burnman and Professor Chalmers might be more likely to have looked at this or have a view on it. It may well be that they think that we are going down the right path, but it would be interesting to explore whether there are elements of other systems that we have not looked at that we should be looking at if we want to improve conviction rates. I think that Professor Burnman is audio-only, so at the moment I might be wrong, but if we can start off with Professor Chalmers. To take that question first of all, it is difficult to draw comparisons between different jurisdictions about how successful they are in achieving justice in those cases. There has been work done in the past trying to look at conviction rates across a range of countries. The problem is that that depends on how many cases are recorded by the police in the first place. That is one part of your figure and another part is the convictions. However, with police recording practices varying massively in the first place, a jurisdiction can look very good on that subject of comparison simply because the police are very reluctant to record an allegation of rape or sexual assault as such. If you look simply at the number of convictions that are being achieved at individual systems, I have done some work on that quite a long time ago now, so I would want to rely on it very heavily. My impression is not that there is a system out there within Europe, if you take that as your cabata group. That has got this right. All the criminal justice systems struggle with that. There is not an easy solution by moving to, for example, an inquisitorial model where there can equally be problems with convincing judges and lay assessors that a sexual assault has taken place. I do not think that there is a simple answer there. In answer to Mr Greene's question earlier about what has to be done, I think that the straightforward answer is to implement the report and the recommendations of Lady Dorian's review. At my view, it would also be that the not-proven verdict should be abolished. I want to briefly come back to the point that Mr Greene made about the freedom of information figures released by the Scottish Government, because I can own up to the person who made that freedom of information request. I have the figures in front of me. The figure was quoted of 43 per cent as the conviction rate in rape and attempted rape cases of cases brought to court. Mr Greene should doubt that. I never expected to be in the committee meeting performing calculations in Excel, but I can confirm that 43 per cent, which is also the figure in the Scottish Government's statistical bulletin, as Sandy has noted in the chat, is correct. In 2019-20, there were 300 prosecutions of those. One was either played or guilty when it was accepted or deserted. 95 resulted in not-guilty verdicts, 74 in not-proven verdicts and 130 convictions, which, if my math is correct, I can confirm as 43 per cent. That compares to a 77 per cent conviction rate across jury cases as a whole, or that there is a big difference between rape and sexual assault cases and what happens more generally across the board. Thank you very much. I will try to bring in Professor Berman, a CEO on screen there. Would you like to come in? I hope that we have got you back. On the point about what happens in other jurisdictions, I do very much agree with what James was saying about how difficult it is to draw comparisons here. I have some experience of the specialist rape courts in South Africa. I spent a period of time there some years ago doing some research on those courts. That is an adversarial system in South Africa, but it is without jury trials. They have had specialist sexual courts there since 1993 up until now. There was a time, a short period, where the courts were ceased and rape cases went back into the mainstream court business, but then they reinstated the specialist cases, the specialist courts. They are understood to work very well in South Africa from the complainer's perspective. The conviction rate is not great in South Africa at all, but this is a very different jurisdiction to ours, a very different jurisdiction. There are a vast number of crime rates that are much, much higher than here, but the rates, unfortunately, are absolutely sky-high in South Africa along with other serious forms of crime as well. In terms of the operation of the specialist courts, people were very suspicious of them, particularly from the legal professions when they were first initiated. It took quite a long time to convince everybody of the validity of these courts, and they went through extensive piloting, but they are now considered to be the best way of dealing adjudication of rape and serious sexual offence trials. As I said, there is no jury. Evidence is taken not in the court. It is all done by video, so the complainant is not in the court. There are also community representatives in the court, because, as you may imagine in South Africa, with such a diverse range of cultures and languages being spoken, there is not a jury system, but there are two community representatives who provide informal advice to the judge. Those have gone through a really difficult period, but they are really considered by legal professionals and by support organisations as the most appropriate way of dealing with rape and serious sexual offence trials in South Africa. I was going to come in later on, if that is okay. Again, we have quite a lot of interest in the issues around reform and court process. I have got a number of people interested in coming in, so I am going to hand over to Mr Finlay to ask your questions. Mr McNeill, after that. Not proven. It is questions for Ronnie Runeche and Professor James Chalmers. I will do them one after the other, if that is okay. Mr Runeche, the faculty submission on not proven and what might happen to that verdict states the need to identify the changes in our criminal justice system that would come along with any such change and, fully to do so, would risk jeopardising reliable justice. Can you perhaps expand on what those fears are, what those potential unforeseen consequences might be? Mr Runeche, would you like to come in? Thank you. First of all, before I do answer that, can I just say that James perhaps misunderstood, I was not challenging the figure of 43 per cent. I was trying to say that that was accurate for cases that went to trial. It was the earlier figure of 6 per cent that I was questioning. In relation to the not proven verdict, in fact it was James's study with the mock jury trials where it seemed to be in some way recognised or suggested that the not proven verdict was some form of a safeguard. It was viewed as some form of a safeguard and perhaps some form of a barrier to conviction. Our concern is that we have a unique system. We have one of the largest jury numbers at 15, but we have the smallest majority that is required for a verdict—a simple majority of one. If you are to go to a two-system of guilty, not guilty, there is no other country in the world that operates a system with a simple majority of one. Our feeling is that if you are going to remove not proven and go to a two-system, then there has to be some form of safeguard put in place or some form of change. Indeed, it was the Justice Committee back in 2016, when there was a private member bill by Michael McMahon, who looked at that. I think that there was a unanimity of people in favour of trapping the not proven, but the difficulty was what other changes required to be made to our criminal justice system. The most obvious would be that there should be a change in the majority. That has been a discussion that has been on-going. The question then becomes what change in the majority? In England, you have a unanimous order unless the judge directs it, you can accept a 10 or a 10-2. Again, that is both for a verdict of guilty or not guilty. The question for us would be, perhaps, whether we change the majority to go from 8.7, as it is at the moment, to 12.3 or 10.5. However, our concern is that if you are going to change our system so fundamentally, there has to be some other change that goes along with it that you cannot simply scrap not proven on its own without looking at the system that it operates within. Do you want to come back on that screen? I do not know if that answers the question. That is very interesting. Thank you. Moving on to Professor Chalmers. Your evidence along with that of your colleagues Fiona Leverick and Vanessa Monroe is really informative and interesting. I think that many people might deliver a damning verdict on that verdict. The question, I suppose, is in light of what Ronnie Ranucci has told us, do you believe that getting rid of the not proven verdict requires a change to the majority structure of a jury? I personally agree with Mr Ranucci on that point. It is simply not easily justifiable to have a system that convicts people of very serious criminal offences by a vote of one, by a majority of 8 to 7. That said, the practical consequence of that may not be huge, because when groups deliberate on points, they usually manage to find consensus. Mr Ranucci mentioned the English approach of requiring at least 10 votes from 12 or a conviction or from an acquittal. That means that a jury in England, unlike in Scotland, can fail to reach a verdict, but that is rare. It has been calculated that it is less than 0.1 per cent of all charges, so less than 1 in 1,000 of all charges brought in the Crown Court as a result of a hearing jury. A jury will usually manage to reach consensus. I would hope that we would assuage what I suspect of some fears that this would be a step backwards in dealing with a particular problem in rape conviction rates if there were to be a change to the Scottish system to require something closer to unanimity. I would not suggest that it is necessarily adopting the English approach, but that is a change that can be made without necessarily some of the negative consequences that I think would justifiably, understandably worry people. Thank you. Just finally, in your submission, you talk about the history of not proven and the fact that, since at least 1846, a Lord Coburn was very critical of it. We, as a Scottish Parliament, have been talking about it probably since inception. Do you think that there is intent on the part of the Scottish Government to make this change, or do you think that we will actually still be talking about this for another 176 years? That is to Professor Chalmers. I think that there is a danger that we end up talking about it for that matter of time. What I would emphasise is that although there is a question to be asked about if not proven goes, what other changes have to be made? It is important to separate out the consequences of those two questions. The starting point has to be that not proven is a verdict that is a historical accident and it is not a verdict that we designed. It is an unprincipled and unacceptable feature of the system and not to go. Having answered that question in the affirmative, assuming that that is the answer, we move on to the question of what else has to change to make that change work. One of the problems over recent decades is that the waters have been muddied to the point that it becomes impossible to reach a consensus by failing to separate and therefore the complexity of the whole issue stops us reaching a consensus. I think that Sandy Brindley is quite keen to come in on this discussion. Yes, thank you, convener. It seems to me on this issue that faculty are trying to make two arguments, firstly that if not proven goes, all those verdicts will just be not guilty verdicts, but at the same time to say that it is a safeguard and if you remove it you must make other changes. I do not think that those two arguments are consistent. I do not agree with the previous commentators that if you remove not proven, you need to look at making a change to the jury majority. I would be very concerned about a change to the jury majority. If you speak to judges, they would say that they almost never see unanimous jury verdicts and big cases. That is even when I say that there is overwhelming evidence, but I think that unless the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament are considering this, seriously engage with the question of jury attitudes. If you change the jury majority, you will definitely make it even more difficult to get a conviction in big cases and surely that is the opposite of what we should be considering. I will hand over now to Ms McNeill. I think that you were quite keen to come in and then I will open up to Ms Clark. I think that you were quite keen to come back in on this. We do have a big interest understandably in this area so I am proposing, if everyone is agreeable, to extend this to around about 11.35. Again, I would just ask our witnesses and members just to keep your questioning and responses as succinct as you can. First, can I ask Sandy to bring the just where you left off, Sandy, about the majority issue? I just wanted to be clear in my own mind that you would be comfortable with the majority of one if we removed the not proven. I have noted what you are saying about England Hat. I think that it is two thirds majority about a fully unanimous jury. Are you comfortable that a conviction for rape or attempted rape in the High Court could be achieved on a majority of one? That is what we have just now. What would be due to the removal of the accident to having to acquit all verdicts? If you accept the faculty's argument, I do not necessarily fully accept, but if you accept the argument that all the current not proven would become not guilty, I do not understand how it would require changing the jury majority. I am asking you that. I just want to know that that is your position that a majority of one, if we remove the not proven verdict, does not have any concerns about that? No, not at all, but the wider question is should juries be used in rape trials at all, which I think is an issue that we should engage with. I was going to come on to that. What is your view on the removal from juries completely from cases of rape or attempted rape? I think that, as I have said, unless we engage with the question of jury attitudes and jury decisions in rape cases, we are going to continue to have a very low possibility of getting justice following rape. Lady Dory made a number of recommendations in this regard. One of them is about a video to try and debunk rape myths, which I think is worth considering, but I do not think that it would have a huge impact. There really is, I would say, over women research, now over women evidence about the use of rape myths in jury decision making that I think should give us real pause about whether or not justice has been done in cases of this nature. I take seriously the Faculty of Advocates' concerns here about the post. Is there a danger of having one single person making decisions in a case of this seriousness? I think that it would be helpful for the Parliament of the Scottish Government to consider looking at a scoping of what are the models that I was creating. I am thinking particularly of Europe, where it is a George Whittley assessor, so looking at still having some form of citizen participation that making sure that that citizen participation has had some training in how to assess evidence, because that is my concern, is that juries are not always making decisions based on the evidence in rape cases, they are making decisions filtered through their attitudes, and we know that there remain really problematic attitudes to rape, but also to women's sexual behaviour within Scottish society. That is really helpful, thank you very much. My second question is to Rona Rennie, chief in the Faculty of Advocates. There is quite a lot in your submission, but I will try to narrow it down. I note the Faculty of Advocates' concerns about the setting up of specialist courts, and in your evidence the committee pointed out that the High Court is already a specialist court, but the specific proposal would have concerns about suggesting that it might downgrade the status or the importance of the crime of rape, just once if you wanted to say something in response to that. Certainly. I think that it is somewhat ironic that of all the groups here that perhaps faculty are concerned about the downgrading of serious sexual offences, and I have set out in the written submissions the reasons why we believe that to be the case. However, if you are taking crimes or you are taking rape cases out of the High Court, the highest court in the land and putting it into a different court, it cannot be anything other than a downgrading, and there is a real danger, I think, of their after-grading rate. At the moment, all rape charges are treated the same, they are all prosecuted in the High Court and they are all regarded with the same degree of seriousness. If you are going to have what is deemed the most serious rape trials prosecuted in the High Court, but others must be deemed less serious, otherwise they would not be put in the specialist court. There is then a danger of a graduation of rape. From our point of view, rape is far too serious a charge for that to happen. I have highlighted an example. Detective Chief Inspector Sam Falls would be aware of that. The police have now got a proactive unit. It works incredibly effectively and it brings more cases into the High Court because they go out and speak to ex-partners, people who have never made a complaint before, and they feature in cases. You would have a case where you have a victim of domestic violence and rape, who might be a single complainer. That case would almost certainly go into the specialist court, whereas if there were a number of complainers who were all complaining of the exact same set of circumstances but because it would be deemed more serious because the perpetrator had committed more crimes, that would go into the High Court. The thing about that would be that each of those victims would—the trauma and the effect would be the exact same, but for one of them, simply because she was the only victim, it would be persecuted in a lower court. That cannot be cracked. It cannot be cracked to take rape out of the High Court and put it into an inferior court because you can clothe a specialist court in any way you like. It would be an inferior court. We are not against specialism. We are not saying that these cases should not be treated differently. We are in favour, and I think that we make that clear in our report. Sandy will know that, because I have met Sandy and I have expressed my view. I agree that specialism is required for a variety of reasons. That specialism can be done by the specialism of the judges, the specialism of the practitioners, both in the Crown and the defence, being properly trained. Down south, I think that England is a sort of ticketing system where you have to be trained and you have to have passed whatever the test is or whatever the criteria is to be able to do those types of cases. Our view is that that could be done, but the proper forum or any serious sexual offence should be the High Court. Just on the question and note in your submission that you reported the removal of juries, you heard Sandy Brindley talk about another way that could be done, which is a judge with lay assessors. Sandy talked about providing a video for juries in advance. Would any of those things in your view work or make any difference to the outcome? I do not understand why there is such a pressure or such a wish to have judge-only styles. I am unaware of any research that has been conducted that says that the figures are going to change and indeed the reference was made to South Africa, where it does not seem to have made any material difference. However, the problem really is one of trust. We live in a democratic country, but what you will then be saying is that if you are committing a certain type of crime, you will be treated a certain way and you will have the benefit of a jury system. However, if you are charged with another type of offence, that will be removed, but more importantly than that, what you are in effect saying to the citizens of Scotland, you are saying, look, I am happy for you to vote for me and I am happy for you to vote for politicians and I am happy to take your vote for whatever it may well be, but we do not trust you to vote in a rape trial. We do not trust you to vote in a sexual offence trial. Notwithstanding the fact that you are the very people that will have heard all the evidence, you will have evaluated it, you will have taken your instructions, your directions from the judge, notwithstanding all that, we do not trust you. What we are going to do is we are going to hand it to a single judge who comes from a particular group in society and we are going to entrust that very small group with all these very important decisions. We find that really quite difficult to comprehend and there are many other problems inherent with a judge-only system. We have got a number of members wanting to come in on this. I am just watching the time. However, I am going to bring in Sandy Brindley, followed by Professor Chambers, if I may, just to pick up on this. Ms Brindley, would you like to come in? Yes. I think that there is a much broader discussion to be had about judge-led trials, but what I wanted to comment on was Bumbacheroni's previous remarks on a specialist court. I think that the way to address those concerns is to remove the 10-year sentence and limit that is being proposed for the new specialist court, because I do actually agree with Brindley. I think that there is a danger inherent in setting up a hierarchy. At the moment, rape is only ever heard in the High Court, which has unlimited sentence and powers. I do not entirely understand the rationale for the new specialist court having limited sentence and powers. I do worry about the message that sends in terms of creating a hierarchy, as Brindley says, around rape, which I think is very undesirable. If part of the purpose of a specialist court is to make sure that complainers benefit from a trauma-informed approach, it seems totally counterintuitive to me that you would then have, in some of the most serious cases that potentially could have, in order for lifelong restriction, for example, that they do not go through the specialist court because the sentence would likely to be greater, potentially, in 10 years. Those complainers would not be able to benefit from the specialist court. We need one approach to rape cases if we are moving to a specialist court. I think that it should be a specialist court, because I think that there is a lot of good evidence that Michelle Berman has referred to about the benefits of specialism and learning from what has happened in Scotland that would demase the abuse of any benefits of specialism. However, I think that specialist court should be equivalent to the High Court, or be part of the High Court and have unlimited sentence and powers. Otherwise, I think that the faculty or the committee are creating a hierarchy, and I think that that is completely undesirable. Okay, thank you very much. I can bring in Professor Chalmers, and if I can just ask you to make your comments fairly succinct, and after that I will bring in Ms Clark, followed by Mr Greene, for some more questions. Professor Chalmers? Thank you. Two quick points then, just to see that I agree with what Sandy says about removing the proposed 10-year limit on the sentence and powers of the specialist court. That court would be presided over by High Court judges or by sheriffs, because they are appropriately qualified to sit in that court. At the moment, High Court judges and sheriffs who sit regularly as temporary judges of the High Court have unlimited sentence and powers, so I do not think that the limitation on the same judges in this different court is necessary. I can see that the Dorian Rifew looked at this in great detail, but it seems an unnecessarily complex system. Particularly if, as was suggested, you preserve the possibility of the specialist court referring or remitting, as the sheriff court could do, a case to the High Court for Sentence. You can see somebody who is normally a High Court judge remitting a case to the High Court to impose a sentence that they would have the power to impose if they were sitting in the High Court, and that is unnecessarily complex. Very briefly, to pick up on Mr Greene's point about whether judgmentally charged would make a difference to the verdict. There is some evidence on this, albeit anecdotal, in the Dorian Rifew itself, which notes at paragraph 5.7 that some judges to whom the review spoke reported cases in which they considered the evidence justified conviction of rape and where it was difficult to understand the rationale for the verdict was returned. There was a suggestion that that was a view that was shared at least by a number of senior and experienced judges. Thank you very much for that. Ms Clark, would you like to come in and then I'll hand over to Mr Greene? Very much picking up on the points that have already been made. Taking in board everything that's been said about potentially downgrading the offence, the comments about the inferior court and the presumption that this would actually be part of the High Court, could I ask, probably the police and the prosecution services. If the system was one where you had a single judge or indeed a single judge with wing members, where it was a jury-free specialist court, do you believe that that would have an impact in terms of how cases are marked and whether they would be taken to court in the first instance? We've already heard that there's problems at the moment with resourcing of evidence on commission, so is that an issue? If we had a system where there was more availability of evidence on commission, where you had either a single judge or a single judge with wing members, and if we take aside the issue of corroboration and treat that as a completely separate, although it's obviously a very important issue, if those specific changes were made, do you think that more cases would actually come to court and therefore potentially more rape and alleged rape or attempted rape convictions would actually be secured? If I may be asked at Moira Price from the prosecution services and then if Detective Fault wanted to come in, that would be helpful. Moira Price? I don't think that you can put aside the issue of corroboration, because the issue of corroboration is central and crucial to whether or not criminal cases can be raised in the court, and that would be the primary consideration, along with looking at factors such as the impact on the victim, the severity of the offence and accused criminal record, whether or not they were pursuing a course of conduct, which are all factors that would be taken into account in any event every day in considering whether someone should be brought to court or not. I don't think that you can put aside corroboration in coming to that conclusion. The question of forum is a matter for the Crown to determine what is the most appropriate forum, in which a case should be raised. If there was a change to forum, that would be factored into our considerations, but the primary decision will relate to the availability of evidence and whether or not it is in the public interest to raise proceedings. That is helpful. Would the chief superintendent have any thoughts in relation to whether cases are not taken forward because of issues in relation to forum, as opposed to the evidence? Would changing the forum lead to more cases coming forward for whatever reason? The decision on whether or not a case is taken forward is a matter for the Crown and not for the police. We have a singular role at the very start of us to gather evidence in and to ensure that we have a sufficiency of evidence before we report to the Crown Office and procurator for school service what the decisions taken thereafter are a matter for our colleagues and Crown and not something that we would wish to influence on. I appreciate that corroboration is a very hot topic at the minute, but it is a central point of what we do and it is what we seek in all of our investigations to corroborate the circumstances that are reported to us. It would be inappropriate for the police to participate in any other discussions or not to participate in them, but in a democratic society it is not for us to determine what a standard of proof should be. It is very much for our colleagues in the Crown Office and procurator for school service to make the decision about whether a case is proceeded with and in what court the case might be proceeded with. We certainly made two steps forward on how we investigate. Mr Rynuchy very kindly commented on that, and we are still continuing to try to improve that, but the decisions thereafter are not really a matter for the police to try and influence. You have a great deal of experience of dealing with rape victims at a very early stage. Do you think that more rape victims would come forward if they felt that the process was going to work in a different way? That is a question to Detective Chief Inspector Foulds. I think that, unfortunately, a lot of experience in dealing with victims at that early stage, and that is where the support from the partner organisations is absolutely critical, because a lot of victims, when they come forward, do not understand the criminal justice process anyway at the start. If you ask a general member of the public whether a certain crime should be prosecuted in a sheriff's summary court or under solemn proceedings of sheriff and jury or the high court, you will probably be faced with a blank expression. I do not think that that is the first thing that victims consider when they are reporting. That is way further down the line and can be explained to them, so I am not sure that that would be such an influence, in fact, for victims at that point, to be perfectly honest. Sandy Brinley, to come in on that, because presumably you speak with many victims of rape who do not decide to go to the police? Despite significant increases in reporting over the past two decades, it is still the case that about half of the people in contact with rape crisis have not reported to the police. There are many reasons for that, but one of the common reasons that we hear is fear of the criminal justice process itself. Although I was right that complainers are not necessarily thinking about what is the specific court that it has been heard in, I think that if they had confidence that the system would not unduly retraumatise them and that they would have a fair chance of justice at the end of it, I think that that would remove what is quite a substantial barrier to reporting, whether or not it would improve convictions is an entirely separate question. If you improve the process for the complainer, if you take evidence earlier, you will get better evidence, and that might have a marginal impact on whether or not the case would be successful. Although it is very important how we treat complainers on a level of trauma that is currently being caused to them, I do not think that dealing with that is necessarily going to improve convictions. To improve convictions, to engage with the reasons why, for example, I always take place when they should not, because there is enough evidence to convict. I think that we need to engage with the question of jury attitudes. Dr Marstress Scott, can I ask you perhaps to comment on this from your organisation's experience on why victims decide not to go down the path of taking issues to the police? You must have extensive experience of that. I might have alluded to it. Ms Scott, if I can just ask you to be very, very brief and then I'll just finally bring in Mr Greene before we bring this session to a close. Thank you. I am very happy to say, first of all, just to point out that I agree with everything Sandy said and that the majority of women who experience domestic abuse are also experiencing sexual assault and rape. They often choose not to disclose that because of their concerns about the way they are going to be treated in the system. Women who have gone to court because of domestic abuse have told us over and over that it was worse often than the abuse itself. Now, calling the police is very dangerous for women if their case is not going to come to court for two, three or four years. The reality is that we have all those lovely, shiny Scottish justice systems that provide justice for some people and certainly do not, in any proportionate way, for women and children living with domestic abuse and sexual assault. I guess the issue then becomes, do we protect the status quo or do we take some chances? Thank you very much. Mr Greene, I'll just hand over to you for our final set of questions. Thank you, convener. Thank you for what has been a fascinating discussion. I'm sure some of these big ticket issues will rumble on for many months to come. I probably should have declared an interest in that I will be bringing forward legislation that will touch on some of these areas. Shortly, the consultation on that will be published through the official parliamentary process and I would invite panellists today to form part of that consultation. The views that I've heard today will inform much of that. You will be aware that our next panel is about victims' rights and victim support. We've talked a lot about today the process up until the point of conviction and what happens before that, but not much about what happens after. Given that you won't be on the next panel, I wondered if you had any views on how the law best protects, informs, supports and includes the victims of those types of crimes. For example, do you believe that victims should have the right to a statement in a parole hearing for someone who is being convicted of sexual crime or domestic violence? Or do you believe that the prosecution service should offer a decision as to a rationale as to why a decision not to prosecute was made in the first instance? Or do you think that exclusion zones have been used enough? Those are all big questions and we could spend all day on those. As we segue into the next panel, do you feel that those who were victims of domestic abuse or violent or sexual crime are being treated properly thereafter once the conviction is made and what happens thereafter? Perhaps those questions are directed to Wraith Cross Scotland or Scottish Women's Aid. Sandy Brinley, would you like to come in? Yes, I think that those are quite big questions but important ones in relation to parole. I know that there has been a commitment to review in the victim notification scheme, but when someone's rapist comes up for the possibility of parole, it can be an extremely frightening time for people and how they are supported in the communication that is eventually crucial. At the moment, I think that it is very confusing, just because of disparate responsibilities between the Scottish Prison Service and the Scottish Parole Board, I think that I made a single point of contact for that process. I think that that would be a trauma-informed approach, rather than I have acted on behalf of rape survivors in these circumstances, where I looked at the letter and sent me. It is so confusing about who somebody should contact at a really fearful time for them. There is so much information given about what any safety measures might be in place when somebody has been notified that their rapist has been released, but I think that there is much more that can be done at that end of the process to improve or at least alleviate some of the trauma people experience just by giving proper information that is easily accessible on the question of decisions not to prosecute. At times, the Crown can do this really, really well. Even if it is difficult news for a complainer that the case has not been prosecuted, if it is communicated well to that complainer insensitively, I think that that can make a huge difference. The more information that somebody can be given if that is what they want, the easier it can be for them to navigate what can be a really difficult point in their lives. I would say that it is important to understand that there is a whole continuum of experience through criminal to civil courts and domestic abuse cases, most of which are unsupported by appropriate, affordable and geographically accessible legal services. I know that there is another round table coming up, so I hope that we can pick that up, because some of the experience that victims tell us about that is really negative after a conviction has to do with the fact that they have gotten poor or non-existent or that they cannot afford good legal services. For children in particular, I really want to underscore that children have a right to legal representation in many, many, many situations in Scotland in which they are never offered them. That is a critical gap, and we are trying to do something about that. The reality is that the system at the moment does not see children as eligible for so many services. The other thing that I have to point at is—I know that the committee has no control over sentencing, but we are very, very worried about the extent to which convicted domestic abuse perpetrators have community sentencing. Even despite Covid, it was not at all focused around the safety of the victim, but rather around some mechanism for discharging criminal justice social works responsibility. It is a mess from our perspective, and Covid has aggravated it significantly. We would be more concerned about the lack of eliminating work hours that have been part of sentences if we thought that work hours actually did anything particularly good for victims and their children. We would really like to see a much more aggressive approach to electronic monitoring through a whole set of mechanisms that actually make women and children feel and be safer. We are not committed to custodial sentences particularly, we are just committed to safety and we just have not seen a system that privileges that. Thank you very much for that. That is a whole other kind of worms, which we will not open now, but that is a very live discussion. You will be aware of a statement in the chamber later this afternoon on that topic, and that is an issue that I am sure the committee will be looking at. I look forward to hopefully reading some more written submissions from you about what you think is working and what is not working in community sensing. Thank you to all our witnesses today. I am going to bring this session to a close now. There are lots of really interesting discussions, so I very much thank you for your time. If any witnesses feel that you have outstanding points that you would like to raise with the committee, please feel free to follow up in writing and, of course, we will take that evidence into account. Again, thank you all very much for attending. We will now take a short break before we hear from our next set of witnesses. Thank you very much. Our next agenda item is our roundtable discussion on victims' rights and victim support. I refer members to papers numbers 4 and 5. We will take evidence today from a roundtable of witnesses who will be joining us virtually. Again, I am sorry that you cannot join us in person, but that is due to current rules on social distancing. Today, I welcome our panel of witnesses, Ms Mary Glasgow, chief executive of Children First, Mr John Watt, chair of the Parole Board for Scotland, chief superintendent Colin Convery, of the partnerships, prevention and community wellbeing section of Police Scotland, Mr Tim Barraclough, executive director of tribunals and the Office of the Public Guardian, Scottish Courts and Tribunal Service, Ms Theresa Medhurst, interim chief executive, and Mr Alasdair Pardy, interim director of operations of the Scottish Prison Service, Ms Kate Wallace, chief executive officer of Victim Support Scotland, and Mr Sean Duffey, chief executive officer of The Wise Group. We very much appreciate the time that you are all taking to join us this morning. I thank those witnesses who have provided us with a written submission, and they are now available online. I intend to allow an hour and 20 minutes for questions and discussion. If witnesses wish to respond to a question, can I please ask you to indicate that by typing an R in the chat function on blue jeans, and I will bring you in if time permits. If you are simply agreeing with what a witness is saying, there is no need to intervene to say so. Other comments that you make in the chat function will not be visible to committee members or recorded anywhere, so if you want to make a comment, please do so by requesting to speak. I will now move directly to questions, and can I please ask members and our invited guests to keep your questions and comments as succinct as possible. I am keen to encourage a free-flowing discussion. I would like to kick things off, and I will ask a broad opening question. I think that this might be one for Ms Wallace and Mr Duffy. It is just really around your views on what it is that victims want from the criminal justice system. Really, in relation to thinking about your main concerns about how victims are supported within the system, when it comes to thinking about their experiences of coming into the system, being involved in the system and how that supports and works for them as, hopefully, at some point they navigate away from the system. I can maybe ask Ms Wallace to come in on that. Hi there. Thank you, committee, for asking me to join today. Overwhelmingly, what victims tell us that they want from the justice system is to have confidence in a robust system that means that what has happened to them does not happen to anybody else, so they want confidence that that system is going to be robust. In terms of what it means for its interaction with them and their own specific circumstances, they want to be treated with dignity and respect and often be heard that they are not. They also do not want to be re-traumatised by the system, and that has been borne out in a number of reports that you have seen over a good number of years now. This retelling of a story that can be re-traumatising for many victims, they do not understand why they keep continually being asked by different people the same things. The way that the process treats them is of concern as well, right from the very beginning, about how statements are taken and how that is then translated into, potentially, if it goes to court. Then again, the whole court process believes disruption, adjournments, all of that kind of thing, and the way that the process is done about victims finding the court buildings very intimidating, they find that traumatising as well. The whole way that that is done very often themselves or their families can be seen accused and their families too can be traumatising right through to beyond that verdict sentence, a lack of understanding really around that, and a lack of having things explained to them in a way, in a trauma-informed and trauma-sensitive way. That they can make sense of and then beyond that into release victim notification and parole. Again, I feel that those things are not explained in a way that they can understand, they are not dealt with in a trauma-sensitive way and we will come back to some of those individual aspects later. Thank you very much. Can I bring in Sean Duffay just to follow on from that? Yes, certainly. I echo Kate and thank you for the opportunity here. Just to start off, I mean that this question is not necessarily our area of expertise. Our area of expertise is more about creating less victims through reducing re-offending. I think that the piece that we certainly hear from people who we support, who themselves in some respects can also be victims is just more progress and wound about, as Kate said, being heard and being visible and being considered in terms of their position within the overall process. It can feel quite cold in binary sometimes. One of the things that I picked up from the last evidence session that struck me and I've heard many times before is access to accurate information in a timely manner in terms of what the process looks like for a victim so as to not re-traumatise or increase anxiety or tension around that situation. Those are slightly more than anecdotal evidence points that we've picked up, but as I outlined at the bienning, our area of expertise is to try and rehabilitate more early introductory offenders to break the cycle so that there's no graduation towards creating more victims. Thank you very much for that. Just following on from those responses, I'm quite interested in your thoughts and I'll bring in Kate Wallace and Mary Glasgow on the follow-up question about the priorities for a victims commissioner, which we've been discussing in a wider context. I'm quite interested in your views on what should the priorities be of a victims commissioner thinking about it from the perspective of their journey through the criminal justice system. I'm particularly interested in that in respect of the experiences of children and young people. What should a victims commissioner priorities be around supporting children and young people navigate through the criminal justice system but perhaps supporting them avoid it in the first place? I'll maybe bring in Mary Glasgow and then followed by Kate Wallace on that. Ms Glasgow? Thank you for the opportunity to give evidence on behalf of the children that we support. Children first are supportive of the move towards bringing in a victims commissioner. Similar to the answers that were given earlier, we think that for children, their rights to justice to be protected and kept safe through the process are incredibly important. We think that the commissioner would be able to take that approach, which ensures that the particular needs and rights of children are upheld, their needs to be kept safe through the process, the needs for their particular needs in terms of an understanding of their development, the way in which they give evidence, the way in which they are required to be communicated with, that allows them to be heard and understood is incredibly important, but also an understanding of impact. The biggest single impact that children talk to us about at children first is that the current system often causes more harm than the original abuse or incident itself, that children continually talk about being re-traumatised by a bewildering, complex and delayed process that they do not understand. For us, for children, the priority of our victims commissioner needs to be to remove any re-traumatisation back of child victims and witnesses and to address the delays. For children in particular, long delays are a substantial part of their lives. There can be huge delay between the incident and the child being in a situation where they are able to get justice, the ability to recall events and, also, importantly, there is often a delay in access to support for children to recover because of those long delays, which is a lifelong and devastating impact. For a victims commissioner paying attention to those particular needs and the rise of children, victims and witnesses would be incredibly welcome. Thank you. Thank you very much. I have some very interesting points there. Kate Wallace, do you want to come in on this particular question? I agree with Mary, particularly around delays and the impact of that for children. There were delays pre-Covid, as you know. They have got much, much worse during Covid, so that is a particular concern. For us, for the victims commissioner, key priorities would be hearing from and understanding the experience of victims themselves, establishing some priorities around that. We would like to see a commissioner who is independent from Government and who has a clearly defined remit and whose role would be to establish panels for those who have lived experience so that that was built in from the start. We would see that as a key priority. Another aspect of that is about making sure that the rights of victims and witnesses that are enshrined in the Victims and Witnesses Scotland Act and the Victims Code are actually being fulfilled by the criminal justice system. It does not really feel like that at the moment and looking at standards of service, as Mary has said. I have said this before on a previous roundtable on system change and that is our hope for the victims commissioner because that is really what is required. Just picking up on a point that you made there, Ms Wallace, you rightly referred to victims and witnesses. On picking that up, do you feel that there needs to be increased focus on witnesses in addition to victims within the criminal justice system? If so, what might that look like? What are the priorities around ensuring that witnesses are supported, where they are required and have access to the support options that they need? At Victims and Support Scotland, we support anyone who feels as though they have been either a direct or an indirect victim of crime. We also support vulnerable witnesses at court. We have a rena in a protocol in place to do that with the SCTS in the Crown Office. Anybody who feels as though they have been detrimentally impacted by a crime is the people that we are interested in supporting. I know that we have had debates and discussions about the use of the word victim, but from our point of view it is about how that has impacted on you. We would see victims and witnesses together in that collective, if you like, because of the impact that a crime has had on them. Whether they are being treated by a court process as being the direct victim is a different or complainer is a different matter for us. We would like to see a Victims Commissioner role that has a broader remit and an understanding of that, rather than trying to apply quite a narrow definition potentially. For example, in the situation of children, you might be thinking about siblings who have been as affected rather than necessarily a direct child victim of one particular incident, if you like, depending on the circumstances. That is how we would see it. There are no other members interested in picking up on the general opening and questioning. I would like to now move on to looking at legislation. I would like to bring in Fulton MacGregor, if you would like to pick up on that, followed by Rona Mackay. I would like to ask Mary Glasgow what her view is on the current legislation surrounding the protection of children as victims of abuse and domestic abuse in relation to the Children's Scotland Act and the Vulnerable Witnesses Act etc. She thinks that more could be done in that respect to protect them. I think that the short answer is that much more can be done. Although progress has been made, it has often been incremental, tinkering to make things a little bit better for children. What we are continuing to do is to try and have children's needs met within a very complex system that was never designed around an understanding of child development, how children communicate, the impact of trauma on children, which is why we very much believe and have been calling on on behalf of the children and the families that we support for a transformational change in the way that child victims and witnesses are dealt with in the justice system. For too long, children have been denied justice because the system that is supposed to protect them is supposed to help them both causes them harm at times, long delays and there is often a complete lack of opportunity for those children to recover. They are often denied the opportunity to recover, which has a huge impact on their lives throughout the life course, so we think that there is much more that can be done and should be done. I will ask a separate question to Superintendent Colin Convery. It relates to domestic abuse protection orders. In March this year, the Scottish Parliament passed legislation to introduce those, which would mean that the perpetrator of domestic abuse would be removed from the house. I think that Royal Assentments gained in me. Are they up and running yet? If they are, are they being used much and are they having an effect? I am not afraid that that is not something that I can comment on. I am not aware of that, but I will happily report back to the committee to get that information, ma'am. I will bring in Kitty Clark. I think that you were quite keen to pick up on this. Yes. In the last evidence session, we heard that there were resourcing issues around evidence on commission. I wanted to ask Mary Glasgow in particular and perhaps Kate Wallace whether that was something that they were experiencing and whether they believed that there was more scope for using evidence on commission in relation to children. It may be if I could ask Mary Glasgow to come in on that. I am not specifically up to date and aware, to be honest. Our understanding is that there has been some challenges made much worse by Covid. Understandably, we ourselves have reported the Crown Office with some access to some of our own premises. As far as we are aware, there are some issues that need to be improved. Probably we do not have the specifics, but we can get those for you and come back to you with an opinion on that. Kate Wallace, I do not know if you want to add anything to that. Yes. I think that there is huge scope to do a lot more around commissions. As Mary said, in her answer earlier on, courts are not really the place for children. They are very intimidating buildings. They do re-traumatise children. They are very adult spaces. They are not at all designed in a way that is child-friendly. Even some of the newer facilities, I have to say, are not that child-friendly either. We think that there is a really good opportunity with evidence on commission to get the best evidence without the need for a child going to court at all. We think that that model could be expanded. I do appreciate that the Covid situation had an impact, particularly on the Glasgow facility, but I think that there should be an opportunity to expand that even further. Those are rights that are enshrined within existing legislation. Why not use what we have got to the best that we can, given that it will improve the experience of children undoubtedly? Tim Barraclough, I think that you would quite like to come in on this. Yes. Good morning and thank you for inviting me to speak to you. This is in relation to evidence by commissioner hearings. You are absolutely right, on speakers who have been absolutely right, that there have been difficulties caused by the pandemic in using the facilities that we have. Pensipi, because of physical distancing requirements, means that the facilities that were very well designed before Covid for evidence by commissioner hearings weren't particularly suitable to take into account physical distancing. However, what has happened is that we have begun to recover from that position. The numbers of commissions that are happening every year are increasing year on year. In 2017, well before the legislation took place, there were only 29 commissions held throughout the year. In 2021, this year, halfway through the year or just over halfway, we have already had 145 by the end of July, so we are looking to reach about 300 by the end of this year. We are very keen to facilitate the increase in the number of commissions. We will be developing facilities in places other than Glasgow. We have facilities now in the new Inverness Justice Centre in Edinburgh, and we will be developing facilities elsewhere. We very much think that this is the future, the way to go, and we will be very supportive of facilitating a considerable increase in the capacity of the whole commission hearings. The only other thing that I would say is that, in order to hold commission hearings, you need to have the judge and the legal practitioners involved. It takes them away from the conduct of trials, so we need to think about how to resource within the criminal procedure process that increase in the number of hearings, but it is something that we are very much supportive of. Thank you very much. Ms Wallace, would you like to come back in just briefly? Yes. It was just to say that, obviously, evidence on commission hearings are one aspect. There are other aspects of where you can gather evidence in a way that does not require a child to be in a court. I did not want us to forget about remote links, where we can be gathering evidence, and children can be providing that over a remote video link. That does not have to be, as we have demonstrated in the summary virtual trial pilot, that does not have to be done from a room within the court building itself. It can be done out with that. It was just to add to that that there are other methods as well. It will not be that one of those will be suitable for all children and young people. It is looking at the range of the tools that we have. It is also thinking about how we can expand on those and do more with them to reduce the number of children having to go into court to none. Thank you, Ms Wallace. If there are no more questions around the current legislation, I will maybe move on now to looking at issues around victim notification, and I will maybe bring in Mr Finlay on that. Thank you. The first question is for John Watt. Most people may not appreciate that the parole system in Scotland effectively operates by enclosed doors and in secret. I should declare an interest, as I did before, in that I am a signatory to the participant in the victim notification scheme. I personally regard the scheme to be impersonal and clear, and it puts the onus on victims to be proactive and choose to engage. Indeed, in your own submission to the committee, you say that the scheme needs to be radically revised. Given that you agree that significant changes need to be made to it, what is stopping you from doing so? John Watt, sorry. We do not control VNS. SPS does that. Given the opportunity, we would certainly welcome the chance. I am not sure whether your question is coming from the… I am afraid that I will ask you a question. What makes you think that the parole board can change VNS? Well, if it is the case that giving the parole board the powers to administer it might be a way to do so, or indeed I could redirect the question to Theresa Meathers. No, I understand what you are coming from now. The board's position is dealing with the first part of your question. We favour more openness and more transparency, but there is a limit to how far you can go on that. In relation to dealing with victims, our preference would be to have victims involved immediately after, if they want to be, immediately after conviction and sentence, or appeal maybe, so that nothing comes as a surprise down the line. It has to be done in some personal way, ideally chosen by the victim. The preference, in the board's point of view, would be face-to-face or virtual contact. There is nothing mind-furiating, and anyone who has dealt with an internet supplier will understand this when you cannot get to talk to a person. The frustration levels are intense. Our position would be that the board of our parole Scotland, not the board, and there is a difference between the two, parole Scotland's administrative arm, parole Scotland could play a role in being a single point of contact right from the earliest stage through to parole hearings in all that goes with parole hearings. There is a level of expertise there that does not exist elsewhere in relation to how parole operates and why things happen as they do. Given the powers and the resources, I would like parole Scotland to provide the opportunity for a witness to talk—sorry, a victim—about their concerns and to understand the process right through progression, to parole and all that goes with that, the role that victims have at a parole hearing and even roughly the date when that will happen. The other benefit is that parole Scotland is quite a small body, and I think that that is ideally suited to dealing with victims. You can offer a much more personal and personalised service as a sporting chance that a victim in repeated tribunals might end up talking to the same person. That is preferable to a monolithic organisation having to deal with it. I do not have that answer to your question, but I hope that it goes some way towards doing that. I will also ask Kate Wallace from Victim Support about the victim notification scheme. Your submission is very critical of it. You describe it as being not fit for purpose. You also pointed out that the Scottish Government has not given any specific commitment to do anything about it in the current programme for government. Why do you think that the Scottish Government does not share your sense of urgency and what should be done to fix that? The Government has committed to conducting a review, so I think that it shares an understanding about the impact. It is aware of some cases, as I am, in particular that have been very distressed in as a result of the way that the victim notification scheme is carried out. For us, we see a lot of re-traumatisation through the victim notification scheme. It is a very complex scheme. There are effectively two of them. There are a number of different organisations involved, as you have heard. It is important to remember back to what the scheme is. Victims are asked if they want to be a member of the scheme. We would argue at a point where they are least able to make that decision, where they are most traumatised. Very often, they cannot remember that they have been asked and they do not know what it is, or they think to themselves, that is not something that I need to worry about just now. I will delay that decision. However, they are not asked again if they want to be a member of that scheme. We have specialist services to support families who are bereaved by murdering culpable bonusiding in those situations. In particular, we can see the impact, because there can be a nine-year delay between someone having any contact at all around the victim notification scheme. All that people are entitled to is to know that the perpetrator has been released. That is all that they are entitled to. At the moment, my argument is that it is the least trauma-informed approach that they can have. It comes out by a letter. There is absolutely no pre-warning that somebody has. It can be, as I say, nine years of a gap. We know no communication in between times at all. No prior warning that that letter is going to come, and no warning about what the contents of that letter are. We know that some victims have opened those letters, been on their own, been extremely vulnerable, and had serious issues going on in their lives. We know that, for some victims, that has led them to harming themselves. In some cases, it is quite serious repercussion. We have asked for, and the Government has agreed to, thankfully. It would be good to know when a whole-scale review of the victim notification scheme comes out, because, as I say, we see day in, day out the impact of what that means for victims across Scotland. Have you indicated how long that is going to take or when it is going to get round to it? Not to me, no. I have another question about the Victim Surcharge Fund, and it is also for Kate Wallace. The SMP 2016 manifesto pledged more than £1 million a year to be paid out through the fund. It took until 2019 to set up, and earlier this year it paid out something in the region of £157,000. Now, your organisation received some of that money for your own victims fund, which in turn paid out £285,000, and, in your submission, you sought an unprecedented demand for that. Some of the money in your fund came from charitable donations. Is it the case that charity is being left to pay for an SMP manifesto pledge, and is this a disincentive for the Government to finally get this £1 million a year fund up and running? I think that the first thing to say is that the surcharge fund is obviously a levy on top of fines, and the delay and the gap in terms of money coming through, as opposed to what was forecasted, was impacted, obviously, by Covid and when with the disruption to the courts. That had a big impact on the amount of money that could be collected. We have always had a victims fund where we have put some different funding towards that fund, and that is something that victim support has been doing for a considerable period of time. What we managed to do with the victim surcharge fund, I think, was to increase dramatically how much money we had in the victims fund and respond to far greater levels of demand. We thought that the pandemic would have a compound impact on victims. Where we are coming from with the victims fund is that the no-victim who is in need should be financially impacted by being the victim of a crime, because they have been a victim of a crime through no fault of their own. That is where we are coming from, but what we saw through the pandemic was the impact of furlough people losing their jobs and their really high levels of destitution, which meant that ramping things up was really critical. We scaled that work up, and we are looking forward to more funding coming through from the victim surcharge fund, as there is more court activity and more fines by the courts. We look to scale up our operations accordingly. Our view is that the fund coming from the surcharge fund should be protected as much as we possibly can to go directly to victims who are in need. The level of financial need is so great. We have found that that money should be protected. I am aware that, for example, in England, they have had a type of surcharge fund, but funding from that goes to different projects and different services rather than directly to victims themselves. I think that what we have managed to do in Scotland is really, really good. It is unfortunate that it is needed, but I am so glad that it is there, and we have got that that we can use. That would be my comments on the victim surcharge fund. I understand that Covid has affected that as it has affected just about everything else. Do you have any indication as to what kind of level of funding you will be getting in the future years of the projected that, or any anticipation? No, at the moment. From the victim surcharge fund, which is what you are asking about specifically, there will be another round of funds released quite soon. What they do is wait until the level of the surcharge fund is at a certain point that has been gathered, and then they release those funds, so it is about every six months. We are about to get another amount through that. Because it is in its pretty early stages, it is quite a challenge to forecast, but I would expect that, by the beginning of next year, we would be in a better position to be able to do that and to project out for future years. The way that we have dealt with it, as I say, is to lever in other types of funds and any efficiencies that can be made, we are funneling them towards the victim's fund. Also, what we would do is just give people really long notice if we needed to have the fund and if we needed to close because of a shortage of funds. That is how we would approach that if we were struggling to be able to leave our sufficient funds into there. I would like to bring in Theresa Medishurst. You were wanting to come in on that. I will take the liberty of asking, although we are looking at the issues around victim notifications, if you have any particular views on the support or arrangements that are currently in place around notification, particularly of release dates, but I will bring you in, Ms Medishurst. Thank you very much, convener, and good afternoon, everyone. Thanks again for the opportunity of attending committee. It was really a point on the VNS, and Kate has identified that the scheme needs to be reviewed, and I would wholeheartedly agree with that. There are different parts of the criminal justice system that have responsibility for different elements, so Crown Office and Prosecution Service are the organisation that issues the application packs and confirm whether or not a victim qualifies to be part of the scheme. SPS then takes responsibility for notification during a person's sentence, and then obviously on to parole Scotland for those cases where parole plays a part. From our perspective, what is very clear is that there is not a connectedness necessarily between the different parts of the system, and any review would flush out where there needs to be greater connectivity, how best that could be achieved, and, in addition to that, what support arrangements would be required. The review would need to focus very much on engagement with the victim's organisations to ensure that the voices of victims are very much at the core of any review. In England, for example, the probation service is the one to administer the process there on behalf of the system, so there are other models of evicting notification schemes that we could certainly consider and look at as part of a review. Thank you very much. A follow-up question is a practical one around the release, not dates but days of the week. Friday is a release date, and it was just to ask for your comments on how appropriate that is given that, over a weekend period, services might be closed. Is that a process or an arrangement that should continue in the context of victim support? In the context of victim support, I am probably not the best person to respond to this. It would be eight who could best respond. In the broadest sense, in terms of people having access to services on a Friday as opposed to any other day of the week, there are considerations that need to be taken into account around when services and supports are engaging with those in custody. For example, if somebody requires to make a DWP application, they can only do it on the date of release. There are things like that that make the system clunkier in that port and release arrangement, and that may be the fact that it is the same for victim support, but, as I said, Kate would be the best person to respond to that. I will bring in Kate Wallace on that. Do you like to make a follow-up comment on that? Yes, we get a lot of feedback from victims who say that receiving letters later on on a Friday afternoon is really not helpful, because the number that is given to them in the letter about where they can phone and get further information by the time they receive those letters when they are in. That is where the question has come from. They say that they are worrying the whole weekend without any access to any further information about what that means. There are obviously support services available, but we cannot contact on a victim's behalf to get any further information, because there is no way to speak to them if they see what means. That is where the question has come from. However, I understand that the date of letter is often triggered by the release date. That is something that should be looked at within the victim's notification scheme review. Thank you very much. That is really helpful. I would like to look at the Barnhouse system review that has been taking place. I would like to bring in the cabinet secretary and maybe Rona Mackay on that. Thank you, convener. It is a good afternoon now to the panel. I wanted to ask about the Barnhouse or the Bairnshouse and the current development of that. That was obviously an issue that came up when the Parliament took through the vulnerable witnesses bill in the last session. It played quite a big role in that. The committee asked the Government to commit to it, and I am pleased to see that that commitment has been taken forward. Mary Glasgow is probably for you in the first instance, just to ask about the role of children first in expanding this work. What have you done? How have you worked with partner agencies and where is it at currently? Thank you. Children first, along with Victim Support Scotland and Edinburgh University, have formed a partnership to develop in practice a test-learn develop model. We have come together and with support from the dream trust of the players at People's Postcode Lottery, accessed a grant in order to develop in practice the first house. Beyond that, we have also worked with partners for a long time to bring the voices of the children and families that we support right to the centre of this conversation, to make sure that children's particular needs within the justice system have been heard and attended to. We have reviewed the evidence and worked really carefully with colleagues across Europe through the Promise Network to identify that the Barnhouse is the most effective model that is to allow children to get justice, to be cared for and protected and to get the support that they need to recover from the trauma that they have experienced. Primarily, the issue is about upholding children's rights to justice in a way that does not compromise their wellbeing. In other words, it does not cause them more trauma, because for decades we have supported children to recover from the impact of abuse, crime, violence and the simple biggest thing that they have told us is that going through the process in the system can often cause more harm than the original incident itself. We are really pleased at where we have got to. We have funds in place, we have identified the buildings that we are going to develop and we are working as part of a partnership alongside social work colleagues, police colleagues and other partners in this arena to develop a model of practice that can be researched, evidenced and taken to scale across Scotland. We have been really delighted with the progress that has been made and see ourselves very much in working in partnership with Government, as well as all the other agencies and players that are committed to bringing this transformational change into the system for children. Thanks for that. That is really encouraging to hear, but perhaps I could bring in Kate Wallace now to ask for the role of victim support Scotland in the development of this and I wonder if you can comment what sort of impact that could have on trial witnesses moving forward. Thank you, Mr McGregor. We are working in partnership alongside children first at the University of Edinburgh and Children of England, as you know, around the House for Healing Project, which is a test-learn-developed pilot that Mary has referred to. We see that as a really important and exciting development to ensure that the spaces and the way that children are supported through this process is done in a completely trauma-informed and child-friendly way. I mentioned earlier on about keeping children out of the courtroom completely and bringing services to children, as opposed to them having to go into adult services. As Mary says, the system will be re-traumatising for them. It has a lot of potential for children and young people, but the reason for VSS involvement is because we think that that is really important, but we also think that there will be some learning coming out of that that we could potentially be using for adult victims, because we know that the system re-traumatises them as well. Services going to the child, as opposed to the child going to the services, is really at the heart of that. We talked earlier on about existing methods and models that we have within Scotland. As I said, there are still some limitations on those, because they are not necessarily being done in buildings or areas where it is child-friendly and where it is done in a trauma-sensitif and designed from that purpose at the outset. It will have a huge impact in reducing re-traumatisation, completely improving children's experience and helping them to recover. It has a lot of potential. I know that everyone of my guys is getting dressed in this area as well. I'm so happy to lead it now. Thank you very much. I'm just going to bring in Jamie Greene. I think that you've got a follow-up question that you'd like to ask, and then I'll hand over to Mr Baraclough, and then I'll hand over to Ms Mackay. Thank you. Good morning, panel. I commend those in the panel for the work that they are doing and the establishment of the burn house, which I think was testament to the good work of the last committee of this Parliament on that issue. However, you'll be aware of the document that the Government produced on 14 September, outlining the vision, values and approach of it. It was brought to my attention that there were some phrasing that raised one or two eyebrows around who might be eligible to use the burn house model, and I just wondered if I could explore some direct understanding that if it's only children who are victims of crime or who are vulnerable, in the true sense that the scheme is designed to assist, or if there's any possibility that there will also be children who are under the age of criminal responsibility, as it currently is, but who might have caused significant harm to others, and who will also be using that facility to be processed as opposed to being processed in a court environment. I've had one or two letters about concerns that have been raised about the interaction between those two different groups of children. Does anyone have any knowledge of that, or could clarify that for me? That's a way of your hand, that's great. I think it's Ms Glasgow. Ms Glasgow, do you want to come in on that? Yes. I think we need to approach this from the understanding that children are children, and that, very much in our experience, the lines between child-accused and child victims can be a very fine one in this arena. We welcome consideration that, in line with Scott's law, the approach that Scotland takes to children's policy that this is being considered, there's obviously a lot to be worked out, but what I would want to reassure Mr Greene of and the committee of is that within our design, within our considerations of the physical development of the space of the child's house for healing or Scotland's first barn house, we are considering how both child-accused and child-accused victims and witnesses' needs can both be met safely. For example, designing separate entrances in separate spaces so that you can protect vulnerable witnesses, but you can also make sure that children who are accused of crimes are also recognised that they've also been victims most often and that they also require specialist support that understands their needs, which is so often lacking within the current system. We think that this is a welcome move. There's a lot to be worked out. The test learn develop approach that we will take will hopefully inform that learning. Our work with Edinburgh University will be very robust around researching and disseminating that learning. It is a complex area. We're also aware that there are some concerns, but we do think that it fits very well with the principles of the UNCRC and with the way in which Scotland considers child victims' witnesses and accused in policy. Thank you. That's helpful clarification. I don't think that anyone disagrees with the premise of how the law treats children and how society treats them. I raise it because there have been specific concerns raised that what was initially perceived as being a safe space for the victims of crime may also be a place that will be used to facilitate the processing of those who have been accused of something as well. There are genuine concerns out there, and I'm ericulio aware of them, I can see that from your response. As we go through that process, we'll be looking forward to any comfort that you can provide that all children will be protected in that environment. I'll bring in Mr Barraclough on that. I think that you were quite keen to speak on that. Yes. Just as someone who first visited the Barna House as far ago as 2014 was part of the evidence and procedure review team that first brought, or was one of the first in bringing this to the attention of the Scottish justice system, I think that there are two things I'd like to say. First of all, that in considering the Barna House, it is really important to understand that a Barna House is not just an offshoot of the justice system, and its very concept is about bringing together a range of services for a child who's been either a victim or a witness to serious abuse. The Barna House has four rooms, child protection, health and wellbeing, recovery as well as justice, and justice is just one element of that. Some of the children that go to a Barna House may never end up in court proceedings at all because their needs need to be met in a different way. Just to bear that in mind in terms of who's going to a Barna House, it's not just people who will be witnesses or potential witnesses in court proceedings. One of the biggest advances in the past few years in the development of the Barna House concept has been the coming on board of the health services in all this. It started out as a justice project and now has expanded as it should have done to incorporate health and child protection services in local authorities as well, which is absolutely where we want to be going on this. The other thing to say is that it is however still incredibly important for potential child witnesses in court proceedings, because if we get this right, a Barna House interview will take place before court proceedings have even started. If we get that initial interview right, we can eliminate the need for them to get involved in the court proceedings at all because the quality of that interview may be sufficient for all subsequent proceedings and you won't need cross-examination or you won't need further examination. There will always be that right for an accused to have the evidence against them examined, but getting the Barna House right where the environment is right and the quality of interviewing is right will be a massive step forward and something we're very supportive of. I'd like to bring in Superintendent Convery. I know that you'll be very interested in this discussion. Over to you. Thank you, convener. I have a general comment as well as to respond to Mr McGregor's direct ask as well as Mr Greene. The whole concept of Barna House is based on our principle of rights-based approach to delivering services and increasing services alongside our partners. It does mirror and we absolutely support it. It is something that supports a lot of the developments that are on going just now on about the interviewing of vulnerable witnesses, presentation of their evidence and also joint investigative interviews, but to pick up on Mr Greene's comment around the fine line between the hard doer and the victim, if you wish to call. There is a very fine line and we recognise that, especially for young people, the Barna House offers opportunities to explore the reasons for offending behaviour and then try to address that by appropriate measures. It's something that we would look forward to working alongside Mary and Kate in their teams to develop and work up as we look to learn and roll out across the country, hopefully. Thank you very much. Mr Mackay, you've been patiently waiting. Would you like to come in, but before you do, I'm aware that our colleagues from Children First have invited members to visit the Barna House, so I'm sure that we would be very keen to take up that invitation. Thank you for that. Over to you, Ms Mackay. I think that that was a really useful discussion about the Barna House. I'm delighted to hear of the progress that has been made so far and to endorse all the comments of the panel on that. I think that we probably have explored that enough. Do you mind if I move on to another topic? It's a question for Sean Duffie, please, of the WISE Group. I just wondered how Covid has impacted the good work that you do in getting people on the right pathways and helping to reduce re-offending. I'm really keen to know how women are going through the process, what success you're having in getting employment and pathways for women. Thank you. Okay. Thank you very much, Ms Mackay. I think that it's unsurprising that Covid's been quite a challenge given what we do. In the last operational year, we've found just over a thousand people through our programme, males. It's been challenging in respect of the programme's structure, six months' support in prison and six months' support post-liberation. That support in prison was quite challenging. Theresa Meadhurst's colleagues have been fantastic in supporting us and keeping contact with potential programme participants during the lockdown period. One of the most pleasing things during that period was to recognise that the things that were previously not seen as doable were all of a sudden doable. It's something that we should remember as we hopefully come out of the pandemic. There have been a lot of necessities in the mother of all invention. We managed to do things together that previously were difficult to do or weren't considered, particularly around the technology, etc. We've had a situation in the last operational year in a male context in the male estate where, say, over a thousand people have went through the programme. We've got a re-offending rate with those who have returned to custody within a year, which is 8.7 per cent. Over 90 per cent of our participants are not going on to re-offend the results in a custodial sentence. That's something that we need to look at more acutely in relation to the conversation today, in relation to victims. Fundamentally, what we're doing here is that it's a bit like vaccines. We're severely weakening or breaking the link between introductory criminality and the graduation to serious criminal offences, which Kate and others do in supporting the victims of that. It's been a challenge. There's no doubt about it, but we've managed to continue with support from prison service, with support from the Government to be able to support on liberation the people who are coming out even on their early release programme. What we were able to do was bring technology to the fore, bring partnership working to the fore in a way that hasn't really been in evidence previously, greater access to services and greater integration to services with local authorities, et cetera. It was a challenge, but what it did was it forced us to do the things that we were always able to do, but we'd never managed to do, as a collective. I think that's the overriding lesson for us, I think, on that. On the female estate, that's suffered the same sort of challenges across both areas. We're working partnership with Sacro and Apex and they're fantastic partners on that. Again, the same issues are prevalent there also. On employment, I don't have the figures on the female for employment, but in the male estate you're looking at roughly between 10 and 15 per cent of those who get through the programme successfully. We're able to find employment for it, but that's because we're able to cross integrate programmes, existing programmes that are in place across different directorates of Government. Again, that's something that we need to look at and how we design and bake in that approach at the beginning and not have disparate programmes running almost contrary to each other in terms of the successful outcomes. Thank you for that. Just very briefly, can I ask you, do you have an approximate gender breakdown of the people that you help, male to female, what the ratio for that is? As I say, there's over a thousand on programme male-wise and there is much less, I think it's maybe 1 to 20 or 1 to 15. I'll get the exact figures, I'll get the committees exact figures and send them through to you, but it's much less because there's a much lower number of females versus males in the estate, so it's much less, but we'll get you the exact ratio. That would be helpful. Thank you very much. Just watching time slightly against us, so I'm just finally going to bring in Katie Clark. I think that you've got a question around criminal injuries compensation. As you will know, responsibility for compensation to victims of crime and the criminal injury compensation scheme was devolved to the Scottish Parliament a number of years ago, but the Scottish Government continued with the Westminster Criminal Injury Compensation Scheme. I was wanting to ask Kate Wallace what her experiences of that scheme were and how well she feels that that works for victims. Thank you. We are really keen to see the outcome of the consultation and the review that seems to have been really delayed. That was over a year ago now, I think, where we put forward a number of recommendations for improvement to the scheme. Reduction in the amount of waiting times, one of the experiences that we have, for example, as I mentioned earlier on in our service for families bereaved by murder and culpable homicides, is that they often experience a really lengthy delay in a criminal injuries compensation payment for funerals. That can be really difficult for families. Nobody is expecting a murder in the family if people don't have funeral plans. Being able to pay for a funeral up front can be a real challenge for families, but there is often a really lengthy delay. We feel that the scheme and the way it is laid out itself, where the conduct of the victim of the crime is being taken into account, is really unfair. That needs to be fundamentally looked at. What that can often mean is that payments are not made, although I am aware that the criminal injuries compensation authority try not to delay, but sometimes it means that they are waiting until the end of court proceedings before they are paying out so that they have an answer to the question about whether or not they are accused the victim is involved. At some point, as I say, for murder and culpable homicides, it is the families that are bearing the cost of that, so that seems really unfair. We submitted a large number of recommendations on improvement to the scheme that we are still awaiting the outcome of. That is very helpful. I know that we are short of time, but if you would want to share anything in writing with the committee, that would be really appreciated. I am just going to bring things to a close, but before I do so, I believe that Superintendent Convary, you have perhaps been able to find some information that Ms Mackay was referencing earlier on. Is that correct? Yes, that is correct. If I am writing, I am just confirming Ms Mackay the question surrounding domestic abuse protection orders. Yes, that is correct. Thank you, Ms Mackay. My apologies for not being able to answer the time when I did not feel that it was appropriate to give half an answer. The position and defence are that we are supporting the Government's implementation board with domestic abuse protection orders. In fact, Sam Forbes, who is on this morning, sits on the implementation board for that, or Sporys sits in the working group for that to work towards delivering something that we support. We absolutely recognise that it has got to be done carefully and carefully to make sure that it is delivered safely for victims in particular. I hope that that gives you what you need. I am not sure all that the time over at something we are at to the working with the stakeholders on to deliver. Thank you so much for coming back with that. That is really appreciated. Thank you very much. As ever, time is against us, but that has been a really informative and helpful discussion. As ever, if any of our witnesses today feel that there are outstanding points that you would like to share with the committee, I very much invite you to follow that up in writing and we will take your evidence into account. On behalf of the committee, a big thank you to all our witnesses attending today. We will now move on to our next agenda item, which is consideration of two Scottish statutory instruments that are subject to the negative procedure. I refer members to paper number six. Do any members have any comments or questions firstly on the Sexual Offences Act 2003, prescribed police stations Scotland amendment number two regulations of 2021, and that is SSI 282 of 2021? Do any members have any comments or questions on the prisons and young offenders institutions, coronavirus Scotland amendment number two rules of 2021, and that is SSI 289 of 2021? I would probably like to get more information on that, convener, on the role that the inspector at our plane in terms of some of the human rights in the extension, so if that is possible, we could get more information from the cabinet secretary and whoever else is involved in that. I echo comments by Stevenson and I would welcome more information. I note that what seems like a minor negative instrument is extending by a significant period of time, some significant powers that governors in our prison services and young offenders institutions have, with the ability, for example, to confine prisoners to themselves for a prolonged period of times to restrict activity, suspend prison visits and curtail work educational activities, counselling and professional activities for another six months. I do appreciate that this is perhaps linked to the extension of other Covid regulations that were debated in the wider chamber and other pieces of legislation, but I would say that I would find unacceptable that in point nine of the consultation it says that the SPS intends to publish the consultation responses received of which they weren't all positive, I should add, and its response to the consultation on its website in October, but these powers run out at the end of September and we're been asked to approve their extension prior to the publication of the consultation and their response, which I find wholly unacceptable. I would expect that either the Minister for Community Safety or whoever is presenting the SSI to at least give us some more information on what concerns have been raised throughout the consultation process so that the members can take a view as to the suitability of the extension of the powers that are being asked by the SPS or indeed by the Government. Thank you very much for that. I'll bring in Ms Barre, just to outline next steps. Yes, so the committee can look at this negative SSI again next week, so in the meantime we can write to the Scottish Prison Service, to the Cabinet Secretary and to the inspector about the concerns that you've raised and you can look at the responses hopefully next week. Okay, thank you very much. As Ms Stevenson and Mr Greene have raised some questions for which it would be valuable to have some answers, I propose to hold off agreeing the prisons and young offenders institutions, Corona, Scotland amendment number two rules of 2021, until our next meeting next week. Are we all agreed? Thank you very much. No member has indicated that they have any comments on the first of our SSIs, which is the one relating to sexual offences. That being the case, are members content formally not to make any comments to the Parliament on this instrument? That completes consideration of the two negative instruments and we'll now move into our private session.