 Gweld imeddiol i gael o'r Gwymeid y Cysylltiau's 12th bydd ynghylch yn 2016. Y gynnig yma yma eich gyntaf, Draft Budget Scootany, yn 2017-18, ac mae llyfradwy i'n gwybod gyda'r Minister Carline Gardner, Auditor General y Fffords Scotlund, Angela Cullen Ejewe, Ysgolwyr o'r duodd, Mark Roberts, sefnion sefydlu iei, ac rwy'n ddiwodd o'r Fffords Scotlund, We are very pleased to have you before the committee today. I refer members to paper 1, which is a note from the clerk, and paper 2, which is a SPICE briefing, along with the written submission, which Audit Scotland has very helpfully provided as. I understand that you would like to make an opening statement in order to general. Yes, please. Thank you, convener, very briefly. Thank you for the opportunity to give evidence to inform the committee's pre-budget scrutiny. There are three points that I would like to highlight before we start. First, the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service budget has been relatively static in real terms over the last five years, reflecting financial constraints across the public sector. In the last two years, the Crown Office has received additional financial support from the Scottish Government for specific case work and to reduce the time taken for cases involving domestic abuse to reach the courts. Second, long-term financial sustainability is a central theme in our work at the moment. Due to the financial pressures facing public bodies, we have been encouraging all of them to think about long-term potential future financial scenarios and to develop strategies to deal with those. I am pleased to say that the Crown Office is now developing a long-term financial strategy. Thirdly, while the Crown Office is constitutionally and operationally independent, it is also obviously an integral part of the justice system. My report last year on the efficiency of the sheriff court system noted concerns about how well that system was operating, especially at the local level. Our monitoring suggests that progress has been made since then with improvements in the operation of local criminal justice boards and the internal restructuring of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service. As you said, convener, I am accompanied by Angela Cullen, who is the appointed auditor for the Crown Office, and by Mark Roberts, who leads our work across the justice sector, and together we will do our best to answer the committee's questions. Thank you very much. That is helpful. Do members have questions? Stuart Stevenson. Thank you very much, convener, and thank you for the opening remarks. It takes me straight to one of the ones in which I was interested, and that relates to the long-term strategy over 10 years. I just wondered, as the auditor, what factors you think should be being considered in this particular context, because I would suggest my experience—because I have been there doing this sort of thing—that trying to look as far or distant as that is extremely difficult. Specifically, are you expecting that, as a result of the exercise that they are undertaking, that they will identify changes in the law, perhaps, that would help to give them stability? Are they anticipating changes in the law, which are not necessarily yet being talked about? Just to give an example, but not for any particular reason, but just to give an example, there clearly might be changes in fixed penalties, which would reduce the number that comes into the court system at the bottom end. How are they going to deal with those kind of imponderables, and how would you expect to see that documented in what you will subsequently be auditing and engaging with? It is a very good question, and I will ask Angela Duggan to come in in a moment with some of the specifics. I will maybe preface it by saying that the bodies that we audit often are anxious at the prospect of doing longer-term financial planning, and we recognise that they only receive their funding in most instances in firm figures for a year or so ahead through the Scottish Government's budget. It is not that we think that they can get a financial strategy that is right in inverted commas. Instead, it is the process of thinking through exactly those sorts of changes, what we know about the likely direction of public finances and how they would react in different circumstances. I will ask Angela Duggan to talk you through the specific things that she would be expecting to see in her audit work with the Crown Office in the future. It is a really good question, Mr Stevenson. A few years ago, when we published our report on Scotland's public finances at that time, when we first recommended—or actually probably the second or third time—we recommended that public bodies develop long-term financial strategies, we set out what we expected to see. That area was not in huge detail but, at a high level, the areas that we expected bodies to cover. We absolutely recognise that they do not know the budgets but they do know their costs. The costs and the cost drivers, what their priorities are over that period, what some of their savings and where they have historically managed to make savings, and different scenarios that they might want to model different options. Some of that might be legislation that they are aware of that will come in in the next few years and how that might impact on their services and demand for their services. A whole range of areas that we would expect bodies to be looking at. The Crown Office is considering that at the moment. They are making progress in this area. What we would also say is that we do not expect those financial strategies to be developed and then put up on a shelf. They should be living documents and they should be dusted off and refreshed every year or so, when we know what some of the new areas are that are coming in. New legislation, if it was not anticipated originally and two years down the line it was, we would certainly expect that to be built in and different scenarios and options modelled around that. We use to be phrased shelfware. I absolutely recognise what is being said there. Can I just take that a wee bit further and analyse what the purpose of doing this is? Is it to inform the Government of the needs of this functional area? I guess it will, in part, be that. Or is it more focused on enabling the organisation to be flexible in its responses by having done some strategic thinking about the consequences of a range of scenarios? If it is that latter in particular, will that mean that the plan is less about numbers and more about activities? I would say that it is both of those things and a third, particularly for the Crown Office. We know that it is an integral part of the overall justice system. For example, in our report last year on the sheriff courts, we talked about a significant increase in work that had come through because of Police Scotland's focus on traffic offences. The discussion needs to be with Government, within the Crown Office, but also with the courtservice, Police Scotland and other players in there to make sure that everybody understands and, as far as possible, is taking a joined-up approach to the direction for the justice system. My sense is that the most important focus is within the Crown Office itself. As I say, it gives them the chance to think through the direction of travel for the demand that they will have to deal with, how they can manage that demand and what is likely to happen to their funding. It obviously links to other strategies such as the workforce strategy and the digital strategy that Angela has also recommended that they should be taking forward for how they would manage that. I know that one of the committee's concerns is whether the Crown Office has sufficient resource to carry out the demands that are made on it. It will help to identify how far that excess demand could be met by efficiencies within the system and how far there may be a discussion that needs to be had with Government longer term about the resources that are needed to deliver the system as it currently stands. It plays both of those roles, but having that really detailed understanding of what the pressures are and where the scope is to work differently to meet them is a fundamental starting point for having a sensible discussion about it. Perhaps finally, before I return the baton to others, this will clearly be something that will engage quite a lot of people in the organisation and take quite a bit of effort and lead to quite a lot of debate perhaps about the organisation. Have you any sense of how many people, how many man hours might be reasonably thought to be properly applied to this and, therefore, on the other side of the equation, what are the benefits and how will we know that we have had any benefits in taking a strategic? If I say to you that I work for the Bank of Scotland, the Bank of Scotland published its first annual accounts only after it had been in existence for over 250 years, and until we in the computer side started to do strategic planning, did none whatsoever. I am familiar with two worlds. I just wonder for this quite substantial piece of work that will challenge and so on and so forth, how big is it, but also where do you expect when you go back to audit what they have been doing, where do you expect to see the benefits from actually taking this approach? I guess other parts of Government will be listening to your answer as well. I will ask Angela Duggan to talk about the specifics of the Crown Office, and I might pick up later if there is something to add. Sure. I get cost of developing certainly in the—I cannot tell you a number off the top of my head how many hours it might take to develop one. In the first instance, it will take more time to develop and involve more people, and we would actively encourage as many people to be involved as possible, because often the people who are on the ground doing the work can identify where efficiencies can be made, so absolutely they should be involved in that. Once it is developed and mainstreaming and keeping it up to date, as I mentioned earlier, it should be easier. It certainly should be an activity that is mainstreamed, it should have significant focus and attention. If I intervene at this point, those are warm words, but I get no sense of scale from them, so please can you give me some sense, because you are going to come in and look at the effort that has been deployed in this, and you are going to make a comment saying that you spent too much time or too little time where the outcome was that it is factory. Have you got your metrics for when you go on audit this activity at a later date that will tell you that the COPFS has successfully taken this request for a tenure plan forward or not? I may or may not comment on how much it has cost them to develop the plan. What I would be looking for is, does the strategy cover all the bases that we would expect it to have some of the assumptions that they have made? Do they look reasonable? Are they in line with historical activity? Is it predicting future demand? What I mean by historical activity is what has been their success rate in delivering efficiency savings to date, or are they being overly optimistic in the early years? Have they built in some areas where it might need upfront investment to make changes and deliver savings further down the line? I would be looking for all of these things and saying whether the plan, the strategy, looks reasonable rather than necessarily how much it costs to deliver it. I would expect it to be benefits from it. I would expect it to reduce the cost base, or, as the Auditor General said, allow them to have that discussion with Government around—actually, predicting that, over the next five years, we may need to either stay flat cash or need a slight increase in our resource base to allow us to meet the demand that is coming our way. I would expect those benefits to be there. I would also expect there to be awareness and ownership throughout the organisation for some of those areas that are in that financial plan and everyone understands what their role is and to identify where savings can be made. Intuitively, where there is uncertainty and the further along that 10-year spectrum, I mean the more uncertainty there will be, the human reflex that I would have thought in an organisation in Cops will be no different from any other, is to make the case for maintaining as much of what you have as you can and building in argumentation that supports that, whether it's anticipated changes in legislation or workload pressures brought about through some other mechanisms. The value of the exercise, to some extent, almost seems to be an opening negotiating position. Once we see the detail of the budget, then we can start a scenario planning for—we'll look on that basis—we can reduce our activity in these areas. We can perhaps deliver efficiencies there. What's the upside in offering up those efficiencies that, needless to say, ministers will take, will bank and perhaps look for other ones, if in the event that budgets are even tighter than was perhaps anticipated? In a sense, I guess the other side of that negotiating, and I'm talking hypothetically, is that we know the Government's budgets for most organisations have reduced in cash terms at least over the last five years or so because of the downward pressure on the block grant coming from Westminster. The process is a difficult one, as it always is, and a time of reducing resources. I think it's one of the reasons why, as Angela said, we'd expect there to be a whole range of scenarios explored and sensitivity analysis applied to them to look at where there may be room for absorbing rising demand within existing resources, working differently to reduce costs in some areas to invest in others. It's also an area where there's an important role for the non-exec involvement in the Crown Office to be asking some of those challenging questions, bringing experience from elsewhere, bringing a fresh pair of eyes about the way things are done. There clearly are incentives that are conflicting and competing in any process of this type. Again, I think it's another reason why having that analysis clearly set out with a range of scenarios, different assumptions, different ways of responding to it is the best way there is in difficult circumstances. That's not to say it's perfect, but it does give you a starting point for exploring what's really happening underneath the surface of the numbers. You touched on there that we are well into a process or a period where budgets have been tightening. What surprised me slightly from the report that you produced for the committees in paragraph 4, you talked about the recommendation of COPs to develop a long-term financial strategy to inform its development over the next 10 years. To some extent, given what we've gone through, is there not an argument for saying that this is something that they should have been doing maybe not at the outset of that process 2008-2009, but certainly shortly after that this is something that they should have been preparing. If that's the case, are there other organisations that you are auditing that have gone through that process earlier? Are we seeing benefits as a result of that? I think it's fair to say that most of the public bodies that I audit have struggled with the concept of longer-term financial planning. They've all had firm financial allocations just for the year ahead in the budget, and sometimes, as I've reported elsewhere, they've had changes to their budget within the year. So have you made this recommendation before, or has your predecessor made this recommendation before and it's not been picked up on? As Angela mentioned in the introduction to her response to Mr Stevenson, the first piece of work that my predecessor did in I think 2010, which was very specifically about responding to after a decade of growth what looked like the start of a decade of real pressure on finances, the recommendation in there was about taking a much longer term view of the finances. That was to the public sector in general, and obviously the Crown Office is an important part of that. I think it's fair to say that many organisations have struggled with what that means. It's not something they're particularly skilled in doing, and they've tended to focus very much on managing the budget within year, rather than the longer-term focus on what they're there to achieve. It's also fair to say that Angela's now recommended this in her audit report for 2015-16, and it was part of the discussion in 2014-15. Although the work is now under way for the Crown Office, I think we feel it could have been started earlier than it was. Have you set a timeframe for when you would expect to see the first iterations of this? As you say, it's a living document, but when would you expect to see the first flush of this? In response to the 2015-16 annual audit report that I prepared on, the Crown Office management accepted that recommendation, and their timescale for it was that they would start the process. It was dependent on two issues. One was that they were doing a project called shaping the future, which was a restructure within the Crown Office. That was a piece of work that needed to be completed before they finalised the financial strategy, and also that they would refine it when they knew the outcome of this year's spending review, which is due this week. Their commitment was that they would have something in place, certainly by the end of this year. Can I ask a general question before being some of the others? Repeatedly, we've heard there's an issue about churn, things being delayed, perhaps unnecessarily. Is there a cost that can be put for a day in court, if you like, an average kind of cost to try and quantify just the impact of churn, which is a huge issue where discovery? The questioner's term was a big issue in the work that we published last year on the efficiency of the court system, and I'll ask Mark to talk you through that. In terms of being able to put a specific cost in terms of a day in court and that sort of thing, we didn't do the analysis quite in that way, but we did build up a model that estimated that the total cost of churn to the system as a whole, so that affected the Crown Office, the court service and police as well, added up to about £10 million during 2014-15. That was where there were cases that were turning over unnecessarily during the course of that year. As that increases, can we start to then... Does that show up? Where does this really come out in that figure, which I think most people can relate to when we hear about churn, but what does that mean? It's disadvantaging witnesses, it's meaning justices delayed, but actually there's a financial cost here to be quantified? Yeah, absolutely. There is a financial cost if individuals who are involved have to attend. It has a wider impact on the economy as well as to the individual public bodies involved and their members of staff who are preparing for a particular trial date, for example. Police officers have to attend as witnesses. Everyone has a cost in things not going ahead as planned, so the system as a whole is working very hard to try and reduce that level of churn. In some of the more recent conversations that we've had, we understand that there's significantly better working across the various justice bodies to try and reduce that level of churn and improve the planning, in particular for trial activity within solemn cases. Is there any more specific analysis of where the churn is particularly in solemn, is it in summary cases, is it a particular type of case or is it just generally across the board? I think it's generally across the board and so forth. Obviously, it's an area of particular focus for the courts and tribunal service and I recognise that that's not the committee's focus at the moment, but they're looking very closely at that and working very well with the Crown Office at trying to improve their understanding of it as a system as well as in terms of their own management of their individual operations. Yes, as you said, the court system is interlinked and the feedback that we're getting is from fiscal being under pressure, being under resourced, having too many cases. The preparation isn't there and some of the vital material might not be there in evidence terms and that is contributing to the churn, so that's useful information. Rona Fawr, followed by Mairi. Thank you convener, good morning. My question relates back to the financial planning strategy. The figures show the pattern is that the number of trials goes up and down and fluctuates and I'm just wondering if you would plan on the upside or would you plan on an average number? Does that make it difficult for you? I think for any public body nobody knows what the future is clearly and as Angela was saying, I think what we expect the Crown Office to be doing is to be saying okay, so if the level of activity continues on the same trend we've seen for the last five years, this is what it looks like. If we assume that there may have been a peak because of, for example, historical sexual abuse cases that have been reported that have almost been flushed out of the system and therefore we may see a drop in that, it looks like this. If we assume that actually there are more scandals to come out as we've seen in football over the last week or so, then it would look like this and you end up with a sort of a fan pattern of what a worst case scenario, what a best case scenario might look like and that lets you plan not just what the cost would be on the way that we currently work, but also if we were to take a different approach across the system, we might be able to do it for a lower cost or faster speed. It's not that there's one plan which is going to be the outcome, but it's a way of thinking through what might be coming. Right, so you're going to look at both scenarios then and guess on that. Yeah, thank you, that's fine, thank you. Mary Foll by Douglas. Thank you convener and good morning. I'd like to ask you a bit more about the digital strategy. It was briefly touched on in a question that my colleague put to you, but I note in paragraph 10 of your report, you comment that the COPFS does not have an agreed digital strategy and it would seem to me if they're looking at a long-term plan, a digital strategy should be part of that. There's been a lot of work done over the last few years to streamline and join together lots of local services and I would say that the digital strategy should be part of that. So what impacts will the lack of that strategy have on the streamlining process? You're absolutely right. I think it's important to distinguish between the overall system where there is a justice digital strategy agreed between the Scottish Government and the various significant players and the Crown Office and I'll ask Angela to pick up where the Crown Office is. Yeah, so absolutely there is the justice digital strategy and each of the bodies underneath that should have their own digital strategy and how to achieve that, the national one and also what it means for their own organisation. The development of a digital strategy is something that has been a feature of the audit over the last couple of years and we've made those recommendations. Absolutely right, it's one of the building blocks of a financial strategy alongside workforce and states and assets. As I understand it, the Crown Office has a draft digital strategy currently which should be going to senior management and board within the next few months. So that is quite well progressed and hopefully will be one of those building blocks that will feed into that financial strategy that we're expecting to see by the end of the financial year. Is there an investment required to develop that or do they have the finances to do that? So it's been worked on over the last few years. A new director of IT was brought in in 2013 and that has been one of his priorities alongside lots of the other digital projects that the Crown Office has been working on with other justice organisations to help improve the efficiency of the system. I want to pick up on a number of the points that other members have already made just to tease out a bit more information. First of all, on the strategic financial management, do you think that it's acceptable for bodies such as the Crown Office and others just to almost ignore your recommendation there? We obviously do our work to make a difference in the public interest to make best use of public money. We think in the current financial circumstances everybody should have a longer term financial strategy and we've been recommending it for some time. The fact that you've had to recommend it for some time over successive years yet they are laterally now maybe taking some action, do you think that's acceptable? That's my question. Angela R. outlined to you the building blocks that are going into it in terms of the internal restructuring and the broader review of the work that's happening. I think those are things that are important building blocks. Equally, as I said in my opening remarks, we'd have liked to have seen faster progress given the pressure there is on the system. What do you go back to the Crown Office and see annually when this isn't achieved? It's a conversation that will normally take place between Angela R. as the appointed auditor and the accountable officer, the audit committee of the organisation. We highlight again that we think it's important and why it is. Obviously occasions like this with the Parliament are also an important part of that accountability process. It seems a weakness from my point of view then. If you continually go in and repeat these statements expecting something to be done yet you have to repeat them annually and annually and therefore does it diminish what you're saying when you give this advice to bodies such as the Crown Office and they choose not to follow it. Other organisations will think, well, they tell the Crown Office to do it, the Crown Office don't do it, so we're not going to bother there either. I think that that's not really an accurate representation of the way the audit approach works. We do obviously engage in a dialogue with each of the bodies that we audit. There's a whole range of issues for each of them that we think they should be taking forward. And we do have mechanisms like reporting and public reporting to the Parliament where we think there's a particular shortcoming. I'd like to have seen faster progress here equally. I don't think it's a major failing in the way that audit works or the way the Crown Office has responded to it. Well, it does seem quite major in terms of the fact that you've been mentioning it for successive years. Indeed, your predecessor was mentioning it to the Crown Office. I picked up in your response to Liam McArthur that you're saying it's difficult because of the one-year budgeting, yet you actually say irrespective of the fact that public bodies budgets are set annually. They should be doing this. You're telling them that despite all the problems with annual budgeting, you should be doing this long-term financial management, and it's not happening. I think that public and politicians look to you rightly to highlight these issues, but there's no point in just highlighting them and if they don't do it, it just continues indefinitely. There's no question. I think it's an important recommendation. Angela Brown wanted to add something to my previous answer. As the Auditor General said, the previous Auditor General originally made this recommendation back in 2010. We came back and looked at that again in 2013 to see how the public sector had reacted to that. There had been some progress in some areas but not across the board. At that time, we discussed with public bodies what might help them in developing a long-term financial strategy because we were hearing a lot that we don't know what our budgets are so we can't do it. As auditors, we don't really accept that argument because, as I said, you know your costs and you can model different scenarios. That's when we set out the basic elements that we would expect to see in a long-term financial strategy. That was in 2013. Since then, we've been working with bodies to help them improve and develop these areas, both at a national level and a local level. As auditors, we go in and look to see what progress has been made, but we also offer advice where it's necessary and where it's asked for. We would absolutely encourage, as the Auditor General said, that the non-execs are involved in that because they are often seeing what is happening in other bodies as well. We have a wealth of experience across the public sector. We can point bodies to others that have developed long-term financial strategies and go and speak to them and see what they did. We have been doing lots of that. Work has been on-going over the last year or so at the Crown Office, but it has been very much dependent on shaping the future project. I accept that they had to complete a piece of work to allow them to inform some of their workforce planning, which would help them to then model the numbers that they needed to allow them to work out the costs around that for a financial strategy. On a similar theme, and it's to pick up on the point that Mary Fee mentioned about the lack of a digital strategy, you mentioned that. You highlighted that in your report in 1415. You did it again in 1516, therefore it hadn't been done the first time. You've done it again. You're now saying that at the end of 2016 there's going to be a proposal put to a board sometime in the future. Is that acceptable? Because you state in your report that without having it, and despite you reminding the Crown Office twice about this, putting it in your report, the Crown Office is at risk of being unable to contribute fuelly to the delivery of an integrated approach across the justice system. Therefore, is it acceptable that they didn't take on board that recommendation earlier? It's disappointing that the more progress hadn't been made. You're absolutely right that recommendation had been made twice. Things were happening in the background when we did the work this year as part of the 1516 audit. There was a draft, but it was very much a draft and we did comment on that there was a draft strategy there, but it was lacking in some areas. We made recommendations, they accepted those and said that areas that they were going to work on and develop in the strategy and that's what I would expect to see in this strategy now. When that was put in the 2014-15 report by the Auditor General, did you expect that in 2016 we would still be looking at a draft that had to be amended sounds quite significantly from what you're saying in December 2016? Is that the timescale that you were expecting at the time, or would you expect it to be run a lot quicker? The management response at the time was that it would have been completed before now. What do you do when it wasn't? You just write the same in the next year's report? Well, we continue to work with them behind the scenes on looking at drafts and commenting on them and does it actually cover the areas that we would expect it to cover before they progress at any further? Although you would expect them to be able to provide you with a draft that should be acceptable, it's almost as if they rushed something out because they realised that it's being mentioned twice and they're going to get in trouble if it's mentioned a third time, so they shove out a draft that needs quite a lot of work done to it. That doesn't sound like a strategy that's being developed through rigorous research and a lot of time put into it. As I said, I would have expected it to be completed before now. Possibly an area that's worth following up with the Crown Office as to why progress hasn't happened to the timescales that they specifically set out. On the local criminal justice board, you mentioned how they were detailed in your previous report, but from April 2016 they've joined up to merge, in similar terms, to the six sheriffdoms that we have in Scotland. Then you go on in your report to this committee to praise the great work that they're doing. Is seven months enough time to analyse and consider how good the work that they're doing? Is that sufficient time to be putting quite strong positive words in a report to this committee? As I said in my opening remarks, in the 2015 report that we produced, we said that there was good joint work at a national level now, but much more variability at local level. Mark's been monitoring what's been happening since that report was published in 2015, and I'll ask him to talk you through why we've got that impression. It's not based on full audit work, but it is based on monitoring. So the reason for the original criticism in the 2015 report was a lot of feedback that we'd had through interviews of people saying that at the local level criminal justice boards had struggled in terms of the aftermath of various organisational restructurings, for example, the establishment of a national police force, the reorganisation of the Crown Office into a federal structure. A lot of people felt that the relationships that had previously existed at a local level at local criminal justice board had broken down, and that contrasted very much with the strong positive joint working that was going on at the national level through the Scottish Government's justice board. What we've been doing very recently is just going back to meeting some of the key people involved in terms of the original report, so the Crown agent, chief executive of the Scottish Court and Tribunal service and representatives of the justice directors in the Scottish Government to ask what has happened since. Those are the people that are very happy about it, because that's understandable. If you ask them, they are naturally going to be very positive about this process. I'm just surprised that now the Auditor General is writing how good things are after just seven months because that seems quite a limited audience that you've gone to to get feedback from. That's true. That is a limited audience. As the Auditor General said, this is on-going monitoring that we're doing at the moment. This is not a comprehensive, fully validated and tested piece of audit work. Although, from a politician's point of view—I'm not saying that there are any issues, but I pick up some things locally that I'm not content with—yet if I raise any questions someone will say, well, the Auditor General is very supportive because after seven months he's writing in about the good working, et cetera, et cetera, yet it turns out that feedback and that analysis is based on quite a small number of people who have clearly got a vested interest in ensuring that this works successfully. I just wonder if that's the type of rigorous approach that we would normally take to statements such as this. Our intention would be to continue to monitor this and follow up with a wider group of stakeholders over a longer period of time. Our monitoring of the impact of our reports is not a one-off event. We're doing it 12, 15 months after publication. I and my colleagues will continue to speak to a wide number of stakeholders to get a full picture of that. This is the feedback that we've had to date, but I recognise the point that you're making. It's probably also worth noting that one of the important findings from the report that we published in 2015 on the show of court system was the extent of variability across different sheriffdoms. Some were obviously big problems in terms of communication, churn, delays in the system, others that were managing it much better, and one of our recommendations was that there was real scope to learn from the places where it was working well and spread that through, and that's one of the things we think is starting to happen through the local justice boards with the caveats that Mark set out for you. Did you have a supplementary statement if it's very succinct? It's fairly succinct. I think that the issue has been raised by Douglas Ross, biffled properly, at the broader issue of what is auditing. I just wanted to test your view of that against a view that I bring with me. First of all, it's a legal aspect. You have to sign off the accounts. The institution being audited has limited discretion over how counts are presented and how things are counted up and how they are documented and so on and so forth, but the bigger bit that we've been discussing here is the advice—that's the word I've constantly heard quite properly—where you are not the people responsible for running the organisation. The management of an organisation takes your advice, notes your advice and chooses which parts of it to implement, but is responsible for accounting to you for the choices that they make. In other words, you do not instruct them. You point to areas that the management concerns, so you cannot be seen as taking anything away from the responsibility of the managers and an organisation. I just wanted to test whether that is your view. I'm seeing the body language saying yes, but it would be useful to get it in the racket. Was it couched in terms of the Crown and Procurator Fiscal Service, which is specifically what we want to do down on this morning? Yes, that's absolutely right. That arms-length relationship is there for a very important reason. We have to be able to report on the Crown Office independently. There are international standards on auditing that set out very specifically the fact that we cannot take management responsibility at the level of preparing the accounts all the way through to developing a strategy for them, and that's so that we can report on how they're doing without fear or favour. In the context of my role, that reporting happens here to this Parliament where there are issues of sufficient significance to bring that about. In the case of the Crown Office, we haven't felt the need to do that so far. We have done it for a range of other bodies. I don't think that we have any form of public audit committee members here, but I regularly report on a body where I think the failings are significant enough to escalate it to Parliament, but under my performance audit powers, reports like this one on the efficiency of the sheriff court system are the way of providing that assurance and making recommendations for future improvement, and there are a number in this report that are relevant. In the same framework that the convener's questioning was orientated in on efficiency and churn, I was interested in paragraph 3 of your written statement submission that there was a reference to witness costs as part of the further 15 per cent that is detailed. I wondered if there was specific data available on specialist witnesses and how much of a percentage in terms of costs they occupy in terms of annual budgeting, whether that can be provided today or at a later date. We have been looking at that in detail. We do not have that specific breakdown of data in terms of specialist witnesses, but I am sure that the Crown Office might be able to provide that to the committee, so alternatively we can be in touch with them and get back to the committee in writing. I wonder if I could turn to something that was raised in one of the submissions from the justices of the piece, or one particular justice of the piece. That was, to blame, short-term faults on the need to prioritise budgets. Specifically, he referred to the cost of the decision to appoint summary sheriffs and referred to compensation package, also to benefits packages paid to sheriffs. Can we quantify that? Is there a figure that you can give the committee today for these costs? I do not think that there is a figure that we can give you today, but, as Mark said, in response to Mr McPherson's question, we are happy to liaise with the Crown Office to give it to you. The broader response, so, again, that is why the workforce plan that Angela referred to is so important. I know that the committee has heard concerns elsewhere about Fiscal's deputy on short-term contracts, about the training of Fiscal's. For us, that is why a workforce plan is so important—to have a longer-term view of what the staffing is likely to be for different types of staff and to make sure that that is being developed in a consistent way rather than a stop-go way. I think that that is relevant because there is the issue of fiscal fines and maybe GPs nodding things through wheres before they had a much bigger role. It is pointed out that they are volunteers, so, in terms of value for money, that speaks for itself. If a policy decision has been taken to narrow-point summary sheriffs, I think that it would be good to quantify that in a monetary term as well as looking at what that actually means for what they are doing in the court. However, you mentioned judicial training. The other issue that was raised in the GPs submission was the cost of introducing the judicial institute and also the fines enforcement agency. Does Audit Scotland have costs associated with that? It is not something that we have looked at so far. It is clearly something that we will take into account in planning future work in the justice system. It may well be something that you want to explore with the Crown Office when it gives evidence to you. Well, it is quite clear that those were areas where work had been carried out more efficiently under the old system and the introduction of new organisations was coming at a cost, which was not necessarily making improvements, so it would be very good to quantify that. Liam McArthur Just following up the convener's question, I think that you are touching it yourself, whether it is general, in terms of the short-term contracts. I think that what we heard in evidence that we have received is that we are training up people within the Crown Office in particular at the Fiscal Service on very high-quality, well-recognised training. At the point at which almost the return on that investment is about to be realised, it is then being released. As an organisation, is that a sensible approach to be taking, particularly when budgets are under pressure? We produced a report on workforce planning across the public sector in 2013. The purpose behind that was to take a more strategic view of how any organisation manages its workforce at a time when, on the whole, demand is increasing and finance is reducing. Clearly, it is not sensible for any of us to be training people who we do not have a role for in the longer term. The court service, the Crown Office, our own organisation tend to have peaks and troughs, and there is a question about how you manage those peaks and troughs and uncertainty about demand. For any organisation, it is really important to have that core of well-qualified, well-trained people who are able to do the job and who are building up the capacity and the confidence to do it in a way that is consistent and in line with the overall objectives that the organisation is trying to achieve. The back says both the line of questioning Douglas was taking in other areas. That was a recommendation that you were making back in 2013. Certainly all that we have heard through the evidence that we have received in this inquiry is that that is very much still the modus operandi in the Crown Office, not really any indication that that is likely to change or is beginning to change. What steps would you take, having made that recommendation in 2013, recognising that budgets are not going to improve markedly going forward, to see a changing approach that means that the investment going into training is not, in a sense, being squandered by then releasing people to other roles and having so many people on short-term contracts? As I said in my response to the convener, having a workforce plan is a key part of that, looking at what is likely to happen to activity levels, to different types of staff, to the way they interact with each other and the way the work is organised. We have recommended both at a national level and specifically for the Crown Office the importance of a financial strategy, a workforce plan and the digital strategy. We understand that all three of those are in hand and we will be looking closely at how quickly they are developed and how comprehensive they are. But, as Mr Stevenson said, it is the Crown Office's role to develop those now. Absolutly, but you are all to keep their feet to the fight, presumably. If I can just add to that, one of the things that we would expect to see as part of that workforce planning and strategy is the proportion of staff that are expected to be permanent. There may still be some fixed-term, short-term contracts to see through peaks and such like that. I would expect to see that, the current status and where the organisation wants to be to meet its demand over the next five years and how it is going to get there. If it wants to change the proportion of permanent staff to short-term contract staff, how it is going to achieve that? That is fine. We were going through the figures before you came in and looking at the budgets for the Crown Office Procurate Fiscal Service over a period. There was a change in the way that that appeared to be measured, where previously it was under summary and solemn court processes to one that measures staffing costs, et cetera. We could understand why, perhaps from an internal management perspective, that move made sense, but from our perhaps selfish perspective, looking at the work of the Crown Office Procurate Fiscal Service, in a sense, took us away from some of the information that we were trying to drill down into, where the cost is being borne by the service and where, potentially, if there can be a move away from certain types of trial processes, there could be savings made without diminishing access to justice, et cetera. Do you have a view on the change that was made, and from an auditing perspective, any comments that you could offer? I am a member of the tripartite budget process review group set up by the Finance Committee and the Scottish Government to look ahead. One of the things that we should be seeking to achieve from that review is more information that links the amount of money that we spend with what we get for it—outputs such as the sheriff's and summary courts—and the outcomes that we are seeking to achieve as well. In my view, the more information can be comprehensive, easy to use and linked to performance, the better it is. Mark, is there something that you want to say about the specific shift there? I do not think that there is anything specifically, I guess, that that just presents challenges, especially when we are trying to look for long-term trends in tracking budgets, when there is a kind of change in the presentation of the lower-level breakdowns in terms of looking at budgets. It does present challenges in tracking shifts in resources. As I said, I think that we can understand from a management perspective why you would want to go in that direction. From what you are saying, I do not put words in your mouth, but there does not seem to be any reason why that breakdown, as it was before, cannot be provided even alongside the figures around staffing and other cost provisions. I would be surprised if that information was not available within the Crown Office. So we would be entitled to ask for those trends over the last short while. Could I ask you to mention again your opening statement about the additional funding that has been provided for certain specific case work, and then again to prove the performance data of cases of domestic abuse? That was a national priority. The additional funding has been quantified. Have there been any unintended consequences as a result of this policy for the rest of the service? The policy of reducing the time taken for domestic abuse cases? And providing additional funding for specific court and case work. I do not think that I am aware of any unintended consequences. As I said in response to Mr Ross's question, we have not done detailed audit work in terms of looking at the performance data. We were particularly interested in the performance cases involving domestic abuse, specifically because, as you say, convener, that was a national priority and there had been additional funding, so that seemed a particular one to focus on. We have not looked more widely at performance, for example, in other types of cases during that less formal follow-up work that we have been doing recently. Is that something that you intend to do, because it is the whole-case scenario with one part of the system? If there is a problem, there are unintended consequences that can cascade down? In terms of the on-going monitoring of the sector and certainly looking at how the justice sector as a whole is going to respond to our recommendation about refining its suite of performance indicators, that is certainly something that will keep an eye on and monitor. We have no immediate plans to do any formal audit work looking at that in the same vein as the 2015 report, but our programme of work is continually on-going in terms of what could be included within it. If I could delve a little bit deeper even on the domestic abuse, because it is a national priority, we have heard evidence that perhaps cases are continuing when there is not a deficiency of evidence to do so. If that is the case, it is going further into the system, increasing costs as it goes along, and that is not efficient for anyone. It is not delivering a good service, and it is certainly not a good use of what is very precious financial resources. Can you comment on that at all? I do not think that I could quantify or provide any additional evidence. The Crown Office would be better placed to respond to that question to see whether it has any data to see whether there are unintended consequences of that prioritisation, as you described. More clearly, it will have a financial implication that is self-evident, and I would hope that it is Scotland would find a way to drill down to that, because it is pretty germane to the problems that we are hearing about. I can ask one last question. We have heard that ffiscals are under huge pressure, the admiration for them is boundless, but they should not have to be coping with this. The stress has been huge. Have you quantified how many days absence and stress there is in the fiscal service? I believe that it is pretty daunting. My recollection that Angela will correct me was that the average number of days lost sickness absence in 2015-16 was 7.2. Sorry, I will correct myself. I do not have the figure to hand, but I think that it is 10.1 and the Scottish Government average is 7.2. That is all staff in the Crown Office, not just the ffiscals. Yes, I understand that, but clearly there is a significant rise there. Again, there are financial implications for this and the knock-on effect again in the fiscal service. Are there any figures that can perhaps send the committee on this or present them? The Crown Office is better placed to let you have the figures. It might be useful just to restate that when we did the work in 2015, we found significant differences across the different share of terms in the way that cases were being managed. I would expect that to have an impact on the stress levels that staff and ffiscals are experiencing. It would be well worth exploring with the Crown Office what they know about that and whether there are any correlations there. But you would not be looking at it from the audit point of view on the financial implication of this, which is significant, clearly. The 2015 report was looking at the overall effect of churn, and Mark has taught you through the figures we brought together there in terms of quantifying the cost of it. The Crown Office does publish its sickness absence rates in its annual report and accounts, and as the auditor Angela makes sure that their processes for producing that information are sound. To us, that is one indication of the pressure on the system, which is the focus of our overall work in this area, and which is clearly key for the Crown Office to address through its financial strategy, through its workforce plan and the digital strategy. Before I have been filled in, I am sure that you have looked to an extent of some issues that have been raised during the inquiry. Are there issues that have been raised that would make you have a little bit of a reassessment, a review of the areas that you have looked at so far, and areas that may be productively looked at for the future? That is a very good question. We were talking before we came in this morning about the questions that had come up for us in reading the official reports of the committee's pre-budget scrutiny so far. I think that the one that we do not have an insight into from the work that we did in 2015 or through Angela's audit work is probably the question of the consistency of marking and how you get that balance right between having a more standardised approach and having discretion. Clearly, there is not a right answer at either end of that spectrum, but it did feel to me in reading the official report that there is something interesting going on in the system as a whole and probably in specific parts of Scotland. Fulton. Thanks, convener. It is actually a supplementary to the convener's earlier point in coming to it from the other angle, if you like. Would you say that the prioritisation of the domestic abuse offences has led to any efficiencies within the system in those sort of cases? Moving on from that, rather than just asking a second question, rather than it being about the domestic abuse cases having an impact on other cases within the system, is there anything that can be learned from that without it having to be a national priority that can be taken into other cases? I have seen a supplementary bit coming from the other angle, if you like. I should start by saying that the legislation that sets up the Post of Auditor General specifically precludes me from commenting on the merit of policy, so the fact that it is a Government priority is simply a fact and I have got no role in commenting on that. We will all have a view on the importance of domestic abuse in Scotland's public life. My interest, I think, kicks in when the Government has set a priority like that in how well the Government and the various bodies in the justice system are planning to respond to it, thinking through what the effect might be on Police Scotland, on the court service, on the Crown Office and what that means for the way that the work is managed between them. I think that it would be entirely proper for the committee to ask the Crown Office how it has gone about responding to that. It is also one of the things that they should be thinking about in terms of their longer-term financial planning, as Mr Stevenson suggested, what other priorities are there that they would like to be escalating for the future and how do they make space for that at a time when the overall pattern of crime is pretty steady but we are seeing some quite significant shifts in its make-up with historic sex abuse, I'm guessing, in future more cybercrime. How are they responding to those sorts of pressures? That's at the heart of what they should be doing for their financial planning, their workforce planning and the way that the overall national justice board is looking to manage the system in the interests of Scotland. That concludes our question. Thank you all very much for attending today. I suspend briefly to allow for a change of witnesses. Agenda item 2 is evidence session for the Crown Procurator Fiscal Service inquiry. This is our sixth week of evidence taking on this inquiry and I welcome today's witnesses to the evidence session. Gordon Diels, Scotland's representative on the National Executive Committee of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers and Patrick Maguire, who is the partner at Thomson's Solisters. I refer members to paper 3, which is a note by the clerk, and to paper 5, a private briefing from Spice and to the written evidence from both witnesses, which we very much appreciate. I invite questions from members. John Finnie, followed by Mary, followed by Reid and Stewart. Thank you, convener. Good morning, panel. Thank you very much indeed for your written evidence. Mr Maguire, it was a comment that you make in your evidence about that the COPF treats the prosecution of health and safety crimes more like civil court cases than criminal. Can you expand on that and what the manifestations of that approach are in respect of what is very important matter? Certainly, thank you. This is a practice that I, in my firm, witness. Constantly, when dealing with these cases, there is nothing having carried out research and indeed having spoken to various criminal lawyers as well, contained in statute or any form of regulation or law that directs why that particular practice takes place. However, in practice, what occurs is that, in terms of a prosecution or a health and safety breach where a prosecution is being considered against an organisation, if that organisation indicates no more than a general indication that it may be willing to play guilty to any charges that may be brought, then the entire process seems to move into what it is for because there is no regulation or law underpinning an entirely informal process whereby often very lengthy negotiations take place between the COPFS and the organisations solicitors. Those negotiations are involved around what the indictment or the charge says. Ultimately, it can come down to the narrative, as it is called, which is a document that, finally, if a company does play guilty, is placed before the court, detailing often at length running to two, three, four or more pages what has been agreed between them as to what happened. Of course, it is important that that is the very point. It is what was agreed in this course of negotiations between the COPFS and the solicitors representing the company. Sorry to interrupt you, Mr McGrath, but is not plebar getting part of the system? What is different about that? The difference about that is the length of time that is afforded for the negotiations to take place. Secondly, the real practical impact of that has on victims' lives. My firm statistics show that we, as I highlighted by paper, have been instructed in the last 12 months in relation to an excess of 2,800 work-related matters—that is in the broadest sense, including disease. My internal research shows that, in fact, there have only been 11 cases in the past 12 months where there have been any prostitutions. In non-fatal accidents, that is five, where the average time from crime to guilty play—all 11 cases involved guilty play—none went to trial—was three years in four months. In the fatal cases, that was an average time of five years and three months. That is not bad cases making poor law. That is pretty representative. There were no outliers in those statistics. What the practical impact is is that victims and, in fatal cases, the families of the victims have their lives on. Things are strung out with very little information coming from the COPFS. There is another aspect, which is that there have been two recent examples of that whereby, if things go on too long, it can ultimately prevent the prosecution from taking place at all. The two examples are the Rose Park disaster, whereby the length of time during which those negotiations took place meant that the company partnership, as it was, was able to dissolve. That meant legally that there was no partnership against whom a criminal prosecution could be brought. That was very extensively covered in the press. The Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland did still try to fight on in the face of that and still try to bring a prosecution forward. However, it was always doomed to failure because of the law, as it was. That has changed now, with an act of Parliament. However, the length of time that those negotiations allowed meant that the company could effectively evade the law. The other example where it sailed very close to the wind—I refer to that in my paper—is in relation to Firefighter Ewan Williamson. That was a matter where, eventually, there was a period of almost six years between fatality and ultimately the guilty plea. What happened during that period, of course, was the transition to the single service. It was only spotted very late in the day and only, I have to say, because of the vigilance of the Fire Brigades Union, that it was spotted that that transition legislation did not contain any provision for the new entity, the single service, being able to be prosecuted for the wrongs of any of the former services. That was plugged just in time for the prosecution to go ahead. However, that is to highlight that, yes, there are real human issues about the length of time that it takes and the continued trauma that causes, but that can have very significant and profound legal implications to in terms of prosecutions going forward. Can you comment on the nature of your engagement with the Procurator Fiscal Service during that period? Is there a sufficiency of staff? Is it that there is not enough to be dealing with these? Is it that people do not have sufficient skills or what? I would not question the skills. I think that resources and staff is certainly an issue, but, as it was described to me by various members of my own firm, and criminal solicitors have spoken to who represent both sides when it comes to prosecutions. It is a mindset issue that I am told, and it is described to me in its own experience, that it is viewed less as a criminal case, like other criminal cases, and more like a civil matter, where you have invariably solicitors representing those companies to defend them. They are the same solicitors who are instructed by their insurance company to defend what may become a personal injury case. They are solicitors who have a more civil mindset, and that tends to bleed into the attitude and the nature of the negotiations as they are properly could be called with the COPFS. I think that is really at the heart of the issue. Our inquiry is about the Crown Office Procurator Fiscal Service, and I know that there will be wider frustrations about the system. Do you give the comparator of what happens in relation to an individual driving without insurance for their motor vehicle? Indeed. Can you expand on that a bit? Do you mention that in your evidence piece? Yes. That is a matter that is also fully covered in the paper by April. It turns on that we have laws that require certain people to have compulsory insurance and that the failure to have insurance is, by the very nature of not having insurance, a crime. We know how society views drivers who drive without insurance. We know how hard the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service is on bringing prosecutions against those people who they find not to have insurance. In my experience, that attitude does not apply to employers who do not have compulsory employer liability insurance. Society, in my experience, does not seem to care, but certainly in the cases that I have handled and my firm have been involved in, there have been numerous cases over the years where it has came to light in the course of a personal injury case, where we have taken it upon ourselves with the instructions of our clients to bring it to the attention of the prosecution service and where absolutely nothing has been done at all, where there have been no prosecutions. Why has there been no prosecutions in it? Is that neglective? I cannot answer that question as to why. The facts speak for themselves. It comes to the initial point that I make in my paper about the need to be very clear about our language. Those are health and safety crimes. They are not infractions, they are not regulatory breaches, they are health and safety crimes and I am afraid that at the moment I do not think that they are necessarily viewed that way. Can I just ask what would be the consequences of someone not having employer liability insurance for when an incident happens? It would be a fine. But what are the consequences for the individual who wants to claim compensation? Apologies for the question. If there is employer liability insurance, an injured worker, if they are able to establish their case, will receive compensation. If there is no insurance, then they may have the opportunity of going against the company if they are solvent, but if they are not, then that injured worker will not receive compensation. Of course, one could speculate without great criticism to suggest that if a company is not doing what it ought to in terms of the law by having compulsory insurance that they are far less likely to be solvent and able to pay compensation as they ought to. Are there any notable examples of that? It is not something that seems to have penetrated public awareness. First of all, thank you to the committee for inviting us to speak today, but in the paper submitted by April, we mentioned two cases, both of which cover the point made by you convener in relation to the lack of compulsory insurance. The effect in both cases was quite significant. First of all, the case of Campbell against Gordon, where a gentleman was injured in the course of his employment, he was an apprentice joiner working on a woodworking machine. For some bizarre reason, his employer had an insurance policy, but it did not cover working with woodworking machines. When he was injured, he attempted to bring a claim against his employer and insurers declined to deal with it because the employer was not covered by the insurance policy. He sought to try and sue the director of the company personally and went all the way to the Supreme Court when he was unsuccessful, but that was a gentleman left in the position of being unable to claim compensation for a serious injury. The second case in our paper is the case of Kelly Stewart, who tragically lost her partner, who was killed in a diving accident. Again, it is a situation where his employer did not have employer's liability insurance. His employer was found guilty of a breach of health and safety work act, but a civil claim was raised against him and, albeit a decree was obtained, he was unable to enforce that decree. When the defender in that case appeared before the sheriff court, it was specifically said by the sheriff that he would not impose a monetary penalty to allow the defender to pay some form of compensation to the family that is yet to be achieved. Therefore, there can be quite significant difficulties for families and for victims of accidents. Yes, so there is most definitely a case to have these prosecutions as a deterrent to others. Certainly, in the fatal case that I mentioned, we did raise with the procurator physical office why they had not sought to charge the defender with not having compulsory employer's liability insurance, and the view was that it was not particularly relevant. It was not within their mindset, and that comes back to the point that Mr Finlay made. If there was a criticism in relation to mindset, it is the importance of having compulsory insurance for employer's liability. We have it for road traffic accidents. A lot of work carried out by the procurator physical service relates to not having insurance whether or not there is an accident, so the same approach ought to be taken in relation to employer's liability cases. Is that a supplementary, Douglas, on this point? You mentioned the two cases, Campbell v Peter Gordon and the Graham Mackey incident, and then you go on in your submission to mention a fund of last resort. Could you give a bit more information about that in terms of levies and such like? Absolutely. You may be aware of the existence of a body called the Motor Insurance Bureau, which was set up several decades ago, and all insurance companies pay a levy into the cover of people who have been injured in a road traffic accident, but there has been no insurance on the part of the person who caused the accident. The suggestion is that a similar fund be set up for victims of accidents at work, whereby insurance companies would pay into a similar fund to cover the situation that I have just described in the two cases. To insurance companies rather than employers, because what you mentioned in your submission is that it tends to be the ones who are less scrupulous, because if they don't take out this insurance, they won't be doing other things, but they also have a financial benefit over other companies because they are not paying out for those things. By setting up the fund of last resort, does it not almost say that we are not going to be able to deal with that problem, so we will just ignore it? There have only been two convictions both in the same year. Therefore, it is setting up the fund of last resort not basically doing the same as what you are suggesting in the Crown Office is doing in ignoring this issue and trying to have an alternative source of funding, but not getting to the root problem that the convener was mentioning. I think that there is a combination. I think that there is no reason why the crown can't be forceful in trying to ensure that the law is complied with. In relation to companies taking out compulsory insurance, there are measures such as being obliged to lodge a copy of an insurance certificate at the same time as lodging a company return. That would not get you over the issue with Cammo v Peter Gordon, because it would lodge an insurance certificate. Indeed. In that situation, there could be some investigation in relation to whether that certificate was sufficient. It was not in this case, and that is a matter that the Crown would have to investigate. However, as a matter of routine, if there were an obligation on a company to lodge a certificate at the same time as lodging a return, that is a matter that could be easily looked at by either the Crown or by the HSE in relation to reporting companies who feel to do that. Just to come in at the same point, it is important to draw the analogy from the motor insurance sphere, because I do not think that there is any one answer. What we are talking about ultimately is regulating the behaviour of companies, but at the same time ensuring that victims are not wronged by bad employers. The fund of last resort provides us an answer to the second point and will ensure that nobody goes without being properly compensated. It is to be commended for that reason, but it is not a solution in itself for the reasons that you have highlighted, Mr Ross. That is when you look at the issue of what is and is not publicly acceptable. We have seen so many examples over the years in terms of road traffic from seatbelts to drink driving without insurance. The world is just a different place because of high-profile prosecutions and high-profile campaigns. I think that we need to address that issue in terms of the competence of the Parliament, because we are talking about insurance and the fund of last resort. Members of the committee may therefore think that it is something that we could recommend but have no power over. It is important to remember that the scheme that Mr Dale has spoken about, the Motor Insurance Bureau, and the fund of last resort is a contractual arrangement between the Westminster Government and the insurance industry. It is my understanding of the Scotland act that, while the Parliament could not introduce legislation to enforce there to be a fund of last resort, there is no reason why it could not if the insurance industry were willing to enter into such a contractual arrangement. You say in your submission that the latest research from HSE shows that 94.3 per cent of companies that are required to have insurance do. That is a very specific number, and you go on to state how many 164,000 employees. If we know that it is 94.3 per cent and therefore the remainder do not have insurance, why can't prosecutors go after them? Is this an estimate or is this a reliable figure that drills down to individual companies? It is based on a report from the Institute of Employment Studies produced for the HSE in 2012, and I can provide a copy of the report to the committee. Interestingly, the figure of 94 per cent is actually a higher estimate. The lower threshold was 81 per cent because the study was based on a sample of 2,000 businesses who were asked whether or not they had employer liability insurance, and 94 per cent said that they did. The reason why it may be as low as 81 per cent is that a number of employers, when asked to produce a certificate or refer to its terms, were unable to do so by a certain that they had it. There was a doubt raised in the minds of the authors of the report that they actually did have compulsory insurance. The figure of 160,000 taken from the same report is an estimate, but it is based on a sample of 2,000 employers. I have some questions on the insurance that has largely been answered, but it was just really so. In terms of penalties for employers that are finding not to have liability insurance, you say that a lot of them have not been charged, but is it just a case that financial penalties are imposed on them? That is a different line of question. We talked about, in the evidence, the very low rates of prosecution. I would be interested to hear your opinions on why that is. The numbers seem to be very low in terms of how many are prosecuted, and I would like to hear a bit more from you on that. It is primarily a question of resource. A number of witnesses who have already given evidence to the committee have commented on that. It is a matter of priority for the Crown and for the Government, but our position is that employees in the workplace deserve to be protected. If somebody goes out to work in the morning, they ought to come back in the same condition as when they left. There are a number of situations where very serious breaches of health and safety legislation take place. In a number of cases, there are very serious injuries. In other cases, there are not, but taking the road traffic analogy, we think that those breaches ought to be investigated and assessed for prosecution by the Crown. We see that in a situation in which there are several thousand accidents reported each year, and that figure is an underestimate for the reasons that we are going to in our evidence. We think that if we are only doing 50 or 100 cases of prosecution each year, we think that that is too low. A percentage of 1 per cent of reported accidents being prosecuted is very low. I echo that. I think that there is little doubt that, at the heart of that issue, is resources. The vast majority of the employees of the CPOFS that I deal with, particularly in the specialist unit, are absolutely committed. The law generally, subject to one matter, that we will return to in a moment, is robust and is there to be used, is the point of making an opening paper. The very rich tapestry of health and safety regulations that we have in this country are so framed. The vast majority of vaccines work, certainly, with the vast majority of matters that members of people in Thompson result in successful personal injury cases are, at the very least, prima facie health and safety crimes, so it tells you just how small a number of prosecutions there are each year. That can only be in relation to resources. It is a matter of priority, but when we look at priority, I think that the only way that we are going to see accident rates drop to achieve the aim that Mr Diel highlighted and that we would echo 100 per cent is that people have an absolute right to go home from their work in exactly the same physical and mental condition. Left that morning is to address it aggressively and to change attitudes, and that is only by using the criminal law as a deterrence. I mentioned one area where I think the law is lacking and where I think that that can reflect, to some extent, in prosecution levels, and that is at the absolute highest end. That is what I refer to in my paper in relation to the law on corporate homicide. We have had an act of the Westminster Parliament now since 2007. There has not been a single prosecution in Scotland under that legislation. There is no doubt in my mind, and there is no doubt in the mind of every single trade union that I represent in this country, that the law is insufficient, that the law needs to be improved, and that if it was improved, there would be prosecutions for corporate homicide, and that would certainly have the razor-sharp deterrent teeth that we need to see behaviours regulated and changed. I suppose that I was wondering if there were any difficulties in providing evidence in some of those cases. I mean, I know that that has been an issue for some other organisations that we have spoken to where there has not been the evidence there to be able to prosecute the cases in terms of wildlife crime, when we would have spoken to the RSPB and environment link about that. Is that an relevant point here, as well, or from your perspective? Yes. I think that health and safety law can be quite complicated. One of the reasons that cases take as long as Mr Glaw was saying in his earlier evidence to Mr Finnie was because you have complex factual situations. Frankly, the Crown in many cases does not have the resource to deal with that quickly. There is an equality of arms issue. Insurance companies instruct solicitors and experts and will devote a lot of resource to those cases. There are times when I think that the Crown is a bit of a disadvantage. It was interesting to listen to the evidence from the auditor general earlier on. I think that it is a question from Mr McPherson on the amount that is spent on specialist evidence. That is a matter that is worth looking at in the context of those cases. A lot of the health and safety cases involve expert evidence to a high degree, and it is something that companies who have been prosecuted will and their insurance companies will spend a lot of money on defending. That is an aspect of which I wonder if the Crown actually has the requisite resource to match that. It is one of the reasons why so many cases are dealt with by way of a plea bargain because taking a matter to trial involves a level of resource and a level of time and commitment, which, frankly, the Crown cannot achieve under current resources. That was going to be the next question that I had really. Do you think that the Crown has the expertise to be able to deal with those complex cases and the issues that are raised? I am very experienced and able practitioners within Crown Office in the Procurator Fiscal Service is just the level of expectation and the amount of work that they have to do. I echo that, and I agree that resources, as I have said before, are at the heart of it. That is not to say, however, that getting the evidence is a particularly impossible task. I think that it is more having the resources to get the evidence because, as I said, there is a very complex and well-established set of health and safety regulations in this country that, gratefully, has not yet been changed. Therefore, cases can be brought forward, but it is having the time and the resources to build that case. Coming back to some of my discussions, I was some of my colleagues preparing for this. I spoke to all of our case handlers, referring to a couple of the cases where there were prosecutions that took non-fatal cases two or three years. On two occasions, the case handler's comment to me was that those were slam dunk cases. In terms of the regulations, the case handler thought that the case was very strong and he could not understand why it took as long as it did. I do not think that it is the law. I do not think that it is the problem of getting evidence per se. I think that it is having the people to build that evidence. I accept that, in civil law, you will need to prove your case on the balance of probabilities and there is no need for corroboration. It is a higher standard in terms of criminal law and where it ought to be, but I think that it would be and should be eminently achievable with the correct resources. A very brief supplementary on health and safety. I just wondered your opinion on the resources and support that is available for routine health and safety inspection and monitoring. I am not talking about where an incident occurs and the health and safety committee. I am talking about prior to that. Do you think that enough financial support is put into health and safety inspection and monitoring? Is it high enough up the agenda for the majority of workforces, companies and contractors? Is there a direct correlation between increase in incidents and decrease in routine inspections? In a word, no. I do not think that there is anywhere near enough resources. I do not think that it is given anywhere near enough priority. I think that there is absolutely no doubt that, if more resources were placed into the preemptive, proactive investigations that we are talking about, workplace accidents would reduce. It has been said for a long time that a trade union workplace is a safer workplace and there are statistics to establish that. I can produce them if required, but it turns in the fact that, in a trade unionised workplace, there is, at the very least, active health and safety representatives who will be able to bring some pressure to bear on an employer and can't even, on occasion, try to bring it to the attention of the health and safety executive if required. However, we have to live in the reality of, as terrible as it is to say it, the economic times that we find ourselves in. I do not think that there is going to be found a magic billion pound to do what is required. That is why, in my paper, I say that I think that it is time to be imaginative about this. I think that it is time to look at finding ways in which we can find a legislative means by which we can place more power into the hands of the people who really know what is going on in workplaces, who are best placed to know if employers are cutting corners, who are best placed to know if employers care or not about health and safety. That is the workers at the floor level who know what is going on. Therefore, finding a way that the remedies that I speak about in my paper, which is to say specific implement, go and do this or interdict, you better stop this, are able to be used by workers that, if the health and safety executive cannot do it, they can be backed, no doubt, by proper trade unions to do that. I would like to return to the issue of delays around plea bargaining and the fact that there is no statutory time limit for bringing health and safety cases to prosecution. Is that a cultural historical issue? Can you suggest any practical ways of the service improving that? Do you like to see a statutory time limit brought in for the prosecution of those cases? Fair to the Crown Office, in 2009 a health and safety division was set up, and that has had an impact. It has been gradual, and it comes down to a question of resource. The special report of prosecution carried out a couple of reports in 2013 and 2015. It had made a number of recommendations in the first report, most of which have been acted upon by 2015. It comes down to resource. The inspector identified a workload of about 150 cases, which seemed to be the reasonable level for the division at that time. We know that there are several thousand accidents per year. We know that most of those will probably involve some breach of regulations. Not all should go to prosecution, but certainly a number should, and more than the 50 to 100 that currently do. The Crown Office recognises the importance of the area, but it is not having the resource to devote to it. Are you relating resource to staffing levels? I am generally dealing with cases. In terms of the time limits, that is a matter. I will be interested to get the Crown Office's view on that. Some of those cases can be complex, others can be quite straightforward, and to go back to the motoring analogy, you could have a fairly straightforward breach of health and safety legislation, and for the purposes of having the deterrent effect, more of those prosecutions should take place. At the moment, I think that most employers and insurance companies know that, in the absence of either fatality or a very serious injury, it is unlikely that they will be prosecuted. Do you think that a statutory talent would make the system more efficient, even from your point of view? Without the adequate resource, I am not convinced. You have already heard evidence in relation to the pressure on the system, where there is existing time limits in relation to common law crimes and prosecution in high court and share of court cases. By adding additional time limits into the system without the resource, I do not think that it necessarily works. For my part, however, there remains an issue of both perception and engagement. I think that that could be at least partly a solution to the issue that the members are highlighting. Although things have improved, there is no doubt about that. My experience and the experience of the clients at my firm remains the case that, for long periods of time, they are left in the dark, that there is not sufficient regular engagement, that they are not sufficiently kept up to date of what is going on, a complete lack of communication. Despite some improvements, we are a significant distance away from where we need to be. Maybe that is where timetabling in the broadest sense comes into effect, not a statutory timeframe for bringing a prosecution, but a clear requirement on the COPFS to properly engage with families and victims. When they are invited to do so, there are solicitors too at pre-arranged timetabled events. To be clear, it is going to be three months before we can report back to you, and that one-three makes sure that they do so. If it is six months from then, to tell them that, to keep them informed, to keep them engaged, that would go a long way to, if not restoring, certainly ensuring some faith in the system. I do not think here at the minute because of that lack of engagement. I will pick up on Rona Mackay's questions. In Mr Dale, your submission, you speak about the introduction of a health and safety division within the Crown Office in 2009, being a welcome addition. You go on to say that it is remit being to investigate and prosecute all health and safety cases, yet you are both coming here seven years after that addition with, I presume, the same complaints that you had when that was introduced back in 2009. If it is a welcome addition, why is it not working? Resource. We carried out a FOI request. Crown Office indicated that it received something between 150 and 200 reports from the health and safety executive and local authorities each year of which they prosecute something between 27 and 37, 38 per cent. As I mentioned earlier on, I think that there are many, many accidents that take place each year which are a breach of the regulations and which, may well, should be prosecuted. What was happening prior or what was not happening prior to 2009 that is happening now or have we got the same problems? We have had a number of witnesses come to us to say that this introduction of this new specialist unit within the Crown Office has helped, yet they still have the same concerns. My worry is that if we keep seeing resources as a problem and we set up these units, this one has now been established for seven years, but it does not seem to be getting to the root of the problems that you are still experiencing and your clients are still experiencing. Is it the units? Is it the manpower within it? Is it the Crown Office in general? Where are the delays? I just struggle to understand why this can be such a welcome addition when we still have the same problems. That is the point that I am trying to get at. It is a welcome addition because you are introducing an element of specialisation. But it is not solving your issues in terms of the number of prosecutions. It needs additional resource. That in itself is a welcome addition but it is not working. From my perspective, to be frank, the bar was so low prior to 2009 that it was a welcome addition. However, it is entirely logical that, if you go to bring together a team of prosecutor who will specialise in only health and safety crimes and will prosecute only those crimes, with that specialism has to bring an improved understanding and therefore you would expect a better level of prosecution. It is important to remember that it is from the bar being so low. I entirely agree, Mr Ross, that more needs to be done. It is undoubtedly, he asked, what do we mean by resources? Unquestionably, manpower is a big issue within that. I would not be quite as absolutely enthusiastic as Mr Diel and say that it is only about resources though. I have highlighted on a couple of occasions now that, from my perspective and the perspective of the clients that we represent, there does remain to be an issue with. I hesitate to say attitude because it is bordering on pejorative, but it is certainly the means by which the unit engages with clients and that there is no disoperandi for doing so. For me, there continues to be a real problem there that needs to be addressed perhaps in the way that I had some dialogue with, in terms of what Mrs McIne. Can I move on to another issue, which is, Mr McGuire, you mentioned earlier on about the lack of information or the little information that goes to and through the Crown Office. One of our written submissions to the inquiry is from the Jim Clark rally, which happened several years ago in their submission. They say that there were 60 police officers taking information. There was video footage of the incident, yet still they are waiting for information. Not just a report and a final response, but letters from the chairman of that organisation to the Lord Advocate going unanswered. That is one example that we have seen in our evidence. Is that repeated across your sector? Do you see that as a theme in terms of the lack of correspondence, but particularly at the highest level, if people feel that they have to go to the Lord Advocate and he is not even responding and the delays that then occur and the lack of criminal investigations that can take place while we are waiting for those responses? The Jim Clark example is obviously at the extreme end, but it is entirely representative of my firm's experience in the general, as I said, modus operandi of the specialist unit. On that point, you say that it is at the extreme end, therefore it is one that is very well known. It has been raised in this Parliament a number of times by my colleague John Lamont, yet still, even with all that backing, it is not getting anywhere with the Lord Advocate. I can imagine that one man and his solicitor is having even more trouble. I think that for that to be the case in such a high-profile incident is worrying for the general health and safety sector. I agree entirely. Finally, Mr McGuire, in your submission you were speaking about the language and you think that there is a problem with the language that we use, yet you finished off by saying that we have to be careful with what we say and how we say it, but you do not offer any alternatives. I just wonder what, in your view, is the language that we should be using? As I said, we call them what they are. They are health and safety crimes, they are not breaches of regulations, they are not infractions, they are crimes that cause real damage to real people. They have to be treated as such and we have to gear our entire system towards proper levels of prosecution, proper levels of fines that will serve as a real deterrent. That is what the law has to do in this context, to serve as a deterrent to ensure that workplace actions go down. Where do you see changing the attitudes in the language in terms of priorities to addressing the concerns that you both raise in your submissions? Is it something that we should be tackling as a priority or is it something that will come naturally if there is more prosecutions and successful prosecutions? The overall principle must be that prevention is better than cure. The proper investigation and the appropriate prosecution of and Patrick's right crimes or breaches of the regulations is an important element of that. I think that to enforce the message to employers across the country that breaches of the regulations will be treated as crimes and prosecuted in the appropriate circumstances. I agree, and I do not think that it is an aside to bring in to this much misused, malign term, elf and safety. That is really what we are dealing with at one end of the extreme. We have people belittling and making a joke of the rich tapestry of regulations that are there to protect people, to keep people safe and to ensure that they do return home from working in the same physical and mental condition they did. How would you tackle that? Absolutely using the correct languages key to that. Is it a priority at 100 per cent? It is something that can be done very, very quickly and hopefully effectively. Just before we leave that, you have mentioned the Jim Clark water rally as an extreme end, but equally in the submission from the Office of Rail and Road, they have mentioned that England and Wales, the average time is 12 months from the start to the conclusion of a prosecution, whereas in Scotland it is 35 months perhaps, if that figure was more dwelled on or highlighted more, it might put the whole problem in perspective a little bit more. I just want to ask a quick question about delays and prosecutions. Is, in your opinion, the main reason for the delays lack of evidence? Is it a different burden of proof in relation to prosecuting health and safety cases, or are there loopholes that allow organisations and individuals to get through the process without being prosecuted? The burden of proof is the same. The Crown has to prove the case beyond reasonable doubt. One of the issues is that, for the reasons that we have already discussed, it tends to be the more serious cases that are being investigated. As a result, that can be matters of complex fact and evidence. There is a culture of negotiation between the Crown and the defence, and some of the figures that were suggested in the inspectorate report say that up to 92 per cent of cases are resolved by way of a plea bargain. Very few cases go to trial. One of the observations that they made in the original report was that relatively few ffiscals had experience of running health and safety trials. I think that there is a culture in those cases that are dealt with by the health and safety division for a plea to be agreed, and that takes time. The Crown have to investigate, they have to get their own expert evidence, the defence are well briefed, they are well resourced, and are able to, if not persuade the Crown to drop the case completely, then come to what they would regard as being an acceptable plea. Is that something to do with the point that you made about people talking about health and safety and the way that health and safety is viewed? We have moved to a compensation culture, so health and safety is not viewed as a crime, it is viewed as how much money can I get for and how much of an impact has that had? I agree entirely. I would say that that version of health and safety is also the stuff of spin, but leaving that aside, there is absolutely no doubt that that has had an impact. It is interesting as well that it will invariably be the solicitors who are instructed by the organisation's insurance company to have at least one eye on any possible compensation claim coming down the line who will be engaging in this form of informal negotiation. Therefore, what those negotiations are about is as much about having an eye on the possible compensation claim and trying to mitigate against that as it is about criminal prosecution, because they know that they will eventually play out to use Americanism, and they are simply using the process far less about reducing the fine, far less about reducing guilty or not. It is about what that charge says, what that narrative says and whether or not compensation lawyers could latch upon that note. That is invariably my experience when you start to look at what the charge is, what has been taken out of the charge, what are those one or two wee things that have been picked away. It is unquestionably with an eye on the compensation process. I do not know whether it is only about the negotiation, but that is a significant factor in the lengthy time that it takes. If there is one thing that can come out of that in terms of something that will make a big difference in terms of driving things forward, it is dealing with that and finding a way by which the COPFS can be driven forward and not look upon it as a civil negotiation, but dealing with a crime that has to be prosecuted principally about deterring future injuries. I would like to make a point following on that. Is there any suggestion that we have a compensation culture? There was a report carried out by Sheriff Principal James Taylor a few years ago looking at expenses in funding and civil litigation. Indeed, it is a matter that will probably come to this committee in the course of the next few months. In that report, Sheriff Principal Taylor explicitly found that there was no evidence of any compensation culture in Scotland. He raised the possibility—he doubted it in England and Wales, but certainly in Scotland—that there is no evidence to support that. It is a myth that is put out to support certain points of view on the part of the insurance industry. It is interesting that, in the context of workplace accidents, you are aware from our paper that there are between 6,000 and 7,000 reported accidents each year. The true figure in terms of industrial accidents is much higher than that. A figure to bear in mind is that there are only 4,000 or so industrial accident claims intimated in the course of each year and around 1,500 to 1,600 actual workplace cases raised in court each year. If you take the analogy of a pyramid, you have the number of accidents at the ferry bottom, you have the accidents that are reported, you then have the number of cases that go ahead to your claim and at the ferry top, the numbers that go into court. It is a decreasing number, so I think that there is clear evidence to suggest that in Scotland there is no compensation culture. One of the things that this inquiry has said and done for me in coming from a criminal justice background is that it has highlighted the vast scope of the zero-PFS and the pressures that are on them, particularly with the current resources in those times of austerity, which is well documented. For what it is worth, I do believe that health and safety crimes should be treated robustly and prosecuted where necessary. However, I wanted to ask your view on a wider issue. You have mentioned a few times about somebody going to work in returning in the same physical and mental state. It is important that, coming from a social work background and working in a busy social work office for 12 years and seeing lots of friends and colleagues over the years go off with various degrees of what you would maybe refer to more as mentor emotional stresses. How wide do you think the health and safety issue should be made? I am thinking that this would be massive resource implications if it was. I still get the impression that we are mainly in the main. I know that you have mentioned wellbeing as well, but in the main, I am still getting the impression that it is more about somebody being injured as such or whatever, which should be, as I will say again, dealt with robustly. However, how wide do you think that this should be and in what role should justice go PFS have in that? We made the point in our paper about the economic impact of accidents of work, and the health and safety executive carried out a lot of research. The producer annual report looked at the financial impact on society. The figure that we mentioned in our report is the cost to the UK, which is about £4.9 billion, and to Scotland, which is £541 million. Those were figures for 2013-14. The 14-15 figures have just been released, and the cost is still about £490 million to Scotland each year, but that is only in terms of workplace accidents. There is an additional cost, which is far higher in respect of those people who are absent from work through ill health, but through stress, through having mental health difficulties and the kind of thing that you are leading to, Mr MacGregor. In that situation, it is a significant effect on our economy and on our society. Another figure to look at is that the HSC estimates that annually 16,000 people across the UK are permanently withdrawn from the labour market due to accidents at work or ill health. In Scottish terms, you are looking at probably about between 1,500 and 2,000 people each year. Are the witnesses both aware of the Scottish work-related deaths protocol? We have received one submission from the action for a safe and accountable people's NHS that this is not being used properly and that there is a multitude of consequences, including a loss of important evidence. Are you aware of the protocol and do you have any experience of it in operation? No, I do not. We will now move on to the next item on the agenda, which is the criminal finances bill LCM, before we do our suspend briefly to allow the witnesses to leave. The third item on our agenda today is to agree our approach to the criminal finances bill legislative consent memorandum. In particular, I call for evidence on the LCM. I refer members to paper 4, which is a paper from the clerk, which proposes that we hear in the first instance from the cabinet secretary on the LCM before reporting to Parliament. More specifically, I refer members to paragraph 26 and 27 of the paper, which refers to a call for evidence as set out in annex B, page 5. Are we agreed that we should A have a call for evidence and B that we should hear from the cabinet secretary? Stewart Stevenson, followed by John Finnie. Thank you very much. I hope that this is not thought to be a big point, but looking at the paper that we have, in particular at page 11, where it makes reference to sorry, I've just temporarily lost UWOs—yes, unexplained wealth orders, that's what it is—that can be made overseas. I just wondered whether that hinted at reciprocal arrangements overseas to do so here. Of course, I do so wearing a selfish hat since all the members of this committee are politically exposed persons. Therefore, whether in the draft call of evidence that might be a factor, I'm not pushing for it, I'm only posing the question. We can make inquiries, and it can arise in the evidence session if it's out of it. I'm happy to delegate any action arising from that to the committee, convener. I'm not. Point 08, and we'll look into that further. Any other, John? Thank you, convener. I note that, at paragraph 24 and page 9, there's reference made to the consultation that Scottish Government officials have taken place with. It does seem to be entirely with groups who would be very unlikely to knock back additional powers. I just wonder—yes, I think that we should have a call for evidence, and yes, I think that we should hear from the cabinet secretary, but I wonder if we can specifically seek the views of the Scottish Human Rights Commission on that, because I think that there are significant potential issues around collateral damage, particularly with regard to residential properties. I'll tell you over to Peter rather than me. It's doing it by proxy. Yes, that point is noted. We've got a list of consultees, a standard list of consultees, which covers a full range of people who are involved in the justice sphere, including third sector organisations and the likes of the Scottish Human Rights Commission. I'll also think about bodies that might have an interest in this that aren't on our list. Okay. Many thanks indeed. Without assurance, we're happy to issue a call for evidence and to invite the cabinet secretary. Thank you for that. Moving on to agenda item number four, the Justice Committee on Placing. That is to consider a report back from the convener of the Justice Subcommittee on Placing on the meeting held on 8 December. This update on the subcommittee will be a regular item on the committee agenda to ensure that all committee members are kept fully informed of the subcommittee's work. Following the verbal report from convener Mary Fee, there will be an opportunity for brief comments and questions. If there is any specific areas of work that the justice wants to consider, that can be looked at in terms of our consideration of the work programme at a future meeting. Douglas, before I hand over. If I can before, it's not a reflection on anything that Mary Fee will say because I'm sure it will be a perfect update, but in terms of preparing for a committee meeting, it's easier if there is a paper to read and therefore I'm sure it will be a true update we get, but I wonder in future if we can have a paper with the issues discussed. I know we can all read the official report from those meetings, but a summary of the discussions, the points raised and action points so those of us not on the subcommittee are prepared prior to hearing a verbal update because sometimes it's easier to read it to prepare questions rather than just listening and having questions off the hoof after that. I'm sure Mary's already got something that can go in written form and yes that would be helpful on the advance. Mary, can I ask you to give the verbal update? Thank you convener and I appreciate the opportunity to update the Justice Committee on the work of the subcommittee on policing. The subcommittee up to date has taken financial planning evidence from Police Scotland, the SPA, the Scottish Police Federation, the Association of Scottish Police Superintendents and from the Cabinet Secretary for Justice. We will report our findings in a letter to the Justice Committee for consideration at next week's meeting. The Cabinet Secretary, Michael Matheson, has given evidence to the subcommittee about his policing priorities, which will help to inform our work programme discussion on 12 January. Are there any questions on that? There's a letter forthcoming next week if I have more detail on it and we can have further consideration when you've got something in writing before. If you want to agree, that's good. The only other thing that I have on today's business is to remind members that our final meeting of 2016 is on 20 December and we'll be taking evidence on the draft budget from the Lord Advocate and continuing our evidence taken on the Crown and Procurator Fiscal inquiry by hearing from HM Inspector of Prosecutions. Also, that meeting will be discussing the committee's EU engagement. I'll now formally close this meeting.