 I welcome to the 32nd meeting of the Criminal Justice Committee. We have no apologies this morning, and just to note, Katie Clark and Fulton MacGregor will be joining us shortly. I refer members to papers 1 and 2, and today the committee will be scrutinising the Bail and Release from Custody Scotland Bill at stage 1 of the Parliament's legislative process, and we'll be hearing from three panels of witnesses this morning. For panel 1, I'm pleased to welcome to today's meeting Tracey McFall, member of the Executive Committee of the Criminal Justice Voluntary Sector Forum, Lynn Thornhill, director of justice services with SACRO, and Charlie Martin, stakeholder and policy lead with the WISE group. We appreciate the time that you have taken to join us this morning. I intend to allow about an hour for questions and answers, and as all our witnesses are attending online, it would be helpful if members could indicate who their questions are for and for the witnesses to indicate in the online chat function if you would like to respond to a specific question. I'm now going to open up questions to members, and I remind all members and our guests, given the slight tightness of time, if you can keep your questions and answers as succinct as possible. I'm happy to open up to members. The latest figures for Scotland show that almost 30 per cent of people in prison are on remand. It's in the region of 1,862 of a population of 7,500. The rate is much higher than elsewhere in the UK and in most other comparable Western European countries. Nobody can explain to us why that is the case. David Abernethy, the governor of HMP Edinburgh, was quoted in the BBC yesterday saying that it's a mystery. Can either or, indeed, all of you perhaps explain what the mystery is, why this is the case, and anyone can go first if they feel like it. If not, I'll pick someone. Hi, morning, convener. It's Tracy McFall. Thanks, convener, and good morning, committee. I think that there is a range of complexities around the population and remand, and some of that has to do with the alternatives to custody. Some of that has to do with the information that sharers need to make those decisions around remand. I suppose that if you think about some of the questions around the bill in terms of the criminal justice voluntary sector forum submission, there are a few things, so sharers have to be confident in community disposals. Sharers have to have the information and need to make those decisions so that people can stay in the community and not be placed in remand for those assessments. There needs to be a pre-release plan when people come back out into the community, so there's a range of complexities. I don't think that there's a silver bullet, is what I'm trying to say with this question. I think that there's a range of complexities. I think that it's about information-sharing, I think that it's about sharers being confident, I think that it's about the range of complexities that people have as they go into prison. Actually, it's about some of those community services that actually are pretty variable across the country in relation to getting that support in the community before being put into prison to reduce the likelihood to get put into prison. Thank you. There's nothing distinctly different about Scotland that makes us higher. You could go back to some of the work that Harry Burns has done around communities and dispersement of communities and mining communities in the range of different places across the country that have difficulties around rots and alcohol over the last 40 or 50 years. I suppose that in relation to Scotland, if you think about the drug-related deaths, there is a range of indications in that information that Scotland and Scotland's populations use different drugs, which means that there is a higher risk of those individuals being involved in the justice system. It's a very complex picture. Thank you. I wonder if Charlie or Lynn would like to come in on this. I'll come in if you don't mind. Good morning, convener and members of the committee. Again, thank you for me for the opportunity to take part in this session today. I think that we have to look at the remand system at the moment as, if you can imagine it, imagine it as a funnel. At the bottom of the funnel, we have the court system, which deals with the cases and takes the trials forward. At the top, we keep feeding people in. At the moment, we are refining that there are more people spending longer periods of time on remand and the court backlog is not able to catch up with the amount that is going in the funnel at the top. That is one of the explanations that we have been getting from customers who use our new rich service. If I can just add to that the submission that the wise group has put in on this bill and much of what we talk about today has been informed by 94 responses from customers who use our new rich service. So, in effect, it's people at whom this bill will impact. I have to add a contribution to this apology. From our perspective, I completely agree with what my colleague has said about confidence and availability in terms of alternatives among other things. For us as well, there is a fundamental piece around the use of custody and the decision making of that and the threshold for that, in the sense that there are a number of people in custody and indeed you refer to the higher remand population that simply shouldn't be there, so for us it's around a threshold piece around what is custody to be used for. As Charlie said, stopping that pipeline in terms of the number of people going in there and particularly as we know that resistance research tells us that it's much more effective where appropriate for people to remain in the community either on a remand base or indeed a post-sentence base. Thank you. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining us remotely. I thought maybe I would just start off with a follow-up to Russell Finlay's opening question. Lyn, I might just start with you first because you were the last to speak, so apologies. You said there are some people who are being remanded who shouldn't be. Can you just elaborate on that a little bit and by that I mean is it the types of fences, the types of people, effectively are you saying that sheriffs are working with the wrong criteria or working with the right criteria but making the wrong decisions? So I think there are a number of complexities to that kind of question. I think that fundamentally there's a lack of information and evidence in terms of what underpins bail and remand decisions are, so I think we need to understand better what is informing the decision making. What we do know is that there are a number of individuals in the custodial environment who are particularly vulnerable, have a number of vulnerabilities within that and don't necessarily need to be in a closed setting with regards to a risk management perspective. So completely accept that prison has a place for those who present the risk of harm, but I think that as a society we're possibly not doing enough to identify those individuals who don't need to be in that closed setting. So for me it's around understanding the decision making process and ensuring that where people can remain in the community safely and we know there's a lot more who can remain in the community or not in their community should be. And I'm sorry to keep pressing on this but I'm just picking up your own language and words, so is it your view that there is a wider lack of understanding around the decision making process or is it the decision making process itself which is faulty and let me perhaps clarify what I mean by that? So I get the impression that these aren't decisions that judges and sheriffs take lightly, the decision to hold someone on remand, therefore they are using all the information presented to them at the time by both the crown and defence solicitors and where necessary social work and other stakeholders are involved in the case presented to them. Is it the case that you think they don't have enough information to make the right decision and again that's a bit of repetition on my first question or that perhaps they're just the volume of cases they're trying to get through because of the backlog there, perhaps not taking enough time to look at all the factors involved in that individual and are therefore just making the wrong decision because I'm still a bit unclear as to what your criticism of the system is. I think that there's a couple of points there. I think that there is more that can be done with regards to the level of information that potentially can be shared support informed decisions and that comes across I think in some of the bail specific proposals with regards to justice social work now clearly that will have resource implications so there's a lot of implementation pieces with that but also I think secondary there's something and I guess I referred to in my first response around the threshold so again the consultation piece is suggesting to look at almost a one test type threshold piece which is very much based around public safety, public protection which is absolutely right but what that will do if used appropriately will likely open up the circumstance where less people are being funneled into a custody system where we know once they're in that system has a significant detrimental impact not only on themselves but also on their family and a wider impact in terms of negative re-offending pieces. Thank you very much. Yeah that really helps yeah that clarifies I think your position and let me ask the other two two panellists I think the other side of that that's been mentioned already is that decisions may be made and I very much it's difficult to just put conjecture on this but there is maybe a concern that decisions are made because there's a lack of confidence in alternatives now I think that's quite an easy thing to say and quite a difficult thing to prove because surely you would think that sheriffs and judges have made decisions that are the right decisions based on the information or lack of information that's available to them at the time but actually if they're making decisions to remand people in custody because they have little faith or confidence that the alternatives will be are there or will be delivered appropriately safely and confidently is that a problem is it the fact that actually there are no proper alternatives for many people and there should be and that would give them a another option a better option and that's open perhaps to Charlie and Tracy I'll come in on that if you don't mind I do believe there is an element of a lack of evil confidence in the alternatives we do know that the provision of of supervised bail is is is not consistent on a national basis and part of the problem for for people on remand is that they are in effect in the no man's land of the of the criminal justice system it seems that this bill could present an opportunity to actually tackle that by providing a similar service to what is provided for through care for for convicted prisoners but what it needs is that consistency of delivery obviating any postcode lotteries or barriers to people accessing it so it requires equity and I'm minded a conference I was at in April of this year which Lady Dorian chair and actually the same question was asked and Lady Dorian indicated that yes there was a problem with shrievel confidence in what alternatives were available in any particular area and I think that becomes an even more difficult problem for travelling chairs that's very helpful I'd be fascinated to hear what Lady Dorian had to say on that matter further and Tracy I'll maybe come on to you and I guess maybe I'll load that question with a secondary one and that's how do you how do we as part of discovering what those rightful alternatives might look like also ensure that there's fairness in the system as well and that victims of crime are also protected and and by that specifically those who feel that they may be at harm mentally or physically for example those who've suffered at the hands of domestic abuse or other types of that type of violence and I guess that that may be an area of concern that there may be more people released that it normally would have been remanded under the current system but the new rules may permit them to be released so how do you ensure there's a balance there yeah thank you so there's a few there's a couple of things in this so the key question for criminal justice volunteers out the forum will this bill make the lives of individuals balancing communities better and improve outcomes so there's a few things in that so you did talk about why our sheriffs make the decision to remand well as Charlie says it's inconsistent across the piece not all courts have criminal justice based courts social workers so that in itself creates an inequality whereby if the sheriff does not have the information he needs to make the decision around a community disposal he may have no option but to remand to get that report done so there's there's a structural thing here around some of the things that chava said potentially this bill could offer around structural processes and information sharing another key question is actually sheriffs need information at court all social workers are not there is there a role for other partners including third sector including lawyers to feed into that process so currently right now that is not the case but again this bill may provide that opportunity there is also resource implications in this because actually if you think about the bill and if you think about potentially the number of assessments that may have to be done let's face that there's going to be a resource implication for this across the criminal justice social work teams that is huge it's an elephant in the room and that has to be looked at that also has implications for the third sector as well so there's something around the clarity of roles in who's going who's within the system to make sure that sheriffs need that information who's going to provide it there's something around a lack of consistency because as chava said some of the alternatives to custody are not available right across the country that creates inequality criminal justice social workers are not based in every court in the country that creates inequality so we now start to understand when you piece all this together why sheriffs really struggle to make these decisions because sometimes they do not have the information at hand but I do think and just lastly to point your question around decision making we and again the bill creates an opportunity for this because if we start to really understand the decisions around bail we can start to really understand why that was the case we can start to build that evidence based and that is critically important not just for people going through the system but as you said Jamie around victims victims need to understand the decisions that are being made around those bail processes so I think that's absolutely critical as well so there's a lot in that and it's a very complex picture but I hope that gives you some context that's really helpful and I'll probably let other members come in I'm sure there's lots of interest but I would like to come back to the questions around funding and resource later in the session if that's okay convener thank you thank you thank you Jamie I'm going to bring in Rona and then Pauline okay thank you convener good morning panel um yeah I mean from your submissions it seemed to be broadly supportive of um the bill and um you obviously do highlight resources as an issue I want to ask you um a wee bit more about the suggestion that you believe the third sector should be involved third sector working with individuals and a case should be able to provide input to help inform decisions I wanted to ask you how you know how how you think that would work in practice um are there concerns about in general about how that might delay or or what are the timings likely to be if that's going to happen um on the whole of the you know the whole of the court system if there are several um organisations inputting and you know working to maybe different timescales so really just about the timing and how that would affect and um and do you think that the the um system has suffered because of a lack of information from third sector organisations until now and I think you I think you believe that this bill will should provide the opportunity for third sector organisations to do that so if it maybe just talk a wee bit about that can I come to Charlie first please and then Tracy yes good morning it's a really interesting question as my colleagues have already explained that the lack of social work in some courts is a problem the lack of information to services is a problem now let's let's be honest here that that people offend and reoffend and reoffend so there is a high likelihood likelihood that that many of the people who who come to the attention of the police or who are taken into police custody already have third sector support in the background and I would suggest that that it should be a question that's asked right at the at the point of arrest or the point of charge do you have any support workers do you have any support from a third sector organisation or from criminal justice social work whoever that might be so that that can be identified at a very very early stage and that individual can then be contacted to be advised that their their client their customer their service user is in police custody and therefore they should make the effort to be at the court the custody court on the Monday or but whenever that might be that then gives a background of of if you like a journey travelled because the person that's in front of that sheriff might not necessarily be the same person who was arrested but they are making progress in their journey and it very often seems frustrating in in in the extreme when someone has been making progress and you know they make a mistake and they're re-arrested and it's it's almost like snakes and ladders you get to number 99 on your back down to number one again I believe people are best supported in the community and that that is one way to make sure that we can do this it allows third sector to inform a sheriff when bail applications are made thanks thanks charlie so just to clarify so you're suggesting that would be the first step in the application would be to contact a third sector organisation who'd been working with the with the person if indeed they are in place you know that does the coordination they know that they have the phone numbers they have the contacts did you talk to social work etc do you have any involvement it just would smooth the system out a little bit more I think well okay thank you Tracy can have your views please just to add to what charlie said so there's a couple of things as charlie said that there is an individual in the middle of this who potentially would not have contact with criminal justice social worker in the statutory services but more than likely and there's a higher chance that they will have access or engaging with third sector whether that be housing, mental health drugs and alcohol the range and gamut of services out there so we need to ask as soon as possible as they come into the system whether that be police custody who's supporting you who's around you is there someone we can tell that you're going to be going to court and as charlie says that gives us at least an in to say well actually you're in court tomorrow okay your third sector worker will get you there to start to go through that process I think there's a question around when someone's in custody it's really important to try and get the whole picture and sometimes even if they are evolving criminal justice it's not the only picture it could be they've lost their tendency it could be the the issues around drugs and alcohol if they're a woman it could be those domestic violence issues but what's really important in sheriff is trying to get that whole picture and I'm going to mention this but I don't want to kind of go down a black hole but there is some challenges that we have in Scotland around data data systems there is a number of different systems that we work police criminal justice social work etc there's a number of different systems that actually don't chart that person's journey and I know that's been raised in the committee a number of times but that adds another layer of complexity there is not one place a sheriff can get this information but a starter would be as soon as someone's arrested we ask the question and actually we get navigators and police custody there is already structures and mechanisms actually that are there that could help us start to unpick this and start to do that so for me that would be a starter for 10 just to kind of bolster on it which Charlie says we need to ask who they're connected with that makes sense thank you thanks Trace I just want to just add it so is there a risk that some people might fall through the net if they're not connected to a third sector organisation if they're not getting support you know is that obviously that's the fall safety still be they are coming to court the difficulty is if there is no criminal justice social worker at that court they may go through custody not engaging with anyone and not anybody asking those questions there is another complexity around the virtual courts around how criminal justice social worker make those links but again there is a potential of people falling through the net but again a failsafe would be criminal justice social work but again it's variable across Scotland so we don't have that across the piece okay thanks that's really helpful Lynn would would you like some input yeah thank you thank you yeah I mean again I would agree with what my colleagues would say I mean I think fundamentally the best outcome for the individual and indeed for the system as a whole is to have as much information about that individual at hand to make decisions and as Tracy said there are services located within our police stations that are set for a number of arrest referral type services there is an issue possibly there around the spread of that so if we can have a better spread around support available at earlier stages so at points of arrest and within the police custody that would support the information flow through and from the third sector into the statutory services the other piece I'll just we'll just flag really around that is often the the engagement piece with third sector is extremely valuable against the versus against the engagement piece with statutory services it's a very different relational piece that happens in that conversation so the quality of information and sometimes that the relationship piece can be quite different to really understand what is going on for that person and therefore what is the best course of action for them for society and for overall kind of safer community protection pieces and just finally are there implications for how long you know if there are multi agencies input and information is there are there implications about the timing of how long it would take to actually get the decision made so for me I think that so it's the coordination piece which is critical so the outcome of having that information warrants the information being available so as long as the coordination is there and there is such good working relationships between third sector and statutory services in any event it's about building on that piece and making sure that there is no obstacles to that information flowing through but it's absolutely the right thing to do to have that information to make fully informed decisions because this is people's lives that are ultimately affected by whether they're going within a custodial establishment or not okay thank you very much thanks convener Pauline thank you convener good morning panel um maybe we want to start with lin about the threshold now i'm still trying to get my head around this test so could you bear with me i'm not certain that i've understood it um correctly however so what i have understood is that this committee have questioned as other members have said high levels of remand and the cabinet secretary said well one of the things we're going to do is bring this bail and release bill forward we're going to change the test and that will allow more scope for sheriff's making decisions that don't involve remanding people to custody so we've had submissions and we heard from crown and the judiciary have written i think is a government submission and they had very serious concerns about the initial provisions and the government adjusted that threshold test but what i've understood the the concern that sheriffs and judges have is that we've changed it from a public interest test to a public safety test and they're saying well the problem is who's defining what public safety is so this is the context of my set of questions because i'm having difficulty understanding the evidence that i've just heard because it doesn't really fit with what i'm trying to get my head around so the first one so for example in answer to jimmy green you think you did say lin that there's uh you the term there's one piece likely to open up i didn't fully understand that but would you accept that so that that's what the provision is designed to do is to give sheriffs some discretion but they're concerned that well how can we use that discretion if we don't have any framework for making the decision about what what public safety actually is and i suppose my sub question to that is what i'd like to understand then is is is criminal justice social works information that we've been talking about integral to sheriff making using that threshold i mean when they're making a judgment about what public safety might mean does that mean well they need this information if someone i think has been suggested by others but if they don't have a criminal record in the first place then how then can that public safety test be used so quite quite a lot of pieces of that so in terms of i guess the point you raised around the public safety definition obviously that is a critical bit around what do we mean my understanding in terms of the bill intention is to remove things like exempted offences which have automatically precludes someone from getting bail now which may not be necessary in terms of public protection so there needs to be some exploration around what's the test currently and how do we put it to a point where absolutely public safety public protection and risk is paramount in the decision making but what we know currently is there are a number of people who are remanded rather than get bail for repeat offending behaviors which do not present a risk to public or victims or repeat victimisation but often there's more around their compliance or their likelihood to comply etc so there are a number of different factors to take into account i think my understanding of the bill piece is trying to simplify that test piece so i absolutely accept that there has to be judicial discretion with regard to that decision making the decision making absolutely needs to be supported by an information base of which justice social work are part of that and so we've mentioned kind of resource implications to that previously but there are a number of different factors that would that will determine whether someone currently is remanded or not and that's not just based on on the risk that can sometimes be other behaviors which which is they don't necessarily mean that someone needs to be in a closed setting so it's it's trying to simplify and make it more around the risk and the public safety but your point is critical what do we mean by public safety and across different justice sectors and organisations currently that test can look a little bit different so the critical bit is about getting an agreed piece around what that test looks like. Thank you just for maybe asking others to come if they want to answer that question. So to take the example Lynn that you've given the committee of a repeat offender then and using this public safety test how will the support say third sector organisations or criminal justice social work help a sheriff or judge make a better decision about whether someone really is how would that work or what sort of information would you provide for a judge? So the information that would inform that decision would be around any risk based stuff so I guess that the value that the third sector can provide with regards to the bell piece is the wraparound support so for example in that example where someone potentially has been remanded previously because of repeat non-compliance there is something to be considered around what level of support is needed to support that person in the community so they can remain there on bail with supportive provision and there are also alternatives with regard to electronic monitoring etc which would add to that level of support in the community as well as support bail supportive provision pieces so that's the bit that the third sector and other partners could add value in with regards to the wraparound support to enable individuals to remain in the community. Can I just come back on that it's just trying to understand it but in a public safety test if the question is do they pose a risk then what you're suggesting mean that you maybe had to add something into the legislation that says what risk does this person pose to the community if they had a level of support because they had two entirely different questions because that's not what's in the bill at the moment but it does make sense what you're saying and of course that's maybe for repeat offenders but we've got my first time offenders well the same test would apply for a first time offender wouldn't it? So the public safety and the risk piece would be the overriding factor what I'm saying is there are situations currently where people don't present a public safety public risk piece but they are remanded and in those circumstances there are provisions available now whereby additional wraparound support can be put around an individual which means they can remain in the community so fundamentally I agree that the risk piece has to be first and foremost and I believe that's what the bill is putting forward the question is about how we're determining the risk and the stroke public safety definition thank you very much. Does Tracy and Charlie want to come in on that Charlie? I'll come in very quickly I think that the crux of this is the situation of repeat offenders versus first offenders so we don't have any and clearly in the case of repeat offences criminal justice social work will have an input there these people will have what's known as LSCMI which is a level service case management inventory and that gives the indicator from criminal justice social work that they can inform the sheriff. I think the real crux of this is those that we don't have any intelligence on or we don't have any previous knowledge from particularly from that LSCMI situation however as Tracy has previously pointed out there's a high probability that these individuals will have connections with third sector organisations what will that be through drug alcohol homelessness etc employability it's about gathering what we have try and help the that the sheriff make a properly informed decision an interesting point which came from the the consultation that we did with 94 customers was that that almost to a man they were saying well you know if it's a summary case they should be a default position unless there's something in your history that indicates a problem and strangely enough for people who have been in prison many times they were saying column cases should be decided on a case by case basis with the right input from criminal justice social work and what other intelligence they have and they're looking at it in a very simplified manner well thank you very much Tracy is there anything you'd like to add Tracy Tracy you're on mute oh sorry apologies I think there does need to be around a discussion a discussion around the definition as my colleague Lynn had raised and I think there is a there is a question around there is something around for courts that around the nature and seriousness of the alleged offence so what we are talking about here on charlie said is those repeat offenders who potentially are in the system because a range of complexities around that their childhood experiences trauma we are not talking here around those at the higher end of the serious offence scale around public safety so I really just wanted to add that and I think there is a discussion around in terms of the grounds for refusing bail it's not really mentioned yet but there is some thing that we have to think about a bit human rights there's a range of human rights legislations coming over the horizon around UNCRC, UNPCD people with physical disabilities and I think we need to keep cognisant of those if we are putting people in remand we need to be really clear about why that is the case and is there potentially an element around the human rights piece UNCRC children the right to a family the right to access their adult so all of this context needs to be sitting within a human rights framework as well thank you very much thank you very much collect Stevenson you want to come in yep good morning panel I wanted to start focus more on we've spoke about community disposals and obviously touched upon you know the lack of consistency across the whole of Scotland in terms of what gets used by the sheriff or the judge in term I wanted to narrow in on because I've sat on witnessed in a court as well the sheriff meeting out a structured defend a deferred sentencing as well and it's similar to what we're talking about albeit it's focusing on younger offenders from 16 to 21 year olds but it's got that wraparound support there I just wanted to throw out there to each of you what your understanding of that is how it works how effective it is and could we actually broaden it out as part of the bill because but one of the things as well that stands out for me is they have to have a home address as well and obviously you know homelessness is obviously one of the big issues as well combined with addiction and mental health but at the heart of it it's social work criminal justice social work are heavily involved and actually putting that forward at the court case as well so if I can actually ask Tracy about that first of all thank you there is a range of different options so even if you think about some of the work that was done around the drugs court around if there is an individual who has and can if there's an individual who is offending due to their problematic substance misuse then there's a range of different elements and innovations that we've had in Scotland around drugs court and what is really important having worked on justice system for a long long time game structure of the fair sentences wrap around is absolutely critical what is the relationship an individual has with the sheriff so it's back to that relational evidence based approach in what works and that is about treating the individual as a person within the system rather than a person going through the system so there is a number of things we've done in Scotland around this there is a number of studies in relation to the effectiveness and the efficacy of this and I think there is some learning around structure of the fair sentences drugs court we've actually got alcohol courts now domestic violence so there's a range of different programmes there is an element of caution in all of this and that's to make sure that we don't up tariff a person to get them that structure of the fair sentence to get them through the drugs court so again caution but there's a range of different disposals there's a range of different innovations that are happening across Scotland that we could really learn from and that would mean the wraparound support it would mean the people are individuals going through court understands that process and actually that support is put in place and there's a need in terms of the drugs court the sheriff can see them once a month and they come in front of the sheriff they explain what the process is etc etc so there's a number of different options across Scotland that we could learn from in relation to that late okay thanks very much to see um i'll i'll pose the same question to Lynn thanks um so i think in our view um the opportunity for to use greater structure different sentences because i understand they're not used massively across a scotland moment so there's something about understanding the reasons for that i think is a fundamental piece but from my perspective it's an opportunity to keep someone going further and further into the justice system so the outcome of a successful structure differ sentence is not going further into justice system ie they have undertaken their piece and that and that's been spent so that can only be a good thing um this is a post sentence type disposal though so it's slightly different from the bail and remand question i guess so we're talking about but fundamentally we we need to understand why the use of it isn't um as significance is across scotland um and also understand the outcomes from that okay thanks then can i just quickly ask you touched upon it at the very beginning why it's not getting used throughout the whole of scotland and each of the you know sheriffdoms i'm unfortunately i don't have the answer that i'm not close enough to understand the reasons for that i can look into that and bring that back to the committee by a Scottish Government colleagues and that's okay so don't worry about it and finally charlie thank you yeah thank you collect yeah structure be fair sentence has been a been a fantastic pilot who was has been done in in south lanccia and i'm sure you'll probably hear more about that later but they do particularly work well with young people however um if we look at the quick this is this is on on conviction but if we look at the question of bail again and um where we spoke earlier about that opportunity to introduce support to people on bail you know um we know that relational mentoring is is one of the best things you can do for people now if we were to put that in place um then there's every opportunity for someone to progress when we eventually get to a trial and have a final eventual conviction it then would give a sheriff the opportunity to say well you know what you did really well with that element of support perhaps the best solution here is to give you a structured deferred sentence that keeps you in the community with that wrap around holistic support and keeps you out of prison so actually what you're doing you're scoring twice there because if you don't put them on remand then you give them support and they're successful you then get to a situation where you're not going to put them in a custodial sentence when they're convicted and it all contributes to reducing our remand population and reducing our convicted population which is what we all want to see in scotland and i'm mind you wouldn't talk about that mentoring um there was an article just last week by by lord john burb what popularly known as the people's pier and he had been looking at relational mentoring in our justice system in scotland and one of the things that he said was scotland has the perfect antidote to ex-prisoners re-offending rates and obviously to support someone to help them out of prison and make a break in the past it's the greatest public saving imaginable but often it's sorely missing so this element of support i think is crucial in all of the questions that we have today and all the way through this bill if we give people support we can help them to change and i think within all that we also have to understand relapse is an integral part of recovery as we get people further down the line they become the get stage fright and the relapse a bit but rather than just say okay you've let us down you go back into prison let's look at them as a person and deal with them as a person let's have some humanity and kindness in our system thanks very much charlie that's really interesting thank you no further questions can you now okay thanks very much Collette i wonder if i can just come in with a couple of questions and i'm just looking at the submission from the wise group so i'll maybe just come initially to charlie and i find your submission really comprehensive with a lot of kind of good points teased out within it but i'd like to ask a couple of questions around the issue of release of long-term prisoners and the use of a reintegration license so in the wise group submission you talk about the benefit of all categories of prisoners who are eligible for early release whether it's under a reintegration license or a home detention curfew so that sort of eligibility sort of assessment process would involve each case being decided on its merits and where perhaps release is refused obviously the reasons for that are communicated clearly and a plan is put in place one of the comments that you make in your submission is around the under utilisation of this type of process so for example a home detention curfew and i'm just interested in any further comments you have on where you feel that is benefit and why you feel there would be benefit in this type of early release option being better used so i'll come to you first charlie okay thank you computer clearly we we understand that that time spent in custody is disruptive to everyone's life it's disruptive to family it's disruptive to loved ones children communities employers and we know that the longer someone remains in custody the harder it is to reintegrate you know i mean for example if you've been off the streets for quite some time and all of a sudden you're released whether that be on a week a week's home leave from the open estate for example you know we see people who you see big signs on walls that say free cash you know they don't understand the bit at the bottom that says you can make withdrawals here we see people in supermarkets scanning their own item reintegration is so difficult for people and we we believe that that many people self-regulate because they can't handle the reintegration and the reoffend giving people the right element of support to integrate i will always go back to mentoring i will champion mentoring till the day i die but if we can use mentors to help people reintegrate then that is likely to be more successful we don't want to set people up to fail we want them to be successful the question then remains convener if we start looking at the reintegration licence which is suggested in the bill my understanding and correct me if i'm wrong but my understanding is that that will in all likelihood be at the behest of the parole board and the parole board are already under pressure in terms of of manpower in terms of the caseloads et cetera et cetera so it always comes back again the question of resource and that would mean resource to provide support for people even present but resource to actually handle the cases and i think what we should be looking at in terms of resource is to change the language around it and let's talk about it as being a preventative investment that will save us money down the line thank you thank you charlie um i'll just bring in lin perhaps on that thank you thanks amina yeah so for me there are a couple of key considerations around the reintegration licence and principle very supportive of it i think first and foremost the fact that it would need to automatic consideration rather than application can only be a good thing in terms of everyone having the opportunity to access around i guess assessment of suitability for it the reintegration piece allows a couple of things so as well as the reintegration of the individual with society family relational pieces all the all the points that charlie's eloquently made there there's another real benefit to that which is around the testing of the individual so how they're tested within the community environment which will support ultimately release release decisions i think looking at some of the challenges currently around the ability for people to make progress through the custodial estate in scotland and any other opportunity to be able to reintegrate and also to be tested to support fundamental decision making and also the higher likelihood of them remaining in the community once they are released can only be a good thing thanks lin and tracy thank you just a couple of things to add just going well it's a couple of things so we have the community community custodial units in Glasgow and Dundee so there is learning in relation to that integration piece so i think there is something we could potentially learn across scotland about how we're doing the things differently in scotland with women in terms of license and integration and getting access as lin said to the community while still in custody to increase the chances of integration but going back to the bill if you look at the 34a in terms of the duty around release planning and everybody's talked about how critical the third sector is in this process the third sector are not named in that part of the bill so that i have some specific tasks to suppose and key questions around we need accountability around implementation around the pre planning who's involved in that right now currently third sector are not named in the bill so that's that's something that i think has to be explored and potentially the role of the third sector is critical we cannot all do this on our own there is an opportunity here to take a really broad interagency intersectoral support around this loads of opportunities with the with the bill but the third sector need to be an equal partner in this and right now currently in the bill that that definition and that explicitness is not there in terms of the role of the third sector around that pre planning release stage whether that be license etc htc the third sector need to be part of that process thanks tracy and that was going to pretty much be my follow-on question was around who all should be informing the process and third sector is clearly from what you and other witnesses have said are integral to that process but at what point do you feel on the sort of timeline if you like should that process start and sectors such as the third sector be come involved in that so i'll come back to tracy and then if charlie and lin want to pick up on anything there so tracy yeah so there's a few questions around the bill that we have around this because the bill we think assumed well we're assuming that the bill is looking at voluntary through care and the statutory through care so if you think about the remand population and the churn that you have in remand right now currently there's a massive opportunity there for people in remand to get that support from the third sector as soon as they hit remand and as charlie has said and lin all of his of kind of labored on this point a number of people that will be in custody will have access to and will be getting access to third sector organisation so the earlier the earliest opportunity that the third sector can be around that table whether it be remand whether it be someone's been given a nine month sentence we need to ask the questions when they get into custody what is your plan who do you need to engage with and that pre planning stage is absolutely critical so it's six months three months there needs to be a process whereby the individual is put at the centre of that and it's not a couple of weeks before release that we're sitting around talking to people they write what is it your plan is there's a massive issue around housing and people coming out to homeless accommodation so for me third sector need to be involved as early as early in the process is possible remand is absolutely critical in that because what we've found is some people can be remandied for a number of months they actually get to court and get released there is no support for them they're released from court so again that remand piece is really really important for the third sector we need to be around the table as soon as possible and in relation to the bill it does say it's about minister's responsibility we're assuming that that means sps so are sps responsible for the coordination the planning the development and bringing everybody around the table so that's a key question and that for me as well thank you Tracy and I'll just quickly ask Charlie first and then Lynn if you've got any other comments to make on that we believe that the earliest possible opportunity you can to start someone thinking about how they plan their way through their prison sentence and plan for coming out the other side is the right thing to do I guess having the third sector involved having mentors involved is crucial to this because there's a question of power balance and what relational mentoring does is it builds that relationship around trust and respect and actually a recent report where the Fraser of Allander institute indicated that in through care in Scotland 92% of eligible prisoners voluntarily engage with mentoring services so clearly mentoring works and it's attractive to people of prison and I think much of that is down to the power of balance yeah thank you that's a really interesting point and finally Lynn thank you yeah I think so when someone goes into prison they don't stop being a member of the community in the place they used to live and walk on back out to so there's something for me around how we maintain that kind of hope and belonging for individuals and so therefore at the earliest point in maintaining the contact when they go in is critical particularly we know around things like housing so for example where we can be proactive and help someone to maintain housing it means that at the point that they're being released that they're not then in need of that house and provision etc so for me it's an end to end piece I think that everyone has a part to play in this and we've had some conversations already today around accountability and where roles and responsibilities sit SPS clearly have a role to play with regards to the reintegration point when people are in the custodial environment and as Charlie has spoken about there are a number of mentoring type provisions so shine and the roots provision of which that's that part of the support individuals to come back into the communities what we need to also focus on is the link between the the planning that goes on within custody and how our community provision links into that and how the custody provision links out so that it's very much streamlined we do know that in areas and establishments where there is short-term planning custody arrangements so similar to integrated case management processes the ability for our external mentors to link much more effectively with custody and with the people that they will be supporting to bring back to their communities is much more effective than where the planning is not as robust within the within the custody establishment now there are many challenges for SPS in doing that because of the populations across the estate so that's not a criticism of SPS it's just around I guess making a point this is a whole system piece and it's a whole person piece that starts from when they go in to when they come back out into the communities and that's the best possible approach for the individual but also for communities people and potential victims etc. Thanks that's that that's helpful. Okay I'm just going to come back to Jamie Greene just to bring the session to a close we're just about out of time. Okay I'll try and get this quick then thank you for the session we've had. The first one is just falling on from the last conversation and it's quite clear that there is a cohort of people who are released from custody either released from being on remand with no conviction those who have been served a sentence but have been in remand for the duration of what that sentence would have been and those who are also coming to the end of their sentence so there are different different cohorts of people being released but what's become quite clear early on is that many of them are released into what it seems to be quite a lack of joined up coordination around what happens upon their release and I think there's lots of good work happening we've seen that at first hand and spoken to some of the protagonists of that but there's quite a lot of people that are just simply you know the doors open and that's it they're they're homeless they've got no access to funds no access to food no access to medication mental health support addiction support skills training and also employment. I'm not convinced and I still can't see other than just putting in words on paper how that will change as a result of this bill because it's still unclear to me who owns that situation who owns that problem when that person is released what are your thoughts on that and maybe start with Lynne and just in terms of how I see it on the screen Lynne Charlie Tracy. Thanks Jamie yeah so I think in response to the joined up coordination points so there are as Charlie said there are mentoring services that support that co-ordination of peace and linking with statutory services I think the wider point is around and it's a separate point is around the availability of service provision so mentors can work with an individual support them bring them to statutory services i housing mental health support but if the housing stock is not there if the mental health provision waiting lists are too long no amount of relational or mentoring peace can plug that gap I guess so again it comes back to the whole system bit so the coordination and the mechanisms for that are there they need to be joined up better and that involves wider information sharing etc as well but fundamentally there is an implementation gap around what's available for people to access and out with that coordination so they can be coordinated in services but the outcome from the contact with that services has to be a positive one. Thank you. Yeah so I'm just waiting on the screen to change so it's hard to see who's waving on me and seeing Charlie you're up next because I can't see the screen. Very very briefly I think I referred in my submission one man one plan one consistent service in this day and age it's not impossible what we achieved collectively as a nation through through Covid how we reacted use technology put aside our differences and made things happen for the better there's nothing to stop us doing that now in this particular instance but it comes down to one person being the coordinator and preferably a person that the individual prisoner has built a relationship with and we can take it from there. So I mean the problem with that is it's I mean that could be anyone is that is that your point though I mean the money has to follow the you know that we have to this has to be backed up by funding presumably so you know that yes is it there you don't want to put a label on it but is it the responsibility of a local authority or is it an SPS or is it a government agency or some other as social work or you know somebody does need to take ownership rather than just leave it open to whoever that individual has a relationship with when they're in custody. I think to make it happen and to make it happen effectively it sits with Scottish ministers erect it because they will have to find the funding but again I'll go back to my previous comment Jamie which is let's not look at it as spending let's look at it as a preventive investment yeah I don't disagree with that I think the reality though is that as we heard from the first answer is that a lot of it's all very well saying there's you have a designated mentor but if the actual services aren't there there are no houses there are there are no skills and training there are no mental health you know if it's not backed up but if it's not backed up at the core service then the relationship's helpful but it's not enough in itself. Well we have we have two national mentoring services as Lynn already mentioned we have shine for females and we have new roots for for males they operate across 32 local authorities they operate in every prison that's got a short term population in Scotland and actually in in the past 10 years the the new root service has co-ordinated and worked alongside collaborated with over 9 000 local services and organisations so there's a structure in place and it can work yeah but we have to be in early it comes back to the previous question we have to be in at the earliest point in order to coordinate that change. Thank you very much and I should add to clear our own interest as I met the shine group last Friday and I'm really impressed by the great work that it takes so that's an excellent plug. Just before we close Tracy do you have anything to add to that? Yeah just very quickly there's a bigger broader question for me around all of this and some of this is about resources but there's a massive opportunity of the justice strategy community justice strategy we've got mat standards whole family approach mental health strategy national action plan for aid and homelessness all of these policies there is a part around the justice space part of the difficulties that our members face is those local implementation structures whether that be ADPs when it's justice partnership and degraded joint boards community planning so there's a number there's loads of money going into the system are we using it as effectively as we can to get every peri of the pound because we're currently we're currently funding in silos Jamie is what I'm trying to say here but actually underpinning all of this is about families individuals and communities so I think there is a bigger question around could we use the funding differently that we have let's face it there's not a big magic money tree out there but could we do things differently in terms of how that money is funneled and structured and used differently locally thank you for that I think that's probably a question rather than an answer actually it's a much wider point and hopefully you'll all be able to input into that solution and yeah really appreciate those responses thank you okay thanks very much Jamie okay I think that brings us to the end of our first panel thank you very much indeed for your attendance today that's been a really informative session for members so with that we'll just have a very brief suspension just for a couple of minutes before we start the second panel for the morning thank you very much thank you very much members and welcome back so I'd now like to welcome to the meeting our second panel of witnesses for this morning and I welcome Rhoda McLeod head of adult services for sexual health police custody and prison healthcare with Glasgow city health and social care partnership Sandra chain national career information advice and guidance policy and professional practice lead with Skills Development Scotland and Julian Booth justice service manager with south Lanarkshire council so a very warm welcome to you all and we appreciate the time that you've taken to join us this morning so again I'd intend allowing about an hour for questions and answers and as previously it would be helpful if members could indicate who their questions are for and for the witnesses to indicate in the online chat function if you would like to respond to a specific question so I'll just move straight into questions and I'd like to open up just with a very general one to begin with and I probably come to you Julian first of all and it's looking at the bail provisions within the bill and as you'll know the bill would require a court to give justice social work the opportunity to provide information relevant to bail decision making so I'm just interested in broad terms and do you support having this requirement in the bill and why do you support it so just over to you Julian thank you very much convener and thank you for this opportunity to speak today yes south Lanarkshire council very much welcomes the opportunity to provide bail supervision assessments and electronic monitoring assessments to sheriffs that is without question and ourselves like many other local authorities have been providing bail supervision assessments for a number of years I think though that I would say there are some challenges within that and particularly around resourcing as I think some of the other speakers earlier this morning have indicated that there is a requirement to undertake assessments that do take significant time and when you consider how many people going through court maybe they'll oppose I take the example for Hamilton chair of court in any day there can be 20 to 25 people that are bail opposed and consider the time it takes to do the assessments which can be over two hours per assessment that is quite a considerable requirement of staffing and I would also say within that that it is not just qualified social workers that would provide that service it is more often than not our part of professional staff group that would be qualified but part of professional staff that are qualified to a level such as social care qualification but don't sit with qualifications in terms of being able to undertake risk assessments so I would say that and whilst I do appreciate that there has been an indication in the financial memorandum around how funding would be directed towards social work resources to undertake bail assessments I think the difficulty that we do have currently is that we don't know just the reality of how many bail supervision assessments and electronic monitoring assessments would be required and that certainly does give a concern I think nationally to social work it's how they would be able to resource that service I would also probably just know that we are like many parts of social work but just the social work are facing challenges in being able to recruit and sustain staff and we know from the recent work done on setting the bar consultation one in four social workers leave within six years of being in the profession so we're conscious just about how we're able to provide a continuous and effective bail supervision service going forward continuing with some of those challenges Thanks very much, Gillian. I don't know if either of our other two witnesses would like to come in either Sandra or Rhoda. I'll come to you for Sandra and then Rhoda. From anyone who was within the criminal system or within some sort of a bail conditions so we work close with social work around that but it's not an area where we are particularly focused in from the next question. Okay, thanks Sandra and just quickly Rhoda would you like to comment at all on that? Good morning, convener and the rest of the committee. The only comment I have about this would be that there needs to be better connectivity perhaps between police custody and social work in advance of somebody appearing that would support this and not all our police custody health services are managed or led by nursing there's a real variety across Scotland in terms of how police custody health is delivered ideally what you would want if in terms of supporting that resource challenge if somebody was being held over in custody in advance of that if there was better connectivity between these services that would certainly improve matters I believe. Thanks very much, I wonder if I can just ask a follow-up question and again I'll come back to Gillian and it relates to the comments in the submission from South Lanarkshire Council around the removal of bail restrictions and your submission suggests that you feel that this would be a positive addition as there are people being remanded that potentially could be safely and appropriately managed within the community. I think so far we're at a very early stage in our evidence gathering but there is perhaps confusion or some difficulty understanding how this actually would work in practice. I'm just interested in any comments you have on this proposal and how you would see an alternative working so Gillian first you're on mute Gillian. Oh can you hear me now? Yep can you are you fine? Thank you. I mean what we do know is that bail that electronic monitoring works best when we have bail supervision in place to support somebody in the communities. I think we've seen over the recent years in South Lanarkshire that by bringing in the third sector to support bail supervision does have better outcomes for our service users and when I say about bail supervision support I mean about helping to connect people our vulnerable people into the community particularly those with substance use issues and if we think about the work that SACRO for instance do as well as our recovery communities and peer mentor services are particularly effective and supportive of people and I think that that is the key that we know that there's many people on remand that have that offending is directly linked to their substance use and custody is not particularly the place that will address those issues longer term bringing people into the community providing stable and supportive accommodation linking in where somebody is ready to consider education and employability all the key factors that sustain somebody within their home and their communities. That is where I see probably bail supervision working best and I mean we know from I suppose the recent statistics on the remand population that the Scottish Government produced in November sexual crimes what remand was up 23 per cent and violence was up 9 per cent but other crimes against society was the highest at 34 per cent so if you're looking at I suppose the individuals within that cohort of offending those are the ones that can be supported in the community more successfully. Probably we just want to say as well that there is something for me around about how we look at trying to make sure that people manage with things like curfews and that I think poses the greatest challenge. We know that for courts there are continual breaches of curfews and that in itself generates more work for the police, more work for court services and further appearances for the individual and that's where I think electronic monitoring perhaps provides the opportunity of when somebody being able to be managed within the community but also if they do have the support of bail supervision are more likely to manage that electronic monitoring tag and less likely to come back in terms of breaching. Thank you very much Gillian. Roda or Sandra, would you like to come in on that? I appreciate this is probably obviously focusing on bail and perhaps your contribution relates more to release from custody but you're very welcome to add anything. Roda first and then Sandra? No, I have nothing further to add. Sandra? No for someone rather than being paused or stalled and I feel as well that's where communities and partners such would be able to play their role more significantly in that situation if bail was more an offer and an option rather than custodian sentences but a lot of what Gillian says I agree with. Okay, thanks very much Sandra, yours sounds just a wee bit difficult but I think we've got the gist of that. I think Fulton MacGregor would like to come in so Fulton over to you. Thanks, convener. That's me now, sorry. Thanks, convener, and good morning to colleagues and committee and to the panel. I've got a question that's on the back of your own, convener, in the answer from Gillian Booth and it's about the impact on social workers and their teams that the bill might create. I just wondered if Gillian or the other panel members had thought about what that impact might be. I mean Kimmel justice social work teams tend to be relatively small. Is it going to take an increase in numbers to fulfil the sort of designs and the principles of the bill? Do you think that those functions would be carried out by typical criminal justice social work teams or would you say that there'd been more specific bail, as you mentioned, bail supervision or bail specific teams? I wonder what you think about that now. I know that maybe Gillian, you can only answer for Southlandshire Council but even in the thought that local authorities across the country might set up with that. Probably should also say, convener, just to refer members to my register of interests as a register of social worker with the triple SC, and probably particularly, more so today, given that Gillian is the current manager of the local authority that I previously worked with, it was before Gillian's line. Thanks, convener. Gillian, do you want to come in? Thank you for that. Yes, I can speak for Southlandshire. I also know that it's a different landscape across Scotland for justice social work and obviously not every area has a court within it. Obviously, for Southlandshire, we manage both North and Southlandshire court services, so that takes into account Hamilton, Eartree and Lanark. I suppose that there are different arrangements and part of the problem is accommodation for staff within courts. Some courts have good accommodation that social work can be based in and in some other areas that have to be facilitated within the locality offices. There is no doubt that there will be a requirement to recruit additional staff if the roll-out of numbers is as we expect. Obviously, we want to encourage that, so it's in our interest to try and promote Bail Supervision electronic monitoring where we can. I suppose that it's about how areas decide to do that and how they decide to use their resource. I mentioned about part of professionals, their social work assistance. Across Scotland, that tends to be the level and grade of staff that are used to do Bail Supervision assessments. Those staff are not qualified and risk assessments. You could argue that one of the limitations of the Bail Supervision assessment is that it focuses on identifying needs for that individual rather than identifying the true risks that that person may pose. Certainly, there is availability for staff to comment on public protection issues, but that will only be where we know and have sufficient information from our social work systems. Now, you may be aware that we will only get information about what the actual charge is that person is opposed to from the Procurator Fiscal Service. There will be more additional information. I suppose that that is maybe relevant just to add in there. I would also say that part of what we have done in South Lanarkshire and some other local authorities have done is use their money to recruit third sector to provide Bail Supervision support. That absolutely looks at the peer mentoring that I spoke about earlier. I would say that it very much depends on what funding you have available, where you are able to pull resources from in your existing section 27 budget and what capacity you have across your localities and specialist services. That is the difficulty that we face in Scotland as a justice social work service, is trying to anticipate what the volume will be. I would say that we are able to do some testing of that just now. For example, we are actively promoting the use of Bail Supervision electronic monitoring for all Bail post people in the south and north Lanarkshire areas. Now, as I have said, if that translates to the true number of 2025 people per day, there is no way, with best will in the world, that we will have the resource staffing to be able to undertake all those assessments in one day. That ultimately will mean that people may be remanded to allow that assessment to be concluded. Perhaps I would say that there is an opportunity here that the conclusions around the timescales in the financial memorandum for how long it will take for a Bail Supervision assessment of one and a half hours is, perhaps, hopeful. It is more likely to be over two hours per assessment, so it may be helpful just to place that into. I am going to bring in Pauline McNeill, who is also got a supplementary. Pauline McNeill, you are right to say, Gillian, that if a spell passes during these assessments, there will be a hugely taken consuming task, an important one. What I was trying to understand was are the discussions at any advanced stage about how many more workers will be required, whether they will be required in specific teams, and where those resources might be pulled from, or would you be expecting, as a result of the spell passing, that the Scottish Government ultimately provides more funding so that it is not having to come from other parts of the social work service? That is a very broad question, and I understand the time constraints. We would be looking for additional funding from the Scottish Government if there is a short answer to it. There is very little scope left, nationally, in our budgets, to be able to obtain the potential volume of work from that. We are aware that we had the recovery monies and the continued commitment to the recovery monies going forward for the next five years. That is only sustaining what we are able to provide as a social work service at the moment. A lot of authorities have channeled that into, for example, third sector contracts, as well as being able to provide longer-term contracts for social work staff. There is not really any additional capacity in that to support a longer-term vision for providing robust and sustained rail supervision services. Thank you very much. I will bring Pauline straight in. I can ask witnesses to keep answers reasonably tight so that we can get through as many questions as possible. I wanted to ask Gillian a follow-up question. Gillian, you said that you highlighted that the Bail Supervision Assessment is a weakness, potentially because it looks at individual needs and not wider risks to the public. I was really interested in that because that is what we have been asked to consider as a new test. From what you have said, my question is, does that suggest that there needs to be a change in the way in which things work? Who is the best place to advise the court on the wider risk to public safety? Then it occurred to me, perhaps, that is a risk management authority question. I wonder if you had a view on who's job it would be or would you have to change the way the kind of information that you process, because that is the new test. One of your previous speakers talked about LACMI. That is the risk assessment tool that just-as-social work applies for court reports and for the assessment of risks and re-offending for our service users while they are on statutory orders. Somebody has to be convicted before we will carry out a full LACMI. The short score of the LACMI, which identifies the criminogenic needs and the factors that relate to somebody offending, is done at the court report stage. You can see the difficulty. We would not be able to apply that level of risk assessment to a bail supervision order, as somebody is not convicted at that stage. I have to say again that that is a service and a role that is reserved for qualified social workers. There are good reasons that bail supervision assessments look at needs, because it is a supportive service to provide. Even if we were in a position to provide risk assessments, the difficulty is where that public protection information comes from. We do not get that from the Procurator Fiscal Service and we do not get that from the police service. You are only going on what you happen to have on your social work records. For somebody who is a first-time offence, you will not really have anything at all to go on. That makes it very difficult to then assess for what risks there are to victims. We will have some information, and that I suppose is what we have to go on. However, you can see why that presents a challenge in terms of the judiciary in relation to their confidence about what exactly we identify as the risks through to and including the person themselves. I will add at this point that one of the hurdles for us is the virtual custody arrangements that we have in place. While there was a need for that over our Covid pandemic, the challenges that that presents for not just social work but also our healthcare professionals and defence agents is that it is very difficult to be able to communicate with your service user in police custody. If you can imagine trying to do an assessment on somebody who is extremely distressed and very worried about what is going to happen to them, often there may be child protection issues in the background. Adult protection issues is very difficult to do a comprehensive and meaningful assessment in that way, in which you may only have 20 minutes to be able to speak to your service user. That is one challenge that is current and I think on-going and is an area that we do need to progress. We need to think about trauma-informed practice, particularly thinking about how best to communicate with our service users. Rona, do you want to come in on this? I know that Katie would like to come in on release from custody, so do you want to pick up on that? I agree with Gillian entirely on access to information. Something that is pivotal to this when you are making a risk assessment is access to good health information, about the individual concerned. Therefore, there is a challenge here in terms of how that would be made available. We need to consider how that would be done, given the range of health information that might be pertaining to one particular individual, but I think that that is essential information for somebody to inform a sheriff about a risk assessment. Rona Mackay, do you want to come in and then I am going to hand over to Rona Mackay? Sandra, I think that we are having problems with your sound and I am advised that if you can just speak a bit more closely to your microphone, that might help. Sandra, I will come back to you just now. I am going to hand over to Rona Mackay to ask a follow-up question. It is really for Gillian and it is just a fairly brief question about the pilot that you mentioned in South Lanarkshire. I wonder if you could maybe just elaborate on the similarities to what you are doing as to what the bill is proposing in that sense. How successful has it been? Has it finished or how long has it got to run? The cost implications to you so far and how you see that. I did hear you say that you couldn't possibly roll it out permanently, I think that you said that. However, just to get an idea of the level of that would be good. We have two services that we have provided alongside our structured deferred sentence courts, which is an opportunity to speak a little bit more about later. We have had in place, for the past two years, a contract with SACRO to provide a peer mentoring service to people on bail supervision as well as diversion. I appreciate that we are not talking about diversion today. That has run on year on year and it is due to conclude next March. What our alcohol and drug partnership has commissioned is a service that looks at restreferrol, diversion from prosecution and bail supervision. That will continue that support and that service is in place for the next three years. Obviously, that looks to take over what we cut with the current arrangement that justice social work has with the SACRO contract, but I am conscious that that will need to continue. If we have high numbers, we are going to need more than the service that we have got through what we call the I project, which is a restreferrol bail supervision and diversion. Obviously, it is a three-area specialism of a service. I am conscious that the cost of that has looked at providing one to workers' bail supervision support workers' peer mentors. The cost around that is about £68,000 a year. Now, if we needed to double that, there would be a cost around that. What I should make the distinction of is that that is about support into communities. That is about making the links with, for example, our beacon service, which is a range of services in the community in different localities that will provide support to people going through recovery from substance use. However, that is one side of it. That is a practical support. The other side is the work that court social work and social work assistants do in terms of the case management, the identification of the action planning and the actual assessments. That functions reserved from them. It is funding in two branches, one for the statutory social work side of it and one for the support in the community. Both are very much intertwined and need to work together to achieve the best for the person. If you are looking at where things are working, where there is potential breach, it is about that early and effective communication to try to get somebody back on track to prevent them from coming back into the court system. That idea of structured referred sentence model, where you have more flexibility and intensity of support, is what we have identified to work well with young people and which we think we can replicate with our adult population. In terms of reoffending the success rate, seems to be good? Yes. I would quote the evaluation that we had for our SDS pilot two years ago, and 83 per cent of our young people managed to complete their period of structured referred sentence and 91 per cent did not re-offend during that period that they were supported, which is a phenomenal figure. That was down to very much a welfare approach and an intensity of support, particularly child-centred and very much trauma informed in terms of the approach that worked well. Those are the ethos and the values that we purport in our Bail Supervision Service and would be something that is critical to the success of that going forward. Thank you. That is really helpful. Thank you. Thanks very much. Katie Clark, over to you. Thank you very much. I thought Gillian's comments in relation to virtual custodies and the difficulties in catching an individual's situation. In that situation it was really interesting and it is quite similar to some of the evidence that we have previously received from defence agents who are in a similar position. My question is primarily about resources and funding and about who provides the service. I think that it has come through quite clearly from the evidence that we have taken all morning, that there are significant resource issues and a gap, if you like, between the kind of service that the witnesses have been describing, they believe that it should be provided and what actually exists now. The main barrier to providing that is not to do with legislation at all, it is to do with resources and funding. My question really is how do you think the statutory minimum standards of through-care support will impact on that? What is your understanding of how that will impact on that? I know that there is a desire that the central Government should provide that funding. How do you think that that will impact on that? Do you know if any work has been done of what it would cost your local authority to provide the kind of service that is being described? Linking into the debate around the national care service, also, do you think that those standards make tendering easier, the outsourcing of services and tendering? Do you think that that is part of what it is about? I could ask Roder to come in first. I cannot comment on any tendering of third sector services, but I can comment on what I think the implications could be for health services. We welcome the idea of people being released before public holidays or weekends because that creates real problems in terms of risk management and safety of patient care, particularly if they are needed to be linked into alcohol and drug recovery services, where people can easily fall through the net if that connectivity is not carried out. You take someone like HMP Berlin or even HMP Lomos, we have a big remand turnover, a big churn there, huge admission rates compared to other prisons, to enter into a properly defined service that would enable people's healthcare to be co-ordinated alongside their social care needs. That would need additional resource in prison healthcare. There is no doubt about that for us to respond effectively. On the release of longer-term prisoners, we welcome that in terms of that being a positive piece of legislation that has been put forward, but we could not probably manage to do that within existing resources. For the Pro-Board, there would certainly need to be supported, there would need to be additional psychiatric and psychology resources to support that risk assessment process. Finally, just at the earlier stage, I think that there is work that needs to be done in our resources to connect prison police custody services in with criminal justice services and that, again, I think that the third sector that was mentioned by previous witnesses in the earlier session, that navigator role, I think would be really essential there at the beginning stage of this process. Thank you. In terms of costings for what the integrated licence would cost us, it would be something that I would probably want to pull together, rather than just say just now, so I can provide that information shortly after that. That would be helpful. Yes, we are supportive of integrated licences. I think that the challenge that I would probably want to highlight is around for our housing colleagues, because we know that resettlement in the community, for that to be successful, that does need stable housing. The challenge is placing people who have come from communities where there is high disadvantage and high levels of offending. If you are placing somebody back in those circumstances, it is not likely to bode well for them. That matched with a very low housing stock that is available at the moment, and I speak for South Lanarkshire, but I know that my other local authorities colleagues are in the same situation. That will make it very difficult. I think that, particularly when you are thinking about the amendments in terms of somebody being able to be at least 180 days earlier than previously, when we know what works well for our long-term prison population is being able to be tested gradually into the community. One of the difficulties for our local authority, as for many, is having whole-leave addresses for people to go to where they are not going back to a family home or their own property. That is an area that does need funded. I suppose that there are questions about the transfer of the funding from the Scottish Prison Service. If that person is not there for those 180 days, could that funding not be coming into the community where we are accommodating that person? I think that there are questions around that. I suppose that the other thing that I would say is that there will be additional work and resource required if we have understood that correctly in terms of HD assessments. That sounds like there is going to be a greater amount of work around that, but we are not entirely sure what the numbers will be for it. As I say, we support the concept of somebody coming out at the earliest stage possible, where they do not pose a risk of harm to others in the community and where they have done sufficient work in custody for their risks to be managed. That is very important. Those areas have been identified and worked on first and foremost. The other thing that I would say is that we need to be a little bit more clear on is whether somebody is released on the 180 days before the parole board sits. You would want to make sure that individuals will have a longer-term release, because the risks associated with releasing somebody and bringing them back are quite high. I am talking about things such as absconding, stress and not being able to cope in the community. That raises risks as well. There needs to be further clarity on that part of the bill. A lot of the points that you are making are incredibly interesting in terms of how we really cost those issues and the idea of funding following the individual, which is an idea that is used in other scenarios. We would be happy in terms of any costings that you are able to put together to get any evidence in writing. I wonder if Sandra might like to come in whether she has got any additional points that she would like to make in relation to what the implications are on that, both in terms of resources and funding, but also who provides the service. I will mention the navigator role. I am hoping that my mic is working. There is something about the stability element of that for someone moving within the system and that navigator role. A question for me is where does community justice partnerships sit within in supporting that and that move from within to back into the community? I think that there is a key role for community justice Scotland in this place and the local partnerships around that navigator role. I do not know the answer to it, but I think that there is something to be thought about there. Thank you. We will be taking evidence in relation to that later. Thank you very much. Okay, thanks very much. I am going to bring in my collette and then I will bring in Jamie Greene. Apologies, Rhoda. Do you want to just make a final comment? No? Okay. Collette and then Jamie. I think it's a good morning to the panel. I want to touch upon release from custody in terms of the bill which would restrict the days on which prisoners are released from custodial sentences and do you think that that will help in their transition back into the community or could it cause potential difficulties in touching upon some of the evidence that has been given, the written evidence that was given? There are mixed comments on that in terms of resources. We have looked at Friday releases and the lack of resources available on that day, from healthcare, housing and even just social work resources as well. I know from the evidence that was given by the wise group that they mentioned about the fact that it wouldn't matter what day it is, it's about that support and making sure that that supports in place. I think that they touched upon even making sure that the releases at 8am in the morning which allow that person, when they are reintegrating into the community, to be able to get in touch with people at an early stage. I would just like to know your views on that and I'll put that to Gillian, because you're the first on the screen, and then Sandra and then Rhoda, thanks. If I can just ask you to keep your answers as succinct as you can, I know there's an awful lot to cover. Yes, we support the idea of being able to release somebody on Thursday where it would be a Friday release. What I would say is that it should be a targeted approach. If somebody has got relatively little needs in terms of health and thinking about addiction specialisms, if they require medical assistive treatment, if they don't require that kind of thing, then a Friday release is fine. I suppose that it's where somebody needs to be linking into their prescriber. They need to get access to keys for housing, and they need to meet their support workers. That, on a Friday afternoon, is nearly impossible, and it leads to breakdown. What I would say is that it should be a targeted approach. I would also say that there is an agreement that that can happen, and that maybe is perhaps best at the ICM stage, rather than what we have at the moment, which is a very laborious process through the flexible release request scheme for the Scottish Business Service, which is a significant report that a social worker has to request to allow flexible release. To something more streamlined, I agreed at the earliest opportunity to allow them the services to go in and support. I would agree with Gillian. It's very much a discussion centre in the requirements of the timing and what's available to them and the put in place for them. I concur with what Gillian said. I've already mentioned linking to alcohol and drug recovery services. That is a risk currently, so we welcome that. Homelessness is the other area. It's best to go to a person-centred approach, rather than a blanket approach to that. That would be my advice. Okay, thanks very much for your comments. I'm aware that we'll not get much time, so I won't ask any further questions. Okay, I'll bring in Jamie, and then I can come back if there's time. Thank you. I've only got one question to the panel. If there clearly is a move to release more people on bail, there's an inevitability that many of those people will come with bail conditions, as part of that as an extra safeguard, perhaps. I wondered what role would you play in that, with that generate any increased workload for you? Lumped in with that, I wonder if anyone on the panel had any commentary on the use of alcohol-tagging devices as part of any condition of either bail or deferred sentencing, or as a condition of early release, for example, as a means of keeping somebody, if you like, on the straight and narrow with reducing the potential for re-offending, given the propensity for alcohol to be quite a substantial driver of some of the re-offending that we do see upon release. So it's linked into the last question about Friday release, but it's actually about how we help people. Gillian, can I start with you, because obviously you might have more day-to-day interaction with people in that scenario? Yes, in terms of bail conditions, I suppose it depends on what the bail conditions are. They tend to be very standard currently about where someone must stay away from. That's where electronic monitoring helps. In terms of the additional work around that, I suppose that that comes as part of electronic monitoring support through bail supervision. I suppose that we need to consider more, and there's a bit of testing of what that actually looked like in reality before we're probably able to give a more definite answer to that, Jamie. But sorry, your second question was in relation to— Yeah, if you think there would be a place for the use of—I know that we're already quite familiar with the concept of GPS monitoring as an electronic means for that, but there's quite a large-scale trial being done south of the border where they've rolled out, I think, at least 7,000 devices as part of either community order or as a condition of release or bail in different scenarios. It can be used in different ways, obviously, but it seems to—my understanding is that it seems to have a reasonably high success rate in terms of compliance around 97, 98 per cent. Is that something you think might be helpful as part of this conversation or not? Yes, I do think it would be helpful. It would be good to explore that further. What I would say, though, like with anybody going through recovery, there may be occasions where there are, I suppose, relapses, and I suppose it's important that there's a flexible approach to that from the courts and police, and that it's not just an automatic breach and somebody is then remanded again. There has to be more fluidity in terms of support, and if it is just about somebody who relapses back to substances rather than an actual offence where serious harm is being committed, I do think that there has to be, I suppose, a balanced approach to that, which I think third sector and statutory services can support. I suppose that would be my caveat to that. That's really helpful. Again, I'd probably need more details of committee on this, but my understanding is that it's not actually aimed at people with long-term alcohol addiction. It tends to be better suited to those where alcohol is an aggravating factor in an offence, for example. In other words, it's not requiring a more hands-on day-to-day treatment approach, and that probably wouldn't be suitable for them in that scenario, so I think that you make a very fair point there. Again, just to the other panellists briefly, if you or your organisation has any role in the provision or monitoring of bail conditions, knowing the likelihood of those who, if it is a result of any legislation that passes, more people are... Sorry, I'm getting some feedback there. If the increase in volume of people on bail will put any additional pressures on what you do, and if you had any comments on the use of technology as part of that solution, I'll go and maybe go with Rhoda, because you've got a top-notch microphone there on you. Okay, thank you. Not particularly, no. I mean, I think that we need to look at whether, when people are released on bail, is there a coordinated approach in terms of a holistic assessment around their health and what is the engagement and what's the integration there in terms of between the health and the social care part of it? I think that one of the challenges is that there is a mixed bag across the country, so just as services aren't necessarily integrated with health services, the way other services are in some partnerships in Glasgow, they are integrated, that gives us opportunities to take a more strategic approach to these types of matters. In terms of the alcohol tagging, I couldn't comment on that, but I'd be very interested to learn more about that, but I'm not in a position to make a comment about it. That's great. Can I just actually just clarify a question? How are your organisation, the work that you do, funded, especially on the localised level? Is it through the wider local authority funding settlement, or is it direct from criminal justice budget, or other parts of the government, other directorates? So the health services are the responsibility that have a justice interface or police custody in prison healthcare, and they are funded by Greater Glasgow and Clyde, the health board. But I am managed, they are delegated to the Glasgow health and social care partnership, so I am employed by NHS GCC, but I am managed via the health and social care partnership, so I sit round the table with other senior colleagues from social work, including justice colleagues. Okay, that's quite helpful, thank you. We're just about up to the hour and a half hour, so I just wonder if I can maybe finish off with a question, come back to you, Rhoda. An issue that the committee has been looking at is continuity of access to prescription medication for people on release from prison, and we have touched on that earlier on this morning. Do you feel that the proposals in the bill will do anything to help to ensure that the gaps around provision are addressed and that people who are coming out of prison back into communities can access GP support and possibly other support when they need it, which often is pretty much immediately after release. I'm interested in your views on that. I think that the aspects of the longer term release, the changes to that, potentially, I think that that's more manageable, although I do believe that there will be some resource issues in relation to that, but these are smaller numbers and easier for prison healthcare to respond to and make that connection with onward services. I think that there is a challenge, albeit that the principles of the legislation that we would agree with. There is a challenge in terms of how we connect people properly back into their community GP services. Not everybody that comes into prison is registered with a GP, as maybe you've heard in previous evidence. Therefore, we do make attempts to try and make sure that there is that follow-on too, but that's not always the case. We can't guarantee that somebody leaves prison and they're registered with a GP, so that is a gap. I don't think that the legislation itself would remedy that. There needs to be a specific look at how we do that anyway, whether the legislation existed or not. That's a problem. I don't think that the legislation itself will solve or address. It might require us to have a more co-ordinated approach, which is good. I think that that would set us on the right trajectory. The other big issue is that IT systems do not talk to each other. That is a real problem. If you can take about police custody and prison healthcare, there are two different antiquated IT systems, but even that talking electronically is a real challenge and, similarly, at the back door of somebody leaving custody is a real problem in terms of how electronically information is shared onward. Again, the legislation might allow for that discourse to be enhanced and for us to take those issues forward, but those are issues that need to be addressed whether the legislation exists or not. I think that that raises some really key points around communication, relationships between, for example, a GP practice and local pharmacies and how important that is. Third sector organisations are also the first point of contact for somebody on release. You have spoken about the part that IT systems and better use of IT can play in that. Are there any other comments that you would make about where that sort of communication process, that joined upness, should be improved? As you say, regardless of whether we are discussing this in the context of the bill or not? I do think back to my previous point about a more integrated approach. One of the MSPs asked a question about whose responsibility is this. For this to be successful, I think that you almost need a named person to say it, to do that co-ordination. I know that the third sector of colleagues in the previous session were making a bid that that should be them and that might be right and proper, but there needs to be some kind of co-ordination to allow the information gathering to come together and for somebody to be able to support the individual and make the right choices on the release. We often see many, many people coming into prison who have never touched health services for months or years, whose health status is very poor. They then get a full MOT to be quite honest when they come into a prison setting and their health. We see people's health improve quite considerably and then they are released. If they are not connected back into health services, they are back down that road again. Often we see people coming back in and we are having to start at square one to start the whole journey again. Given the volume around this, we are probably very good at it with longer-term prisoners who are released with a good through-care package. The shorter-term sentence group requires a lot of support and a lot of help, so we need to think about how that is co-ordinated. As soon as a person steps over the line at the back door, who is there to just take them and say, right, we need to get you registered for your house, we need to get you down to the GP service, we need to make sure that your prescription is sitting in your local addiction service. The other challenge that exists for us is that, obviously, business does not serve a locality. A large percentage of our patients come from greater Glasgow and Clyde, but a significant number comes from that. We have to talk to a variety of health boards. LoMOS is a really good example where we have had on-going discussions with Forth Valley around this very issue about people being released at weekends and not being able to collect their prescription or not being able to be tagged into recovery services. Thanks very much, Rhoda. That is really interesting. I am interested in the comments that you made about a option of a named person. I am just going to bring this session to a close, but I am just going to bring in Sandra. I know that you have been battling with your sound today, just to ask if you have any final comments on this particular issue that we have been discussing around release and access to medication. I do not have any comments apart from a game about the co-ordination and how that brings other majority statutory partners into being. Thank you very much. We were a bit distracted by your weak companion there, but that was a nice way to end the panel session. That is us up to time. Thank you again to all our witnesses for your assistance today. It has been really informative. If members have any further queries or questions, we will follow those up in writing. I am just going to have a brief suspension for a few minutes just to allow our final panel of witnesses to get ready. Thank you very much. Welcome back, members. We are now moving into our final panel for the morning. I would like to welcome to the meeting Mr Keith Gardner, specialist adviser with Community Justice Scotland, Susanne McGinnis, executive director of social work with the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland and Sharon Stewart, justice social work policy and practice lead with Social Work Scotland. Keith is joining us in the meeting room this morning, and Susanne and Sharon are joining us online. We very much appreciate the time that you are taking to join us this morning. I intend to allow a roundabout an hour for questions and answers. As we have two witnesses online, it would be helpful if members could indicate who their question is for and for witnesses to indicate in the online chat function if you would like to respond to a specific question. I am just going to move straight on to questions. I will start with a general opening up question. I will maybe come to you, Keith, first of all. In relation to the provisions around bail, the bill would require a court to give justice social work the opportunity to provide information relevant to bail decision making. I am just interested in if, in broad terms, you support the provision and maybe just a set of context around that. I will come to Keith first and then Susanne, then Sharon. Broadly, the community justice Scotland supports this measure and other measures within the bill. It is a complex landscape bail, and I am sure that in the previous sessions you have heard about that as well. Currently, under the 1995 criminal proceedings act, there are two parties who can give information at that process. That is Crowner's Procurement Service and the person or the other defence agent. The provision and the information that, in most cases, a sheriff will have access to at that point is where bail is opposed by the Crown Office. On some occasions, but on every occasion, the defence agents will proffin information as well. We support this measure because it allows for a professional social work to be put at the right time in that process, which will give a balance of information. One of the things that justice social work is assessment of the need for that dynamic information. Based on assessment of the person there and then looking at what their historical information is and their legacy system, because, unfortunately, many, many people who go through the system will not be the first to go through the system, so they will have dealt with many before. We have tried to pre-empt some of that by introducing things such as we now have an information sharing agreement between Police Scotland and the 37 local authorities and information sharing agreement that tells social work departments around the country at the start of play who is in police custody from the rear, who has been arrested, charged and appeared in the next lawful day court, so that the start of play local authorities will know who is in police custody. That is a way of getting that kind of information to social work as soon as possible to allow them to begin their triage assessment. That helps because of later in the day when, for example, the Crown Office declared being opposed and we know that, through no fault of anybody, that that process can sometimes be late in the day when they understand, when they declare a position, of being opposed. So our idea was that if social work can know at the earliest possible juncture who from their area is in police custody, it is not the full picture but it is part of the picture. How that links into the provision in the bill is that it would allow social work to know as much as we can ahead of time and begin that process of assessment and triage, which would allow them to put as competent and accurate information as is available within the circumstances to the court. Before I bring in Suzanne and Sharon, just by way of a follow-up question, in previous sessions this morning and indeed in some of the written submissions, there have been a number of practical challenges around the provision relating to criminal justice and social work highlighted. How do you feel some of those practical challenges should be addressed when we're considering the practical application of the bill? Again, it's easy just to jump and say, well, more resource. Resource is a part of it. But there is partly a bigger system here about understanding and having better information about why Crown Office opposed the bill, not just that they are opposed but the reasons why they opposed the bill, which would help social work to understand. There is practicalities of note. Every court has these court teams available on-site all the time. I think that there's a training issue. There has to be a part when understanding about the importance of this, because this is the gateway. If you discount diversion and the other measures that can do pre this stage, when we look at some of the complexities that are within that arena, it's a mixture of training, it's a mixture of resource, it's a mixture of culture. It is a big part of it as we need to think about how we enhance the relationships between Crown Office and social work. This is a change for social work to come in at this point and do the assessment and offer the information. There's loads of work happening across the country just now of a similar vein, but what the provisioning bill seeks to do is to formalise that and put justice in the same footing as Crown Office and the accused stroke defence agent. Susanna, I'll come to you first and then Sharon. Thank you, convener. In terms of bail and the provisions within the set out in the bill, the commission would agree in terms of the reduction of people on remand, particularly those affected with severe and enduring mental illness. We also welcome the sheriff to have far more information at his or her disposal at the point that the person arrives in court. From the commission's point of view, it's really important that the sheriff is provided with all information about the person's mental ill health. At that point, there's an opportunity for an assessment order to be suggested as one of the options, because we found in our report that we published earlier this year in terms of people within the prison system. There's a number of people on remand who would be unlikely to be to be sent to custodial sentence when they come up for that. We heard about a number of views, which I'm sure further questions will be asked later on, but what we would suggest is that people affected by mental and health, learning disabilities, autism and related conditions should be brought to the sheriff's attention at the earliest opportunity, even before the prosecutors, as my colleague has just outlined. That must include the impact of custody on a person, their links to community mental health services, local services, driptons, et cetera. On the whole, we welcome the provisions within the bill and we welcome our reference to anyone who is under the mental health act to be on the face of the bill for consideration or for the sheriff. Shaddon, would you like to come in? Yes, so Schwartz Scotland would also agree that enhancing the use of bail as an alternative to remand is very much welcome, but there are practical and resourcing implications. I also want to say that there is a difference when it comes to looking at suitability for bail and when you undertake a risk assessment, and that is something that we will come on to later on. Some of the practical implications of it is that you heard the evidence earlier on about not every court has a social worker or a bail officer available. Some courts run multiple hearings, so it is impossible even if you have someone in court to be available in every court. Sometimes the distance between the justice social work office and the local court can be at some distance, so maybe for rural areas that is more of a challenge. You heard earlier about the use of virtual custody courts, which were used extensively during the pandemic, but when it comes to the nature of some of the people that social work is working with, people with multiple complex problems doing that over a screen can be pretty challenging to do an accurate assessment of needs and just the availability of information when you are doing a bail assessment. Sometimes you might know quite a lot about a person, but on other occasions there is very limited information available, so there is a bit of a challenge with that side of things as well. Okay, thanks very much. I'll just open up questions to members now and I'm going to bring in Russell Finlay. Thank you very much. Good morning. In your submission you talk about the historic high that remand is at. Just now it's up to, I think, 30 per cent, but you also concede that remanding people is sometimes necessary. Have you given any thought as to what kind of level would be comfortable for your organisation and any thought at all about where it would be reasonable? In 2014-15, our prison population was similar to what it is just now. Our remand population was 19.76 years later. We are now at 28 plus and have been north of that recent. It's an interesting question. I was in Helsinki a wee while ago and talking to the organisation RISE, who, we're not alone in this, this isn't a unique Scottish issue, it exists across the whole of Europe. Finlay's population, remand population rose to 23 per cent and they set up a commission because it was at such an unprecedented high level. They normally run at about 14-15 per cent. I always caveat that by, I'm never in favour of looking somewhere else and trying to lift it and dump it wholesale. But there are elements within there. People know the comparisons with Finland. They have a similar population, similar issues to Scotland, but they have a much lower prison population and, usually, a much lower remand population. I think it's difficult to put a number on it. I think it's more about the appropriate use of—there's no question that remand, in some cases, is necessary. It's trying to find a necessity within that is problematic because within the consideration of bail, there is no formal risk assessment undertaken. It doesn't allow for it. The 95 act declares that it must be decided on the day that person appears in court, known and common for bail custody, close to running to 7, 8, 9, 10 o'clock at night. I recently had knowledge of a young person who was there at 11 o'clock at night before their decision was made. I say this with absolutely no criticism of any organisation or agency within the justice field. There is nobody that doesn't want to solve this problem. It's just a question of, you'll see from our submission and our original submission, we had made reference to remand should be for people who either have an evidence flight risk, an evidence interference of witness or, indeed, an evidence imminent risk of serious harm. That has changed—I know there's a further question later on in my part of the discussion—it should be for those who are unable to adhere to either standard conditions or further conditions, which we usually refer to as bail supervision. Since 17 May this year we opened the options for sheriffs. We changed the landscape, which means that you can now have standard bail, standard bail in electronic monitoring order, further conditions, which we usually call bail supervision, or further conditions, bail supervision, within electronic monitoring order. So there are a number of options there. So when I answer your original question, I don't think there is a number—not naive enough to say zero—there will always be a place for remand. It's the efficacy. You mentioned Finland and the commission and obviously you don't want to talk about lifting things wholesale, but did that result in new legislation in Finland? There was just a question of taking a good look at the existing systems and making them better. I suppose the question would be, do we really need yet more legislation? Can this not be fixed with the right intent from all the agencies involved? Being in this for a long time, I don't think there is a question of positive intent. I think everybody would work towards this. If we take Covid out of the equation of the numbers, our remand population has been rising inexorably since 1415. Legislation is necessary? Yes, right. I wonder if the other two witnesses might have a view on that as well. I have not got an answer to what should the number be, but just agreeing with what everyone said, 30 per cent of the population is definitely very high. From some evidence that we have had across social work, when you look for instance at women who get remandied in custody, there is a tiny number of them going on to get custodial sentence. It begs the question why they were remandied in the first place, because they do not appear to have been a risk to community safety or public protection. That is a question. There is also a number of visiting sheriffs, so they need to be confident that they know what services might be available. They are seeing increasing people in front of them with multiple and complex problems. When a sentencer has someone in front of them, it is not an easy decision for them, but being aware of what is available across social work services would help. I know that there have been attempts to provide portals for sheriffs in relation to what is available in local areas, but that might assist them in the process when they are making that decision. I will follow on from that. I outlined rather than back my key points that I was going to make there around women in particular, so I will not refer back to that. I do not think that there is an easy answer in terms of numbers of remand, because each person must be taken on their own merits and risks and needs, and that is for the sheriff to determine. However, I would agree that legislation is required, because there has been a lot of things tried previously that have not worked yet. Therefore, here we are today, and there is an opportunity here to consolidate and bring together those services and, hopefully, plug those gaps to improve services for everybody, from the commission's point of view, in terms of those particular needs of mental health care treatment and how that is disrupted and impacted through remand. So, in answer to your question, it appears that legislation does need to be implemented. That is really helpful. Thank you all. Maybe I will come back in if there is time, but thank you. Okay. Thanks very much. I am going to bring in Jamie Greene and then Katie. Jamie. Thank you, convener. Good morning. Good afternoon. Can I just play a devil's advocate a little bit on this, just to probe and test a little bit? If we are saying that legislation is required—maybe that should keep start with you, sorry, because you are in the room—the legislation is required to reduce our remand population. First of all, is it not a valid observation that the remand population is so high because of the backlog of court cases and the length that it is taking for people being held on remand for unlimited periods of time awaiting their trial—had those trials been dealt with far more quickly? Is there an inevitability that some of those people have been released or released having served enough of their sentence to be released? That is an observation, so that number could come down quite quickly if we got through the backlog more quickly. The second is maybe more of a philosophical question, and that is that my understanding is that the Crown really only oppose bail when they feel there is good reason to, based on information available to them, including information given to them by police and other protagonists. The judiciary really would only therefore remand some, and if they felt there was good reason and they were satisfied that the argument had been made well by the Crown to do so, so that is not something that we need legislation to fix, surely, because what legislation will do is simply tie the hands of the judiciary and the parameters that it uses to make those decisions. What do you say to that? I think your point about the number of people who have remand is valid. Covid has done exactly what you say. Our capacity to invoke sections 27 or 30 of the 1995 act, which is the mechanism for reviewing bail, has been sorely limited by the backlog in the courts. I am sure that, for previous evidence, you will know how hard the Scottish courts have worked to try to bring that down. It is an incredibly complex problem, but that is part of the reason why we have people who seem to be almost locked in the system because they were remanded. Interestingly, when you look at some of their remand information, when people are remanded, there tends to be a spike at day 1421 of people being released, a significant amount of people being released, but because people have not been coming to court, that has not happened. On your second point of why we need legislation, and again, this whole landscape is characterised by a death of data. We have very little data to work on in this. However, working with Crown of Prophet Fiscal colleagues, some of the reasons why they oppose bail are based on historical facts, such as the person who did not turn up X, Y and Z, or the person who had an offence, analogous offence, blah, blah, blah. It is absolutely valid, but the difficulty in assessing that is that if you have a previous analogous offence, you have no idea the time, you have no idea the person's situation within you, what has happened with them, and again, where people have a previous history of no attending court, there will be reasons for that. The provision in the bill allows social work to assess that, and where they can, and it will not be in every single case, but it will mean a lot to them, where they can proffer information to the court about what has happened to this person in an intervening time, here are the points that will lead you more towards stability, such as the first offence in three years or whatever, or that we can have a support package to put in place where we can ensure that individual will come. That is partly why we introduced those other options in May this year, so I think that what social work can bring to it is a dynamic picture of the person, so you have the fiscal who have opposed bail for their professional reasons, absolutely, but you then have other information of a more dynamic nature that would allow social work, and if you put both of those sets of information to the sheriff, I think that allows for a much more defensible decision in making that, and that is no criticism of any sheriff's decision about remander bail. They make decisions, but it allows them to have a more holistic picture based on both agencies. I find that a very interesting response. You have almost identified the solution within your answer, and neither of those solutions, one being there is a dearth of data, well let's fix that, let's fix the information that is available to the crown to allow them to make a better decision as to whether they think it is appropriate to oppose bail in the first place. They may take a different view had they have access to more information or different types of information that was more real time, as you say, and secondly the provision of more information to sheriffs and judges at the time in making those decisions. Again, I probe we don't need legislation to do that, that's something we could do already, and it sounds like indeed there have been some recent changes to the options available to them, which might have a positive impact on remand numbers anyway, but we haven't really let that bed in or given any substantial time to get any qualitative data out of it. Again, why do we need a bill to then further restrict the parameters around how those decisions are made, that's what I'm getting to the root of? It really is a valid question, part of this is a question of timing. If social work don't have the resources to offer a report in every case it was through, it would only be realistic if a bill was opposed. When and how the procurator fiscal declares that a bill was opposed is a timing issue, so they have the standard police report, the SPR, which goes to the fiscal, so the fiscal March case, the fiscal might need more information to go back to the police. This is through the timeline of the day, so it might be early afternoon before they declare a bill opposed. It then goes to the sheriff. The sheriff at that point then asks social work to provide me with bail information if I'm imposing further conditions and I need your suitability, so that might be late in the day. What the provisionist bill allows for is that early for social work to prepare their information almost in advance, and you might think, well, if we're going to prepare that information in advance alone before a bill is opposed, it's particularly helpful where a bill is opposed is declared, but where it's also helpful is to identify if people have other needs within their community, if they need support for other things, for example mental health issues. So it's no wasted effort because there is a legal requirement under the 1968 act for local authorities to provide advice guidance assistance for people in any form of detention, including police yesterday. It's not anyway a wasted effort. It allows people to have their needs assessed as they can there and then, but it also helps where. It also means it's a lawful route of that information galinti quirk, which is a key factor in this, because if it's going to be a process that we rely on, then the information sharing has to be lawful. Necessary in proportion would make it lawful information and the bill underpins that. I think actually on the face of it that probably sounds a sensible move, and if that's all the bill did, perhaps it would be less controversial. But it doesn't just do that though. It's the other side of it that is the question that we haven't got to the root of and that's why there is the need to then, if you like, raise the bar in terms of the threshold of what needs to be taken into account based on that information. So it's good that there's a route to get that in front of shares and noses on the day. It sounds like there's going to be huge resource implication off the back of that for you and others, and we've talked about that at a great length. But it still doesn't answer the question as to why then, based on that information, there's a further need to redefine the parameters around how those decisions are made. I'm not asking you to comment specifically on that. I don't actually feel the need to ask others to comment unless they want to. We'll just wave at me if you do, but I'm happy with that otherwise. Okay, thanks very much. Katie Clark, do you want to come in now? Is it not the case though that there have been many occasions in the past where there has been that social work involvement in cases with the current legislation in place? That the kind of involvement that you've spoken about at length, that's happened in the past on many occasions? Have you told me that social work has proffered information to the public sector? Yes, that is a long-standing tradition. There's obviously been a decade of massive cuts in the public sector, and that's a resource issue, but it's worked well in the past, and sheriffs, when they don't have the information, often they do ask for the information to be provided, they will continue the case before they'll make a decision if they don't feel that they've got the information that they feel would be relevant. I think that that's a really interesting point. It's the point at which a sheriff asks social work for that. There are instances where information is proffered to the court. Part of the work that I do is about information sharing, and I won't worry about data protection act 18 or UK DDPR. It's the lawful submission of that information to court. But as a matter of routine in many courts over many decades, social workers are in attendance. They talk to the police about who's in the cells, who's coming in, who's arrived yet. If the police feel that there's a vulnerable individual, they will proactively get in touch with the social worker. If the sheriff feels that there are vulnerable individuals, they will proactively ask for social work involvement. In the past—we can talk about cuts, but in the past there's often been a social worker there to fulfil that role. That has been part of the way that the criminal justice system has worked for many, many decades. I fully accept that the scale of the cuts in recent years may mean that that service has been eroded, but is it not the case that there's been many occasions in the past where the type of involvement that you're talking about has happened, has happened successfully? Yes, yes and no. What I would say is that those and a lot of these circumstances—one of the things that, for example, justice social workers are really, really good at finding workarounds for things—they are incredibly talented at that. A lot of that is on an ad hoc basis and a lot of it is unstructured. I think now we live in a different world where the legitimacy of the source of information becomes key because particularly in this case there's a differentiation between if you have a legal requirement to have that information with public task, then the consent of the individual is not required. Anything below that, which includes welfare and wellbeing, you require the free, fair and informed consent information to the person to share that information. What we've done through the information sharing agreement is we have every morning at six o'clock onwards actually, every local authority will know it's a specific set of data which includes markers like if the person has been logged in the vulnerable person's database, name address, ALC stuff like that, and if there are any particular issues around about that person, and that's a limited set of data. As an adjunct to that, where you have a situation where an individual presents the imminent risk of harm to themselves or others, then that actually transcends the data, that's a big safety. So you're saying it's a different world and there's legal barriers to enable the kind of involvement that social workers may have had in previous decades to happen now, and that's the reason that this legislation is required? I don't think it's a barrier as such. We are required that when we share information it's done lawfully, which means we need to demonstrate the necessity and the proportionality of that information. Well, in this case it's necessary because there's a legal requirement in local authorities and it's proportionate because we have a specific data set. It actually underpins that process and it will now completely allow social work staff to access that information in a lawful way and to use it in a lawful way. I'm going to put it to you that the major barrier in recent years has been lack of resource and cuts and that's been the major barrier to social workers being present in court and performing that professional role, which they've done for many, many decades, but I don't want to take up too much time. Can I just briefly go on and ask the witnesses whether they've actually looked at the provisions of the bill in relation to the public safety test, which seems to be very poorly defined? Two of the witnesses have said that they want legislative change. The issue, because they feel that the threshold is too high and that people are being remanded where they should get bail at the moment, is whether the issue is the right legislative change. The concern is that the way that the legislation has been drafted is poorly defined using a concept that has not been previously used in Scots criminal law and that there will be a lack of clarity in terms of what that means and therefore whether it's actually going to mean that more people get bail or less people get bail and which kinds of individuals are more likely to get bail or not. If you don't have a view on it, there's no need to respond, but if I could ask maybe Keith first and then the other two witnesses, if that's something they've actually looked at and have a view on? The answer is yes, yes, we have looked to it. Interestingly, there is a group looking at that very issue just now, falling on from the tenant of romance group, which was led by the Scottish Government. That was a specific issue that we were looking at. My background before I joined Community Justice Scotland is social work for decades, so I'm well-routied in using the tools of assessment and we have many of those. If, as I said in response to Jamie's question, there is no formal risk assessment in this process, if we wanted that to be the case, then we would need to think about how we would do that within the time span that's allowed, which is the same day, which is just impossible to do. There's no mention of risk assessment in the bill, but I've heard very clearly what you're saying. Susanna, I don't know if there's any points you'd want to make in relation to those issues and in terms of the actual drafting of the legislation, whether that's the change that's needed, whether that's something that you've actually really looked at properly or would be something that you wouldn't necessarily have a view on, and it would be the overriding policy implications that you'd be interested in. In terms of the public safety test of itself, I don't have a view on that to the in-depth, as you'd be looking for. I'd leave that to my colleagues generally speaking. In terms of the aims of the legislation from a mental health perspective, it boils down to information sharing, communication, filling the gaps in sufficient resources. There's been many, many different things. I'm sure that the panel has heard through submissions and through people like myself coming along. We are here today in terms of the special legislation that offers a way forward. On that basis, we do support the bill, but if you want me to look further at the public safety test, I can certainly look at that and provide a written submission to require it. I think that it's going to end up in the courts. It's a legal issue, and I quite understand that people think that the system doesn't work and we need to make changes, but what the committee is obviously looking at is whether those are the changes that are going to deliver. I don't know if Sharon has got any points that she'd want to make. From a social work Scotland point of view, we would agree that the numbers of people who actually present risks to public safety are likely to be pretty small, but to accurately identify those people, it needs to be based on a risk assessment, and for just the social work to deliver on that, it would be a resource issue. Thank you. That's helpful. Thank you very much. That's very much. Rona, you want to come in, and then I'd quite like questioning to move on to issues around release from custody. I just wanted to go back to the issue of women in custody. It's an area that I'm particularly focused on. I'd like to ask Suzanne, Sharon and then Keith. I know that this is a very broad question, but I'd just be interested in your response. Do you think that this bill will bring about the necessary changes? Most women in remander custody, as you said, shouldn't be anywhere near a prison. It would be a fantastic outcome if the bill could facilitate keeping them out of prison. Do you think that it would, albeit with the necessary resources and inter-agency management, help the situation of keeping women out of custody or remand? As you have highlighted, if the adequate and appropriate infrastructure is around the provisions of the bill, there is a likelihood of success, particularly for women. As we have found, we did a report in 2021, particularly around women in prisons. Some positive changes have been made, but we still remain in that position where many women are being remandied when, in actual fact, we would never receive a custodial sentence in any event. We are where we are in terms of the bill. There are various things that have been put in place previously. If they had worked, I do not think that we would be here today. However, however, they have not in this bill appears to, with all the caveats of everything being in place, implementation gap being filled, et cetera. If that is in place, then there is a chance of success. It is about garriffs not having hands tied behind their back in terms of the options in the information for them to make that decision. If the bill can achieve less women on remand or less women receiving a custodial sentence, it has got to be a good thing. However, we need to ask with a view to what else is going to be in place. A woman who presents in the criminal justice system comes with multiple complex problems. There was some interesting research done on making the point that 78 per cent of women in custody had a brain injury, for instance, often related to domestic abuse. There are really some complex issues, but the damage that is done when women are imprisoned—whether it is remand or a short-term prison sentence—is the impact on their life, their parenting, family life, trauma. Anything that can be done to reduce that has got to be worth at least considering. The approach to it needs to be—I do not think that any one organisation has got the answer to it, so I think that collaboration with the third sector and looking at the role of mentoring is really important in working with women, because we know within, for instance, SHINE and other voluntary through-care services that women comment very positively on the impact of services like that. I would have none more to add to what my colleagues have said. I think that they have hit the nail in the head in terms of—and it is very individualised, but we need to be aware that the complexity that women in the justice system have, and particularly that aspect that SHINE related about trauma, but beyond that I would have nothing more to add to it. I wonder if I can just come back to you, Suzanne, just from your position within the Mental Welfare Commission. The committee is aware that a recent report published by the Commission included consideration of arrangements around release from prison, and I would like to ask what you found, if you could just expand a little bit more on what those findings were, and whether or not you feel the proposals in the bill, the bail and release bill, would contribute to addressing the problems that you identified? Thank you. We published a report. We visited every prison in Scotland late last year and published a report in April this year. The headline from that report was that prisons are under resourced, essentially. In terms of liberation from prison, you are right that we made recommendations around that, because what we find is that there is a varied picture across Scotland, particularly with medications, access to community mental health services, and it all came down, an awful lot, it came down to post codes, where from psychiatrists, where from individuals, we heard from medical staff and prison staff themselves. Links to community were broken, and without a post code it was really, really difficult for any services to undertake any cohesive links to the community. We found a small number of our respondents were on remand, with little or no evidence of release plans in place. One of the things that we would suggest strongly is that release starts from admission to custody, in which whether that is on remand, for other reasons, the sheriff decides that the remand should take place, or whether that is through sentencing. We heard from prison psychiatrists and healthcare staff that liberation from court, and there is a provision in the bill around Friday release, but liberation from court is a significant challenge, because there is no notice given to any services to allow the arrangements to be made for any kind of through care, once a psychiatrist describes the whole situation as chaotic. We clearly have recommended a cohesive whole system collaborative approach from start to through care, and that keeps going. It is to maximise that the underlying purpose is for the support of vulnerable individuals, notwithstanding that there is an offence being committed, etc. It is to maximise the distance, maximise people's mental health and wellbeing, and reduce the risk of the revolving door in and out of prison. However, it needs to be a whole system joined up approach. We had suggested consideration of a more consistent use of the care programme approach, which involves everybody around that table. In terms of the individuals themselves, the prison service, the psychiatry community provision, the third sector family, everybody would be around that table. There is a resources issue here, notwithstanding that either, but the evidence that we had during what we observed was that when the care programme approach was implemented appropriately, there were positive outcomes. That is one of the things that we have recommended right across the board. That is very informative. You will be aware that the bill seeks to develop personal release plans for prisoners, so the comments that you have made around that are very helpful. I am going to hand over to Jamie Macleod to come in and then Russell, I think that you have another question. Jamie, just in the spirit of the question. Mine is just a brief supplementary to Rona Mackay's line of questioning around women in custody. I listened carefully to what you had to say on the issue and it struck me that the way to perhaps deal with some of that would be through the Scottish Sentencing Council rather than through new legislation. I just wondered if you felt that there was a bigger or a better role that they could play around sentencing guidelines and the way that they had quite a prolific effect on the changes to how sentencing guidelines were changed for under 25 roles in Scotland, whatever your views on that. That research and academic research that they undertook formed a part of that decision making. Could they do the same for sentencing guidelines or any potential changes to women, which would then allow judges and sheriffs to make perhaps different decisions based on revised guidelines rather than through the introduction of new legislation, as we are considering today? Sorry, you are on mute, Sharon. Can you hear me now? I can, thank you. I think that certainly having sentencing guidelines specific to the profile and the needs of women taking account of what we have learned over the years about a gendered approach and the impact for women in the criminal justice system would be welcome, but taking account of things like trauma, et cetera, but whether in itself it would be enough because it is sentencing guidelines and that is the function, whether that alone would be sufficient to achieve the aim of seeing less women remandied or less women doing short-term prison sentences. I am not sure in itself that it would be enough, but it may be needs further thought. Thank you. That has perfectly answered the question. I guess that the premise of it being that, can you change this through guidelines rather than statutory changes that are perhaps a bit more forceful or permanent, if you like? Are we exhausting all opportunities around guidelines first before we take bigger steps, was the premise of that, but I think that you have answered that. Thank you very much. In the final page of your submission, Keith, you talked about the expanded role of the criminal justice social work, the early workload increase, hugely if this bill goes through, as is both in terms of bail, pretrial, pre-release and release and onwards indeed. You go on to say that it is not yet known whether criminal justice social work will be part of the proposed new national care service, which is already mired in a significant amount of controversy. I suppose that two questions really, one is, does anyone know how much this will cost, all this additional criminal justice social work will cost? And secondly, is it the case that this should perhaps be given time to bed in and develop before we even think about incorporating it into a national care service or whether indeed the national care service should come first and that these needs are factored into that? In terms of the cost, the answer to that is no. In reality, we don't actually know much this will cost anyway because we don't have, for example, the unit costs of it. We have an amount of money that is allocated for, for example, a CPO or a diversion case. So, whatever funding is allocated to these activities just now, it will be that, times whatever, the following. Given the size of your remand and the difficulties that we know that remand brings, no standard, it's necessary in some cases. I think the argument for investment in it is cogent, whatever it costs as opposed to, quote, the cost of no doing it. So I think that I will bring increased costs, increased costs for no just the provision of that facility at court, but it will be ancillary like, for example, the training that Community Justice Scotland offers to the sector between the issues and that. So there are a number of complexities. Sorry, should it be part of the national care service? In respect to that, there is a group that has been formed to look specifically at that issue. It's been the reparal process with children, families and justice. The Scottish Government led group is commission research to look at the whole question of what is it that social work, justice social work does within a community justice landscape and its interaction with other partners. The answer to your question is no decisions have been made yet. The point of purpose of that group is to form a recommendation in 2023 that will go to, there's no chance of appraisal being created just now, that eventually will go to the cabinet secretary for a decision on that. I think perhaps Sharon, you would like to come in on this one. In relation to the cost, we do have a group within Social Work Scotland trying to update unit costs because it's probably, what we do have, is probably pretty out of date when you take account of the cost of living and inflationary increases. So there is a group actively looking more generally across justice social work at costs. The other resourcing issue within all of this is the workforce issues. There's a national recruitment and retention problem, so even if we had a bag full of money, we also need to find competent workers and paraprofessional staff as well. That is also something that we're grappling with. We published a report called Setting the Bar, and it's just highlighting those issues about the views of social workers as a profession and what they're dealing with in workloads, etc. Just similar to what Keith was saying, I'm part of the reference group that is looking at whether justice should be in or out of the national care service, but it's just at a really early stage at this point in time. Okay, thanks very much. Fulton MacGregor, you would like to come in. Yeah, thanks, convener. Good afternoon to the panel. Thanks very much for your evidence. So far, I was going to ask the same question as Russell Finlay did, but it now ends up being a supplementary. Given that this bill, in the process of the national care service bill, is going through at the same time, how does that impact planning? Obviously, we've heard there that recommendations and decisions are yet to be made about whether justice social work would be part of the national care service, but I don't know if you were listening to the earlier panel and some of the questions that I myself and others asked. That panel was about the impact on social work staff and how planning can be made around that. So, how does that impact planning just now? It is planning for the social work service aspect of this bill, just on the current situation, on the current setup, or is there a current plan, a parallel plan, in case it was to go over to the national care service, which would obviously make it a more uniform approach across the country? Who would you like to come in first, Fulton? I'm happy to answer that with the answer being, I don't know. I think there is so little detail round about what the NCS might look like beyond a number of care boards. The nitty gritty of that will determine, for example, if you move the legislative requirement, for example, for a court report, that currently lies with the local authority. If you are then to move that service to a care board, for example, those are the technical issues that would need to be resolved to make that happen. I think that in the interim, and it is one of the questions that the group that is analysing it and the reference group is looking at, actually, whether social work, just as social work, is in or out of the NCS. It's more about the longer term, how do we improve the outcome for people? In some respects, it's a structural question whether they are in the NCS or not. The bigger question is that all of the issues that the committee has spoken about are about bail, about remand, all of the early release, all of those will still be issues whether just as social work is in the NCS or out of the NCS. I think that your point is right to look at what would that mean if just as social work were in NCS. Unfortunately, at this point, there is no enough solid detail of what the NCS and just as social work in the NCS would look at equally. There's not any detail about what that would look like if just as social work were not within the NCS. Thanks for that, Keith. I'm already coming to you as well. Is the planning around the implementation of the bill just now based on what Keith said there? Is it planning for it based on the current justice model, the current community justice model? I guess what I would say to that is that there's some dual planning going ahead. There's an awareness that the national care service may or may not happen for justice but trying to anticipate that the bill might become an act. Probably the biggest concern is in principle across social work. They would welcome just the whole principle that less people end up on remands or doing short-term prison sentences or there's better planning for people coming out of custody. But the big concern are the ones that I've mentioned around workflow, force and resourcing of it. There is some work, as I was saying. There's been some research commission trying to look at what we do about workforce, how we can encourage students to have a career in social work and what we can do to work collaboratively with the third sector to deliver on some of the outcomes from the bill should it become an act of Parliament. There's certainly regular on-going discussion across the justice standing committee and trying to plan for what that might look like, but there's some things we have limited control over. If we don't have enough social workers, we have to make decisions about what the priorities are. Okay, thanks for that, convener. I'm aware of time, so unless M Dales wants to come in, I'm quite happy to leave it there. Okay, thanks very much. I'm just watching the time and I'm going to just ask a final question, and I'd like to put it to all three of you because it's something that we haven't covered this morning, I don't think, anyway. It's around the proposals on minimum standards for through-care. So obviously there is a proposal that that be developed within the provisions of the bill. So I'm just a very simple question whether or not you would be supportive of that provision. So I'll come to Keith, Sharon and then Suzanne. Briefly, convener, and the answer to that question is yes, the caveat that goes with it is many of these things. It's not just about the standards, it's then about how they're implemented, then monitored, and feedback for improvement. Broadly, we would welcome standards for agencies involved in it. Great, thanks very much, Keith. Sharon? Yes, really the same response that setting minimum standards is really welcome. It helps with consistency of services, so it shouldn't matter where you are up and down the country that you can expect the same standard of service. I know there's work going on within the Scottish Government at the moment to be looking at rewriting standards, like through-care for instance, so it would be welcome. Thanks very much, and Suzanne, just finally a word from you. Yeah, I would certainly echo my colleagues sentiments and we would welcome standards for all the reasons that they have set out. We would also suggest a reference specifically within those standards to mental health services and access to. Thank you. That's just almost us, we're almost out of time, so it just remains for me to thank you all for attending today. That's been a really useful session and any outstanding points that members have or that you feel that the committee should pick up, then we can write on that. Yes, of course, Jamie. I do. Thank you for your forbearance. I just wanted to make this point while we're on public, because I know there's a live panel, but we've had two other panels of the nine witnesses that we took evidence from today, and it's not criticism, please don't take it as this way. We were only one who responded to the call for evidence from the Finance and Public Administration Committee when they were analysing the financial memorandum of this piece of legislation. That ran last year from July to September. I appreciate some organisations, maybe we weren't even aware of it because it's often difficult to uncover these, but given what the evidence we have heard today around some of the work that's on-going, around the potential financial and resource effect that this bill would have on your own organisations, we can only use what we have in front of us when we repair our stage 1 report. I would ask all nine organisations, with the exception of Glasgow Health and Social Care Partnership, to respond to the consultation. However, if others have any financial analysis or concerns, please raise that with the committee in writing at your earliest opportunity, so we can conclude that in our stage 1 report, because without that information we can't comment on it. Okay, thank you all very much for attending. That concludes the public part of our meeting. Next week we'll be hearing from the Minister for Mental Well-being and Social Care as part of our scrutiny of the National Care Service Bill. We'll now move into private session and that's for the final item of our agenda. Thank you.