Justice Committee

Meeting date: Tuesday, October 1, 2019

Official Report 634KB pdf

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Contingency Planning (Brexit)

Item 3 is an evidence session with senior officers from Police Scotland on their contingency planning in response to the UK’s departure from the European Union. The committee has received written submissions from the Cabinet Secretary for Justice, the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service and the Scottish Prison Service. I refer members to paper 3, which is a paper by the clerks, and paper 4, which is a private paper.

I welcome our witnesses to the meeting, who are Deputy Chief Constable Will Kerr and Detective Chief Superintendent Patrick Campbell of the specialist crime division, both of Police Scotland. I thank them for providing written evidence in advance of our meeting. That includes a report on Brexit planning that Police Scotland previously provided to the Scottish Police Authority board and has now submitted to the committee, which is extremely helpful.

DCC Kerr, I understand that you would like to make a short opening statement. Is that correct?

With your indulgence, convener.

Good morning, members of the committee. Thank you very much for the opportunity to come and speak to you today. At the outset, I make the fairly obvious point that, although there is a complex set of planning assumptions around what has become known as Brexit, and operational plans exist to mitigate the risks that are associated with it, there are still a lot of unknowns, so it is very difficult for us to predict all the scenarios that we would like to. Not being able to predict everything with the degree of certainty that we would like is an uncomfortable position for us in policing.

I have three very brief observations, which I hope will set out the general context. First, Police Scotland’s planning for and operational response to Brexit has highlighted the benefits of having a single national service. The ability to plan across the country, and to set up intelligence support provisions and the operational assets that we need—including a force reserve of 300 officers that can move flexibly to any part of the country, supported by local, visible community teams that are still strong—has been a bonus for us over the past six to 12 months as we have been planning for Brexit. It has given us capacity and flexibility. One of the biggest operational risks that we have—not least at this time of year, as we enter the winter season—is what we call operational concurrence, which just means a lot of things happening at once. I would be very happy to talk about those risks in detail later in the meeting if members wish me to do so.

We also recognise the public concern that clearly exists around the UK’s exit from the EU. As you highlighted in your introduction, convener, every month, we go to our accountability body, the SPA, to talk as openly as we can about what the police service is doing, our concerns, what we are planning and the mitigations that we are putting in place to protect communities across Scotland.

Secondly, I am now in my 31st year in policing and have been very fortunate to have worked in many different parts of these islands, including in Northern Ireland and London, before I came to Police Scotland. I can say, without hesitation, that the partnership arrangements in Scotland are more mature than the ones that I have experienced in other jurisdictions. Those include the strategic resilience partnership that is chaired by the Deputy First Minister, the local resilience partnerships and the arrangements and relationships among local authorities, police and other category 1 responders under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004.

That becomes important as we try to manage the relationship between operational plans and practical delivery. It is easy to have a plan on a piece of paper; it is a lot more difficult to ensure that it works in practice. Those plans have been regularly road tested over the past six months. The multi-agency co-ordination centre, which is housed in a police facility at Bilston Glen, is a very good example in that context, and I would be happy to talk about that in detail if members want me to.

Finally, one of our biggest concerns is the unpredictability of the environment that we currently face in respect of the reaction of the public to rapidly evolving and changing events. In that rapidly changing environment, words and behaviour matter, and the importance of temperate and responsible language and behaviour from people in positions of civic leadership—politicians and anybody who has leadership responsibility in Scotland and more widely—cannot be overstated. People are entitled to express strongly held views, and it is obvious that there is a range of strongly held views on Brexit. Police Scotland will protect the right to express strongly held views, but those views must be expressed peacefully and lawfully.

I end with that obvious point because some of the issues that we have seen recently and some of the language that has been used make it more difficult to police the environment. It is very important that we have an open and transparent debate about that issue, as well.

We will go straight to questions.

Good morning, panel. Thank you for that update, DCC Kerr, and for your written submission, which is, as the convener said, very helpful.

I know that colleagues are going to ask about deployment. Will you set out for the committee the background to the force reserve and the number of officers involved in that, and say whether that reserve was specifically set up as a response to Brexit?

Obviously, in our planning arrangements for Brexit, we were concerned about the increased likelihood of disruption or disorder—I hope that there will not be the latter—and the need to have a flexible asset that we could move about the country as and when we needed to do so. Therefore, I decided earlier in the year to create a force reserve, which has 300 police officers who are formed into 12 public support units. Those are self-contained public order units that can be moved flexibly across the country as the need arises and they are forward based in the east, the west and the north of the country at Jackton, Redford barracks, Oakley, Dundee and Aberdeen. I stood them up in February and March this year and again with effect from 5 August, principally to deal with Brexit-related matters. We have not had any Brexit-specific disorder to date—thank goodness—so they have been gainfully employed carrying out a range of other duties, such as policing parades and associated issues in Govan, dealing with environmental protests and dealing with normal serious crime warrant execution. They were deployed more than 500 times in August alone—that is covered in the submission.

There is a bit of a trade-off for us, because we are abstracting from local police divisions to create a force reserve that is used to police events that we would have had to police and abstract for anyway. What we wanted in Police Scotland was the flexible facility of having a large reserve that we could move about to keep different parts of the country safe as and when the need arises. We have pushed around 120 officers out from middle and backroom functions to work in front-line policing again to try to minimise the impact of the force reserve on local police divisions.

I want to stick with John Finnie’s line of questioning, if I may. You talked about 500 deployments of the reserve in August. Can you say at this stage whether any of those deployments were Brexit related?

Only tangentially and not directly. There was a range of other duties. I suppose that the difficulty at the moment is that there is a growing range of protest activity across the country, and issues can sometimes be conflated. We end up with environmental protests, protests for and against independence, and protests on a range of other issues, and there may sometimes be some protesters on Brexit-related issues in those groups. We police the event, but it is sometimes hard to discern, decipher and disaggregate what the cause or the issue is. Sometimes that is more obvious than it is at other times. However, the straight answer to the question is that there has been very little Brexit-related demand for the force reserve to date, but it is there as an asset in case we need it.

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Should Brexit result in the force reserve being used specifically to deal with related incidents, what would be the impact on day-to-day policing across the country?

We have been very concerned about that issue. As I indicated to John Finnie, we have been pushing out some officers from middle and backroom functions to support local policing. I cannot in all honesty sit here and say that, if there were a protracted period of disorder and disruption, that would not impact on local policing. Of course there would be an impact—common sense tells us that.

By setting up the force reserve, we are trying to get ahead of the curve and manage that resource so that, with a single central command and control function—we have set up a multi-agency co-ordination centre at Bilston Glen—we can move that asset about the country as and when we see fit. We have already seen a lot of operational dividends from that approach, whether in relation to extension rebellion protests in Edinburgh or in dealing with parade-related disorder in Glasgow in the past couple of weeks. There has been significant operational benefit from having that function available.

Good morning. I will follow up Liam Kerr’s line of questioning on Brexit. DCC Kerr alluded to recent sectarian incidents in Glasgow. It has been suggested that Brexit is acting as a catalyst to fuel such behaviour. Terrorism expert Kevin Toolis said:

“Somehow Brexit has unleashed these forces that were dormant. The tragedy of Brexit is that we have lost a national consensus.”

What communication has Police Scotland had with colleagues in Northern Ireland about that issue?

A lot. I spent the first 27 years of my policing career in Northern Ireland, and I still have a lot of professional contacts in the country.

There is always a risk at a time of political uncertainty and fragility that those at the extremes will look to exploit that situation, and we have seen evidence of that recently. We established at the outset and are still maintaining an EU exit intelligence cell, so that we can do what you would expect us to do on your behalf, such as open-source monitoring, looking at social media commentary and looking at some of the groups that may be on the extreme fringes and may be more inclined to get involved in disorder. Part of that intelligence overview and work involves reaching out daily to colleagues in Northern Ireland to see whether there is any associated risk across the Irish Sea.

There are some risks. I suppose that we could describe them as proxy symptoms. A rise in hate crime would be one example. We have not seen that in Scotland, unlike our colleagues in England and Wales. We are grateful that that is the case, and we are working very hard to maintain that position.

Frankly—I hope that this gives you a sense of perspective in answer to your question—it is not the high-end disorder that concerns me most. I hope that I will not be proved wrong about that but, if that happens, we will deal with it, as you would expect. Rather, it is the low-end disruption that might come from people being genuinely annoyed at large queues at the borders and ports. If an image of an empty shelf in a supermarket goes viral, all of a sudden, in two to three days, we could end up with protests or concerns expressed at supermarkets about food or fuel shortages. That stuff is incredibly resource intensive for us to police. That is not high-end disorder; rather, it is just about people who are genuinely worried or concerned. Social media aids that—flash to bang sometimes takes only 12 to 24 hours. We are more concerned about that aspect than we are about anything else.

As politicians, we have a responsibility to conduct ourselves appropriately and to use responsible language, which is an issue that you have mentioned. On that point, only yesterday, Conservative Party chairman James Cleverly said that Brexit is a “warning shot” and argued that “democracy breaks” if votes are not respected. You will be aware that the Prime Minister has been criticised previously for his use of language. He has accused those who support remaining in the European Union of betraying the people; he has also described those who are trying to block Brexit as being surrender operatives and the Benn legislation as the “surrender act”. Is that dangerous political rhetoric stirring civil unrest in the background? Is it feeding into the narrative of the low-level behaviour that you have mentioned? Is that spilling out into greater disruption more broadly?

I will let politicians deal with the political commentary of politicians about other politicians. However, I reinforce what I said at the beginning: we all have a responsibility to use temperate and responsible language. At a time of heightened emotional and political tension, words and behaviour matter. They have an impact on the behaviour of people on the street, and we all have to exercise restraint, caution and responsibility, to make sure that those words do not manifest in behaviour and are not used as an excuse or justification by people in the extremes who are looking to engage in violence or disorder.

Earlier, you touched on the testing and exercising of command, control and response arrangements with resilience partnerships. Will you expand on that? Who is involved, and what scenarios are being played out at training and exercise events?

I am happy to give the committee a bit of flavour on that. As I said at the beginning of my remarks, it is hard to predict what might happen under every Brexit scenario. Almost daily, just when we think that we could not be more surprised, a different set of circumstances arises. In my opening comments, I mentioned the relationship between the strategic resilience partnership and the local resilience partnerships in Scotland. A sub-group of the strategic resilience partnership deals specifically with co-ordination and partnership arrangements among the agencies to which Mr Finnie has referred. It is chaired by Assistant Chief Constable Mark Williams, who is one of Police Scotland’s most senior officers, and in the past six months has been working on a range of tools, from risk mitigation templates to preparedness checklists, which are updated regularly.

Last night, I was reading through the detail from the EU sub-group. It has been testing and exercising in five areas, including information flows, communications and reporting, to ensure that we are sharing information on a timely basis. The value of the multi-agency co-ordination centre is that everybody is housed in the same place, so they can just talk across their desks rather than having to rely on information technology systems that might not be mutually compliant.

We are looking at the impact of concurrent risks alongside EU exit activation—that is the sort of language that is being used around operational risk mitigation at the moment—because we are worried about lots of things happening at once. We are entering the winter, when there might be bad weather or we could end up with an outbreak of seasonal or pandemic flu. We are also coming up to Halloween, which has associated policing challenges. All those things could be happening at the same time as the UK’s exit from the EU, so they are all concurrent risks that add up to a significant compound risk. We might have to involve health and social care partnerships to ensure that we can protect the vulnerable—not least in rural areas. There will be consideration of the recovery phase and also simple awareness sessions for partners, senior officers and local authorities. Therefore a range of testing is going on in October. For example, on 3 October Scottish Government exercise crossbill will test policy areas, interaction with the Scottish Government resilience room—SGoRR—and the information flow, to ensure that information would start to flow at local level. We will then go through a process of building that up through local authorities in their regions, up to Government and national level, to ensure that those systems and information flows are working as well as they can. Lots of testing is going on, but the situation is still unpredictable in parts.

I appreciate that the approach is wide ranging. Is the UK Government represented on the resilience partnership?

It is not represented on the one in Scotland but, as the committee would expect, there is a significant amount of connection and engagement with our partners south of the border. For the purposes of this meeting, I am talking specifically about Scotland’s preparations.

Are any of the UK agencies represented on that partnership?

Yes, they are. When we are dealing with health and social care arrangements there is a range of connections with down south. In policing, we have strong connections through the national police co-ordination centre—NPoCC—and we also have daily contact with our respective partners south of the border.

I ask that because there have been well-documented concerns that information has not necessarily been shared at Government level. What is the impact of that? It would surely have implications for issues such as continuity of medical supplies.

To give you the honest answer to that question, we have probably been more informed than involved in the mainstream planning assumptions at UK level. As the committee would expect, we have been much more integrated into the approach in Scotland. I say “mainstream” because we have had to reach out to policing and other colleagues in England quite a bit. At times, those assumptions have tended to be centred on London or the south of England. We have constantly had to assert and reinforce the particular needs of Scotland, which has different legal and constitutional arrangements, to ensure that whatever is put into place at UK level reflects those differences, because the assumptions have not always done so.

We have also struggled at times to get access to the more sensitive elements of those planning assumptions. Last Friday, the chief constable went to a meeting in London at the Home Office, chaired by the permanent secretary, to make that point and to assert our need to get access to all that information. He is flying out to The Hague this morning, with the director general of the National Crime Agency and the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, to make the same point. We need to assert the needs of Scotland in those planning arrangements, as well as the distinct differences that we have in this country.

So, there is a genuine concern that the dearth of that information might affect your planning and the ability to provide resilience.

I do not want to exaggerate and say that it has been a significant concern, but it has been a partial concern, not least around the availability of the more sensitive elements of those planning assumptions and how quickly we get them.

In the event of a no-deal Brexit at the end of this month, we will no longer be members of Europol and we will not have access to the European arrest warrant, which has been used successfully in the past. We have been able to arrest people within four hours in other European countries. How much of a concern is that? Is there anything that could take its place?

It is a big concern. DCS Campbell will talk you through the details.

We have concerns about contingency planning. In the event of no deal, we will lose 36 EU measures and tools. We are now planning for that with other UK law enforcement partners, and that has been on-going for the best part of 18 months. There is no doubt that we will move towards a slower, less effective, more bureaucratic process and a significant reduction in capability.

On the main headlines, the contingency processes that we have built up with our UK partners are around the loss of the European arrest warrant. Rona Mackay rightly pointed out how successful that has been in the past. In Scotland, we execute between 120 and 150 warrants per year and, throughout the UK, there are about 1,400 to 1,500 per year, so the loss of that capability is significant.

We have been working with the Crown Office, and we have built in a parallel process around the 1957 European Convention on Extradition, which gives us the power, under Interpol notices, to seek extradition. The process will be far slower than we have with the European arrest warrants. With European arrest warrants, if we put our hands on someone across EU states, it is sometimes days before we can bring them back. With the extradition process, that will take months. It will be slower and more bureaucratic, but we will still have that power. That is what we are preparing for now.

Come 31 October, we will leave Europol. We will physically leave that building and, thereafter, we will have to apply to get back in. Europol will be a significant loss. I could be underestimating the problems that that will cause us. The facility that we have at Europol, of picking up a phone and speaking to our law enforcement partners across Europe, will go. As I said, we will have to apply for re-admission to Europol. We have been told that it could take weeks or months to get back in there; if we get back in, it would be under third-country status, similar to the USA or Canada. Again, there are challenges with that.

Another concern is the loss of powers regarding Eurojust; the joint investigations that we have with some of our EU partners will fall at that stage. It is a challenging arena. We would lose access to systems and automatic processes that we have in place with our EU partners. Reduced operational consistency with EU member states is also a concern. We would have no direct access to EU intelligence systems, so we would lose the powers that we have at present.

Let us be clear: the model that we are moving towards for a no-deal scenario will significantly impact on our ability to keep the communities of Scotland safe.

That definitely sounds like a step backwards in your operational capability.

Yes.

Are you aware of any negotiations that might allow us to continue using those tools in the event of a deal—whatever that might be?

Yes. If we have a deal, there will be a transition period, so we would keep the 36 EU tools until December 2020, which would give us more time to negotiate the additional processes that we might need to put in place.

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That is helpful.

Are there any ways that the issues that you have outlined, which sound extensive, can be mitigated in the event of no deal?

Yes. As I said, with our UK law enforcement partners, we have built in processes around contingencies for the loss of all the measures, so there are fallbacks in respect of those measures. However, they are more bureaucratic and far slower, and that is one of the great challenges. One fallback is to use Interpol, so we have put an officer from Police Scotland into Interpol, to give us that additional capacity across Europe as we move forward.

That example is helpful, because the situation sounded bleak and we do not want to be alarmist. We will not be left in a vacuum. There is something, although it is not as good as we have at present.

DCS Campbell, what you are saying is concerning and bleak. Are you saying that, in 30 days’ time, in the event of a no-deal Brexit, the ability to arrest criminals within hours will go?

Yes. For example, we are looking for a number of criminals across Europe who are wanted on European arrest warrants. With the Crown Office, we have built in a parallel process around the Extradition Act 2003, which allows us still to put hands on and arrest those individuals. The process of bringing them back to Scotland will be more troublesome and bureaucratic, so it will be a lot slower than it is now. For example, with a European arrest warrant, once we arrest people, they are returned to the UK in about 10 days. We anticipate that that will become months.

That is concerning.

Specifically for Scotland, do you agree that the scenarios set out in the UK Government’s operation yellowhammer document are the worst case?

There has been a lot of commentary around the operation yellowhammer planning assumptions. They are not predictions. They are based on the worst plausible—not the most likely—manifestation of risks. That might seem like a semantic distinction but it is an important one, not least when it comes to reassuring the public, when they read the list of things that might happen. However, those things might happen, because they are possible.

For policing purposes, we used the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 to make our definition of a major incident or emergency. We road test scenarios with partners, to make sure that we can respond quickly and effectively in communities across the country.

Do we think that all those things are likely to happen? No—but some of them might. Therefore, we are trying to mitigate those risks as well as we currently can. As I have said a couple of times, our biggest operational risk is for lots of those things to happen at once—the so-called concurrent risk scenario. It is not a great time to be leaving, because it will be winter. A range of other challenges come with that, such as Halloween. We talked about seasonal or pandemic flu and a range of other on-going policing issues.

We have been trying to mitigate those issues by uplifting our international bureau. Patrick Campbell has talked about some of the tools that we will use. The situation is deeply concerning to us. If people have committed offences against Scottish citizens, we want to get them back into this jurisdiction quickly. We have had to more or less triple the size of our international bureau to more than 40 officers, in order to make sure that we can share intelligence in a timely manner. We have added 25 per cent to our border policing command—another 60 officers—to make sure that we can control the flow or disruption at ports and airports. Those are officers who would have been doing other things, whom we have had to put into those teams in order to mitigate the risks.

We are trying to be sensible. We are working hard to identify a range of risks and work with partners to mitigate them but, if a number of them happen at once and over a protracted period, that will be a challenge for us.

It sounds as though you are working hard to put in plans, in a situation that is free flowing and not of your making. When the plausible worst-case scenarios for the operation yellowhammer document were being developed, was Police Scotland consulted ?

As I outlined to John Finnie, the honest answer is that we were informed but not consulted about the UK mainstream planning assumptions. As I said, we are closely involved with the Scottish Government planning assumptions that fell out of those broader UK planning assumptions. We got them. As I said, we are concerned that we are not getting access to some of the sensitive tiers of information and, as you would expect, we are pushing hard to make sure that we get that access. In Scotland, the relationships that we have with the partners is as mature as I have seen it in any other place, and I say that after 30 years of doing this job.

In relation to operation yellowhammer, competing demands on Government agencies could put enforcement and response capabilities at risk. You have covered some of the borders issues but what is Police Scotland’s role and what does it envisage doing in response to the examples that have been raised, including illegal fishing and, more generally, smuggling?

Over the past months, there has been a lot of discussion about the fisheries issue. We have to be pragmatic about what we can realistically do 12 miles off the shore. We are working closely with Marine Scotland on sensible risk assessments and deployment protocols. From 21 October, Marine Scotland is putting a full-time liaison officer into the multi-agency control centre that we set up, so that we can share information and talk to each other as and when we need to. However, as far as fisheries specialist capability is concerned, we have also made it clear that we do not anticipate that we will be putting police officers on trawlers that are 10 or 12 miles off the shore—in the North Sea in November, that is not proportionate or practical. However, we will have to manage those events somehow, not least if somebody reports crimes to us when they come back to shore. A lot of discussion is going on at the moment. In some of those areas, we are trying to balance aspiration with realism.

You talked about the strain on existing resources. The size of our prison population is an area where the strain is already becoming unbearable. I suspect that custody capacity is also under serious strain. In relation to the custody capacity and the knock-on through the courts and the prison estate, what assessment has been done of the potential impact of some of the disorder that you have talked about?

Over the past couple of months, there have been a lot of discussions, led by the policing division of the Scottish Government, with other criminal sector partners, not least the Crown Office and the Scottish Prison Service, about what we do with people in the advent of mass arrest. We have detailed comprehensive contingency plans in policing, with a menu of tactical options. If we end up with a surge of hundreds of arrests, either planned or unplanned—spontaneous and on the scene—we can move our cellular custody provision around the country. There are things that we can do to mitigate the risk.

Obviously, at the moment, there is a significant issue with the prison population in Scotland. If we end up with hundreds of arrests, we will have to look at alternative judicial measures to make sure that we do not exacerbate that problem. A range of considerations are being discussed at those meetings to make sure that we can mitigate that.

I say all that to reassure you that discussions are taking place on what we can sensibly do to manage that risk if it arises. I also need to be honest; if we end up in a position in which there is protracted disruption and disorder and we make hundreds of arrests, of course that will affect somewhere else in the rest of the system. There is no way that we can avoid that. To an extent, we can mitigate the risk but if we end up with a significant period of disorder that we do not foresee and that intelligence does not indicate is likely, it will have an impact on normal business.

However, you believe that, across the country, there is sufficient custody capacity, although individuals could potentially be moved around and accommodated far from where the arrest has taken place.

Yes, absolutely. We will have to be pragmatic about it.

I would not expect you to speak for the Crown Office, but from your discussions with it, is there an expectation that there would be diversions away from custody for the simple fact that there is not at the moment the capacity in the prison estate to cope with any further bulge?

Absolutely. Those are exactly the conversations that are going on with the Crown Office at the moment: how can we sensibly deal with the full spectrum of disposals for people involved in low-end disruption or disorder? There may be alternative disposals to prosecution that we can apply, which do not involve custody. As you can imagine, we are having those conversations with the Crown Office every week.

DCC Kerr, the committee is fully aware of the steps that Police Scotland has taken and we understand some of the background to the centralisation of custody facilities. Are you looking at the reuse of discarded premises as a contingency measure? There are a number of locations that housed prisoners, historically, although it is more centralised now. Is that one of the options that you are looking at?

Redundant capacity will definitely be one of the tactical options that we will have to dip down into if we end up with hundreds of arrests. That poses its own challenges around health and safety provisions and full compliance with recent HMICS inspection recommendations on custody provision. However, as I have said a number of times, if we end up with hundreds of arrests we will just have to be pragmatic. The short answer to John Finnie’s question is yes; if we end up in that scenario, the tactical options include using some redundant estate, but only what is up to a sufficient level and quality that we will not breach any health and safety rules.

That is reassuring.

Are you taking advice from HMICS and human rights experts about the use of that redundant estate? Nobody underestimates the challenge that you will face in dealing with potentially serious situations if there is an upsurge in civil unrest. However, the concern is that, if you hold people in custody in facilities that fall below a certain standard, any likelihood of you taking forward cases in due course will be undermined. Are you taking that advice?

I am not aware of the detail, although I am sure that we are taking that advice. I can give you an absolute assurance that we will not house detained persons in sub-standard accommodation where there is any risk to them.

It is worth saying that the committee received a submission from the COPFS and the prison service that looks at the various scenarios and their impact on our courts and prisons. The committee has found that very helpful.

James Kelly has our last question.

Police Scotland stated that £8 million has been spent so far on Brexit. Has that money been allocated to the Police Scotland budget by the Government specifically for Brexit preparations or has it been found from other areas of the budget?

The figure is £8.9 million, as of yesterday. It has not been specifically allocated to the Police Scotland budget, but we have a welcome undertaking from the Scottish Government that it will pay up to £17 million of additional costs incurred by Police Scotland for Brexit-related duties in this financial year.

Which areas of the budget has that £8.9 million been drawn down from, given that you have not been given a specific Brexit allocation at this time?

It has not been drawn down from any other area of the budget. What is happening is that it is growing the deficit this year. Effectively, we have a post-dated cheque from the Scottish Government. We can spend up to £17 million on Brexit-related duties this year, if we need to, and the Scottish Government will cover that bill.

In your response to John Finnie’s first question on the force reserve, you explained its establishment and the rationale behind it and said that, in recent times, it has been deployed in response to Extinction Rebellion protests, other environmental protests and sectarian protests. Is the force reserve establishment and operation included in the calculation of the £8.9 million? To some extent, it would seem counterintuitive to allocate that to Brexit, certainly at this stage, given the deployments over August that you have talked about.

12:00  

Absolutely. That is a really important question and I am grateful to you for asking it. There can be some confusion around that issue and we rightly have the discussion every month with the Scottish Police Authority.

As part of our deficit reduction plan that was agreed through the Scottish Police Authority with the Scottish Government a couple of years ago, it was intended that we would have to reduce capacity in terms of pure numbers by 100 last year and 300 this year, in order to meet the budget deficit reduction target. The chief constable rightly made the decision that, if he dropped the number of officers by 400, he would not have the operational capacity to maintain a resilient police service that would be able to respond to the needs of Scotland during uncertain times and respond to the various challenges and risks that come with Brexit. He therefore made a decision not to downsize Police Scotland by those 400 officers and it is essentially the cost of doing so that has accrued to £8.9 million to date. The cost of those 400 officers annualised over this financial year adds up to about £17 million. Effectively, the cost is the cost of maintaining the capacity in Police Scotland to respond quickly and flexibly to the needs of Scotland as and when there is a risk associated with Brexit.

Of course, in the interim, and by starting up the force reserve, the police are engaged in lots of other duties across the country. However, the cost is a capacity cost.

That concludes our questions. There is obviously anxiety about what is going to take place, and I thank the witnesses for the measured way in which they have given the reassurance that every possible scenario is being looked at. That is very helpful for the general public, as well as the committee.

We will suspend briefly to allow the witnesses to leave.

12:02 Meeting suspended.  

12:02 On resuming—