Justice Committee

Meeting date: Tuesday, November 6, 2018

Official Report 777KB pdf

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Management of Offenders (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1

The next agenda item is consideration of the reports from HM inspectorate of constabulary and HM inspectorate of prisons on home detention curfews, and also the response so far from the Scottish Government in the form of the ministerial statement. I refer members to paper 4, which is a note by the clerks.

Before I ask members for their views on the reports, I want to put on record the condolences of the committee to the McClelland family. I also want to note that the committee paused its consideration of the Management of Offenders (Scotland) Bill to await the publication of those two independent reports. We will shortly consider how we wish to proceed. In the meantime, I invite members to comment on the issues that are raised in the two independent reports and in the response in the chamber from the Cabinet Secretary for Justice.

We are agreed that a number of issues are raised in the two reports. It is our intention to discuss in private session how they will affect our work.

Thank you for extending the condolences of the committee, which is entirely appropriate. It strikes me that there is a good deal of substance to both reports. A great deal of it does not necessarily point in the direction of legislative changes but, nevertheless, it involves policy and practice changes that this committee needs to keep an eye on in the months ahead.

Where there are proposed changes, which the Cabinet Secretary for Justice has referred to, there is time to factor those into our consideration of the legislation. My preference would probably be to do that ahead of stage 1, if we are to take evidence, rather than at stage 2, when we could maybe find ourselves running out of time. It was absolutely right for us to stall the process. That decision has been justified by the detail of the reports coming forward.

I associate myself with Liam McArthur’s comments. He is exactly right.

We were very mindful of the sensitivities around this issue.

I agree with everything that my colleagues have said. It was right that we stopped the process in order to get this information. The Cabinet Secretary for Justice has said on the record that he will accept all the recommendations. We have an opportunity in the legislation to try to make some of these changes. I think that, at stage 1, we should take evidence from the authors of the reviews and then think about how the bill can be amended at stage 2.

I think that members of the public and the McClelland family can be assured that we will make sure that the stage 1 report is the best that it possibly can be in light of the two reviews and the ministerial statement.

That concludes the public part of today’s meeting. Our next meeting will be on 13 November, when we will continue with our post-legislative scrutiny of the Police and Fire Reform (Scotland) Act 2012.

12:20 Meeting continued in private until 12:43.