Official Report 589KB pdf
09:32
Agenda item 2 continues our series of meetings to enable members to gain an overview of key issues in the criminal justice sector.
We have two panels of witnesses today. The first relates to courts, delays and user experience. I warmly welcome John Good, member of the criminal law committee of the Law Society of Scotland; Malcolm Graham, chief executive of the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service; Yvette Greener, chief operating officer of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service; and Tony Lenehan KC, vice-dean of the Faculty of Advocates. You are all incredibly welcome, and we thank you for your time. The panel is large, and a number of members are looking to ask questions, so we will try to keep our questions fairly brief, and we seek the same when it comes to answers.
I open with a question to all witnesses. It would be fair to say that welcome progress has been made in reducing backlogs in the summary courts; however, the picture is far less rosy in the High Court. In one sentence—or as close to that as possible—what single biggest factor contributes to the delays in that part of our justice system?
We will start with Mr Good and work our way along the table.
Thank you for having me. It is not rocket science; it is fairly basic. It is about resources: the amount of time, energy and funds that can go in. The system has inputs and outputs, and the delay between input and output is the issue.
A lot of work and some money are going into the system to increase its capacity. It is difficult to extrapolate from the modelling how that will work to significantly reduce delays over the next projected period, which is maybe four or five years. It is a question of good management, with proper resources being put in at the appropriate points.
I am not explaining anything new. That is how it works. It is civil service procedure—Government run and organised. It just needs the resources at the right time and in the right places, across the board—from the Government, policing, defence and advocate sides. It is a complicated equation, but it just needs everything to be joined up and resourced properly.
Great. We will come back to that.
Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to give evidence.
In essence, the pandemic backlog has been cleared in numerical terms, and what we are dealing with now is not a backlog borne out of delays due to the courts being closed and the reduced level of service during that period. We have done exceptional work across the summary courts and, to a lesser extent, the sheriff and jury side.
The biggest issue is the increase in the volume of cases coming into the courts and the changing nature of the seriousness and complexity of those cases. That is compounded by the absence of, or very limited, investment in modernisation across the whole system. Attempts to invest in one part or another from time to time have resulted in bottlenecks being shifted from one place to another, whereas we need to take a whole-system approach. That is how victims and witnesses—the vulnerable people whom we serve every day—quite rightly view the system. We need to design the system to ensure that we get the best outcomes for all our users. That requires a system-wide approach and investment in modernisation that we have not yet had.
Good morning. For me, it is definitely a system challenge. It is not a challenge for just one of the organisations represented at this meeting or for any one part of the justice system. It is a challenge purely of volume. Overall, since 2024-25, there has been a 19 per cent increase in demand and, of that, 36.5 per cent relates to the High Court. That is purely due to the serious nature of the crimes that we are dealing with. Naturally, they take longer to progress, as they are more complex. There are also lots of historical sexual abuse cases, which, in some instances, have many complainers linked to them. That all adds up to a larger volume going through.
As Mr Graham says, we have cleared the backlog that came as a result of the courts being closed during Covid. However, we are currently dealing with the peak that comes from the parallel time-bar system, which will be running for the next six months. Members might be aware that measures under former legislation to extend time bars came to an end at the end of November 2025. That means that, for the next six months, some of those cases will still be running through the system. We also have new cases coming through that are on the traditional time bars. That means that there is double the work coming through at the moment. I go back to the issue being a system challenge because, even if we were to clear through that work rapidly, it would just put more pressure through to the courts and the advocates.
Good morning. Simply put, the number of incoming High Court cases exceeds the trial court resources in the High Court.
Thank you, Mr Lenehan. That was wonderfully brief and brings me on quite nicely to my next question, which is probably directed more to Mr Graham.
Mr Graham, in your 2 September letter to the committee, you say that you are
“expanding High Court trial provision to 26 courts per day from January 2027,”
which will mean that there will be 10 more courts than there were pre-pandemic. Realistically, how much of an impact will that have? With an ideal budget—in other words, if budget constraints did not come into play—what would be the optimal number of courts to really move the needle on the issue that Mr Lenehan just identified?
The increase in the number of courts will have a limited impact—not no impact, as otherwise we would not be doing it. However, we are having to find the capacity to create those extra four High Court venues from within the efficiencies and reductions that we have achieved in other parts of the system. In effect, we are converting capacity from the summary courts and the wider sheriff courts and translating it into the High Court. That is not just a shift of the same people; it has implications for everyone who is sitting around this table and for others.
In our modelling, we projected what would happen if we put a larger number of courts in place, and we found that doing so would not make a huge difference. The reason is that the number of courts—whether the court is conceived as including the judiciary and the staff or just being the building itself—is not necessarily the limiting factor on being able to put stuff through the system. As Yvette Greener has just said, this is a system-wide challenge. If we are to increase the capacity of the system, it needs to be increased in all parts, and it is my contention that we have run out of road in dealing with this system challenge simply by increasing the size of the system itself. We would have to recruit an exorbitant number of additional people. More importantly, we would not have enough courtrooms—we would have to build new courthouses at scale and so on.
There are other ways of doing this, including by investing in modernisation of the whole system so that we have a much more efficient process, we are much clearer about how data gets transferred between partners, there is much more clarity in communication with victims and witnesses, and we manage cases in a much more modern way by using technology. We have seen lots of evidence of that in other jurisdictions. That, in combination with sustaining or increasing capacity where and when it is required, will be the answer to how to tackle this challenge.
We talk—rightly, and to some extent negatively—about the consequences of some of the unconscionable potential delays that could come into the system. I will just point out that, according to the modelling that we have published, victims might be waiting up for to four years in High Court cases if we do not intervene and do something differently from the time that they report their crime to the time that the case is resolved. We need a different way of operating to prevent that from happening. With the combination of increased capacity, investment in modernisation and different management of cases, we will have a good chance of doing that.
I say that we talk about this issue negatively, but a lot of it has come about because of very positive changes that have been made in how society tackles certain systemic issues that have been around for millennia. The fact that the whole system is now tackling violence against women and girls, the huge increase in the number of serious domestic abuse cases coming into the High Court, which is a big shift, and the connection with serious sexual violence cases and certain non-recent cases should all be recognised as positive progress that has happened across Scotland in the past 10 years. We now have to deal with the consequences of that and ensure that we follow through on that good work when it comes to outcomes and resolution.
That is great. I know that some of my colleagues have questions on resourcing and capacity for you.
Ms Greener, on page 2 of your letter of 26 August to the committee, you say that
“remand continues to serve a number of important purposes, with risk management being a key consideration.”
The committee is well aware that the remand population in our prison system is astronomically high, and I am keen to drill down and understand Crown Office thinking in opposing bail and seeking remand.
At last week’s meeting, Sheriff David Mackie told us:
“By virtue of human nature, a prosecutor or a sheriff will err on the side of caution. When the only information available is that an individual has a record as long as your arm, and not much else, it is hardly surprising that a decision to remand them is then made. If, however, the same sheriff has information that the individual is, in fact, already on a community payback order or a drug treatment and testing order, and that remand would undermine work that is already under way to enable them to lead a more law-abiding life, a different decision might be made. That is an illustration of an area where the information that is available to the decision maker can be crucially important”.—[Official Report, Criminal Justice Committee, 2 September 2026; c 31.]
I am therefore keen to ask the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service about the information that is presented to decide that bail test and what is being done to ensure that people are not being added to that ever-growing list of folks on remand.
First and foremost, the decision whether to remand or grant bail is one for the judiciary—it is not made by the deputes who represent us and the Crown in court. Naturally, we will make our case on the basis of risk, including on whether we feel there is risk of future offending, or risk to victims or witnesses. We have recently heard of cases linked to domestic violence where people have been out on bail and gone on to commit some horrendous offences that are currently going through the prosecutorial system. That needs to be taken into account.
However, in doing that, we also very much need to think about the length of the sentences.
There are very strict guidelines for the judiciary in relation to when remand should be considered. We will be applying the guidelines that are in place and balancing those against the risks to the community, the victim and any witnesses. Ultimately, the decision is for the judiciary.
09:45
Mr Lenehan, you are on record as saying that there is scope for
“an innovative look at yielding more plea based resolution, versus trial resolution”.
What would drive greater use of early guilty pleas, and what has stopped that shift already happening?
It would require skill to bring both sides together to deliver resolution. The process requires talented people, sometimes with a visionary or an agile approach, to see how compromise can still yield an appropriate result—that is, appropriate to X number of years—at the end of the day. At the moment, I do not think that the Crown Office fully takes on board the need for such an approach to case resolution.
Ms Greener, is Mr Lenehan wrong on that?
In part he is wrong, but in part he is right, because, although we have not yet moved particularly into the solemn space, we can clearly evidence work that we have done, including across the justice system—because it is not just something that the Crown Office has done; it has been led by the judiciary.
I can also point to the success of summary case management, which has been hugely successful in the summary courts in reducing the number of citations of police officers and witnesses and reducing the costs, including of taking officers off the streets for that purpose. We have been getting resolutions a lot earlier—as my colleague said, that is what we need to be seeing—through early evidence disclosure and conversations and seeking the correct outcome.
We are now working on taking that success into solemn case management. That is why I said that Mr Lenehan is not incorrect in what he said, because we have not yet expanded the approach to solemn case management. However, that is the next step. My colleague Jim Brisbane is working on that as we speak, because that is where we want to go. The process is more complex in some cases, but the principles are the same: early case preparation and early engagement with all parties to seek the best resolution possible at the earliest stage.
Mr Good, the programme for government makes provision for a legal aid bill. Can you quantify the link between legal aid deserts and case delay? Are there particular parts of Scotland where cases are stalling specifically because an accused or a complainer cannot get a solicitor?
We hear stories of what people call legal aid deserts. That situation is probably more prevalent in relation to civil cases than criminal ones, as much as it is still an issue in criminal cases. Criminal law practitioners tend to be a bit more parochial and build up a body of work near their clients, so areas where there are certain groups of population and courts running will attract practitioners. It is an issue in rural areas and because the number of courts has declined—a number of courts have been shut in the past decade or so. There are large areas, just geographically, where there might not be solicitors for clients to visit and consult in order to prepare for their cases.
There are a number of factors. On the financial aspect, legal aid work is not the most remunerative for qualified solicitors, and many solicitors would choose not to do it. Because of the payment system, you need to go through a volume of work, so you need to do as many cases as you can to make it as cost effective as possible. There is a pressure in a business sense, but there is also a pressure to get people to come in and consult and get proper advice as early as possible, and we are not dealing with the easiest bunch of people that we come across in society, sadly.
Therefore, yes, there are such areas. In previous jobs, I had to go to Kirkwall regularly, because there were no solicitors willing to do legal aid work in Orkney. Where there is a small group of lawyers, they can choose to decline to do that kind of work, so it is a difficulty. Edinburgh serves a huge geographical area, right to the border—well, as far as Eyemouth—up to Edinburgh and further, and we cover that area, so it is quite a long way for people without their own means of transport to travel.
Resources are an issue. In the past 20 years, the number of solicitors doing criminal legal aid work has halved from 1,500 to about 800, which is a huge drop, because it is not an attractive form of practice for solicitors who can qualify and go on to do other things that are less challenging and more lucrative.
I am sure that the committee will consider the legal aid bill in short order, because it is part of the year 1 agenda in the programme for government.
I am interested in getting more detail about reform, as a follow-up to the convener’s questions. I know the work that is involved in clearing the Covid backlog, which is very welcome. Mr Lenehan has spoken about the agile approach. My question is for Yvette Greener. So that I can understand it as a layperson, are the Crown and the advocate depute free to make those decisions locally, or do they have to be signed off by someone further up if they are taking a plea?
We have not extended that into solemn case management yet. From the perspective of summary case management, it is for the depute to work with the defence agent to share the evidence early and work out, with them and witnesses, whether it is sensible to get an early plea or seek another outcome. Solemn matters are different, because we prepare cases. As before, we will look to indict, which is a process that is usually signed off and agreed to by principal Crown counsel before it can go ahead. Only at that point would we start work, which involves sitting with one of the advocates who would usually have been allocated to a case by principal Crown counsel. At the moment, we are working through what that might look like. It is about getting the best possible outcome for the public interest and for victims.
I want to talk for a minute about reform. The criminal justice journey must be reformed end-to-end so that national justice organisations can operate a more coherent system. Malcolm Graham, I know what you have to say about this, which is that it is not just about getting more courts. Can you say in a bit more detail how you envisage reform and what it would look like to you? What needs to be done?
We have made some good starts already. Summary case management was supported by digital evidence sharing. As Yvette Greener has already said, the ability to prepare cases and disclose material to the defence at the earliest opportunity has allowed for significant progress in the summary courts in all the things that have already been covered. We need to go beyond that. Digital evidence sharing is just one element of the digitisation of courts, which largely operate on a paper-based system. You could come into the criminal courts today and, with a few notable exceptions, it would look largely as it might have looked a hundred years ago, with bits of paper being passed across the table. That slows down the preparation of cases and information sharing. There is a requirement for people to re-enter information, which causes a barrier to cases being ready earlier. It sometimes results in unnecessary adjournments, which can mean that victims, witnesses, and professionals attend court when they could otherwise have been notified that they were not required.
I will interrupt you there. I am interested in the High Court. I know that we have done a lot of work on solemn cases. Does that mean that the preliminary trial arrangement, where evidence is supposed to be agreed or not agreed, is not working?
It has been acknowledged that there is room for improvement in the process. At the moment, the proposal is to take a similar approach to summary case management, noting that there are some significant differences in the High Court and in sheriff and jury cases. For instance, cases in the High Court are far more reliant on digital and forensic evidence, which will not be disclosed until it is available.
Is that one of the barriers to forensic evidence being available?
Potentially, it is. As we did with summary case management, we will work with everyone in the system to try to arrive at a better sequencing. Whether that requires new procedures or changes in process, guidance, or legislation, we are planning to work through it to try to improve the process and design of the system as a collective.
The other side of it is that it needs some enablement with a system-wide designed technology approach. I am not suggesting that we need one system for the criminal justice system. However, we need an approach to data standards and the different pieces of technology that organisations and people use that enables all the different users—including victims, witnesses, the accused and their representatives—to access the information that they need when they need it. At the moment we have an ad hoc, disjointed approach to the technology. There has not been an overall vision for how the system should be designed.
We are proposing to now make that the case. A proposition is sitting with the Government to fund the development of a business case for that joined-up piece of work. I would strongly encourage that it be supported. It would enable every organisation to know when and where its different parts, in a modular approach, working to a common platform, can develop a system. In technology terms, that is not rocket science. It has been done in many other disciplines and criminal justice jurisdictions. However, we are significantly further behind than a lot of other jurisdictions and we need to make progress on that.
I know that modernisation is needed and we will pass legislation to assist that but, to be honest, I am struggling to understand what that means in practical terms. Tony Lenehan, as a practitioner, what is your view on what Malcolm Graham has said? With regard to the High Court, is there something about the process that is not working?
I do not think that there is much scope for improving the agreement of evidence. There is a lot of judicial pressure at the preliminary hearing stage to knock heads together to get the sort of evidence that should be agreed, agreed. In my experience, that does happen.
The things that Malcolm speaks about will definitely help. However, section 65 of the 1995 act says that the time from the preliminary hearing to trial should be 30 days. I am struck by the projection that that will go up to 945 days. We are not going to fix that by technology alone.
Do you mean between the preliminary trial and the trial?
Correct. That is 135 weeks. It is an eye-catching figure.
Technology will definitely help. I, as a bit of a dinosaur, have moved on to that, and it is a game changer. Once you get through that, it helps, but that is not going to change the 945 days in a significant way. A variety of things need to happen. I have no doubt that you will have other witnesses who sit where I sit and say that it needs investment, and it does. Making this work needs real investment, or it needs a different approach to resolving cases.
Is it fair to say, then, that the modernisation reform is not going to be enough to bring us back within the law of the 30-day limit?
I think that I have been consistently clear, in speaking about this issue to previous committees and publicly in reports, that a combination of factors across the system will be needed to tackle these challenges. For me, reform and modernisation are not about implementing technology in isolation but about redesigning systems so that they are user led, efficient and focused on outcomes. That also gives you the opportunity to make all the other cultural and practice changes that we have spoken about.
Do not get me wrong—I agree with Tony Lenehan when he says that there will be a requirement for investment in capacity as well. To my mind, the longer we delay investing in modernisation and redesigning our processes, the more we have to push into short-term capacity to continue dealing with the challenges in the same way that we have been dealing with them. My contention is that the earlier we get on with investing in modernisation at scale, the greater the likelihood is that we will temper the excesses in some of the projections to the best effect.
At the moment, as you are aware, the Scottish Government is very clear about public service reform. Criminal justice reform is public sector reform, and investment in criminal justice reform up front will have a beneficial impact. I agree with you that it is one of many answers that we need to the potential impending crisis in isolation.
10:00
That is helpful. Lastly, I want to ask Tony Lenehan about the position of the Faculty of Advocates. Are there any issues with a shortage of advocates, or is the profession equipped for the number of cases that the system has expanded to cover? Is there anything that you want to tell us about that?
The funding for representation in the criminal High Court is referred to as schedule 2 funding. It came in back in 2005, and it is now worth 37 per cent less in real terms than it was then. That has an effect on the calibre of people who want to do my job. I am sort of trapped in my job now, but I am not sure that, if I were a younger man, I would have chosen this pathway. The effect on calibre has a knock-on effect on the treatment of witnesses and, in due course, on who sits as sheriffs and High Court judges, because there is a progression.
That is not an exciting answer, but the reality is that there is an effect from reducing the real-terms funding of the defence bar. We are not currently seeing the pinch points where there is nobody to do cases. We saw that following the Covid pandemic, but we are not seeing it just now. I say that because people would normally come to me, as an office-bearer, to say, “There’s a problem in Livingston—there’s no one to do it.” I have—or the dean of faculty has—the power to say to someone, “You’re going to have to go and do that.” I am not seeing that just now.
If all that happens is that the timescales drag out, there is not going to be a problem with the number of people doing it, because there will just be the same number of trial courts. If we increased the number of trial courts, which looks like it will have to be part of the solution, we would need more people. We need to attract capable people into the job if we are going to achieve all the impressive ambitions of the Parliament in the Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Act 2025. Great ideas are nothing without resourcing and delivery, and we need those.
Does the Crown Office want to say anything about that?
There is not much more to add. A clear part of the issue is resource, but it is resource across the system. To go back to the 30-day target, which we talked about, we are not going to get the digital forensics and cybercrime reports back in that time.
It starts from the very first point when we are gathering the evidence together, and witness expert reports need to go in as well. Resourcing is a system-wide issue. We ourselves provide advocates, as well as those that come in from wider advocacy as prosecutors in the courts. I know that principal Crown counsel is currently concerned about the volume of cases and the number of advocates that need to take those through the high courts.
Given that the committee has a session later in private about pre-budget scrutiny, I suspect that Ms McNeill might come back to some of that.
I will hand over to Ms Chapman.
Good morning, and thank you for joining us. I will follow on from Pauline McNeill’s questions on the tension between increasing capacity and changing the system. Malcolm Graham, you have said this morning and elsewhere that additional capacity alone will not solve the problem and that we potentially need a complete rethink. You have spoken about modernisation and some of the technological changes that need to happen. What would a radically different end-to-end system look like? If it is not what the system looked like 100 years ago, what should it look like?
In process and culture terms, at present, everything in the system is back-ended, so it comes at the latest possible time. A good system would have everything coming at the earliest possible time. If we work through the consequences of having things available at the earliest possible opportunity, to be shared across the system to enable decisions to be made and for cases to be judicially managed at an earlier stage in the process than they currently are, that could be a real game changer for our ability to administer a court system that can absorb at least the majority of the projected capacity that is coming through.
That will need a combination of investment and technology, which will support the development and delivery of different ways of working. The fundamental importance of that for confidence and public trust in the system, and for the service for the victims and witnesses who support and are subjects of the courts daily, cannot be overstated.
Some of the projected time delays clearly undermine any notion of trauma-informed justice, despite the efforts that we have been making on that. If we have some of the delays that are projected, justice will not, in essence, be trauma informed. We know that forcing people to wait for so long causes attrition in the system, that outcomes are less successful and that people’s sense of procedural justice is negatively impacted. Ultimately, that has the potential to undermine the rule of law in the country.
Yvette Greener, do you want to comment? If you could design an efficient system that reduced harm as well as processing cases more quickly, what would that look like?
We need to start with prevention. What is causing the amount and nature of the crime that is reported? The domestic abuse figures came out yesterday. Prevention starts with education, health and housing. The programme for government that was published last week would put more work into prevention and the starting point must be to prevent people getting into the system, first and foremost.
There should be a combination of things. I am pretty sure that there is a need for some modernisation of legislation, because some of what we are handling does not reflect how crime and modern society work. That takes me back to digital work. We have a system in which we have to certify copies, but pretty much everything that we deal with nowadays is a copy. As Malcolm Graham said, a huge amount of people are moving around. We need more digitisation but we also need to stop doing some things.
There is no one silver bullet. We need system-wide change and there will be multiple elements to that. There will be a long tail because, although the Government is focusing on prevention, we are still dealing with what is happening today and there will always be a lag in the impact of any change.
Do we measure the impact of diversion and prevention as a system issue? Do you have that information? Do we have a collective understanding of what we are seeing, rather than looking only at case disposal rates going up or down or at those things happening more quickly or slowly? Do we measure those other things and understand how they are working?
That is not something that we in the Crown Office measure. It might be visible through crime reporting and the like, but it is not something that we would use to measure our success.
Some good data is available, and the Scottish Government and other bodies publish that. There is data on diversion and on non-prosecutorial disposal of cases. Those figures have steadily gone up and far fewer cases at the lower end are being registered in the summary court as a result of the range of other disposals that are now available to the police and the Crown. It is good news that they are dealing with things in a way that is appropriate to the level of offending.
That has happened at the same time as a huge increase in serious cases. You cannot compare one with the other, because of the complexity and timescale of some cases. You can do three or four summary cases in a court in a day, but the average High Court trial takes six days, with a commensurate number of staff involved in that.
My final observation is that international evidence clearly shows that having an effective and timely criminal justice system is a key part of any preventative and interventionist approach to tackling crime and positively enhancing other social outcomes in a nation. The opposite is also true.
That is helpful.
Tony Lenehan, you spoke about the quality of people who are able to negotiate and deliver earlier resolutions. How would we know if reform is actually reducing harm rather than merely getting people through the system more quickly?
On the abusive practices that are, sadly, widespread, we need to focus on having every Scottish man understand better that, nowadays, with modern changes in policing and a move towards multicomplainer cases, in which the conviction rate is 85 per cent, the consequences of such actions are likely to be a very long time in prison. I think that a lot of offenders do not understand that that is what is coming to them.
Education would therefore be a big part of it, because the dominant case type just now is a domestic abuse multicomplainer case. Such cases are not solved by forensic evidence, and they are not cases in which people easily plead guilty. There is a sort of taboo, it seems.
People who come to the High Court are bad decision makers. That is what brings them there. Trying to get them to understand the advantage of a good decision in resolving a case and all the benefits that come from that is therefore very difficult, and talented and experienced people are needed to make that work.
The biggest thing is the message of having better education, and working with young people in particular, because I see distressingly many 17, 18 and 19-year-olds with an entrenched pattern of abusive, including sexually abusive, behaviour. Talking about choking and the like, or violent pornography, is a squeamish conversation to have with 15, 16 and 17-year-olds, but there needs to be more of that, so that people—including young ladies—understand better that they do not need to consent to those things, because that is the route to disaster. We see that in case after case after case. It is mirrored by the observations of Rape Crisis Scotland and all the agencies that help on the victim side. It is worryingly widespread, and more needs to be done to let people understand that that leads to their meeting someone like me in due course, and that 85 per cent of them, by and large, will get long terms in jail.
That comes back to what we were talking about earlier, on how to ensure that the whole system is trauma informed and genuinely well informed about the limits of good and bad behaviour and where those go.
John Good, I come to you on a similar question. From your perspective, given the limitations on the capacity for solving the problem, what areas do we need to look at reforming?
The Law Society is helping generally in recruitment. We are also part of a scheme to bring education into schools, to try to engender an understanding of and empathy with the criminal justice system. Funding has recently been added for traineeships, and additional trainees are being recruited right now.
By addressing the input part, we are trying our best to encourage people to practise in that sphere. It is an interesting, challenging and useful part of society, which needs to be properly funded, properly respected and properly supported. We are trying our best to do that, in conjunction with all the other partners that are involved. That is very important.
We have all mentioned education, I think. We should look at early years as well. There has been a template for decades about early intervention, violence reduction, health and welfare, education, housing et cetera. We know where our clients come from. Generations of them repeat the same issues. It is still a question of trying to control the input as best we can.
For people who are involved in the kinds of offences that Mr Lenehan deals with, which are a growing aspect of court prosecutions, a combination of social media and digital communications is leading to more prosecutions being possible, because they are all forensically identifiable and evidenced. That is creating almost a perfect storm of young people getting involved in things in which they should not be involved, which are then evidenced.
So—
Ms Chapman—
We need to move on.
Yes, I am going to move on to other colleagues. I call Ben Macpherson.
10:15
Good morning, and thank you for your candid evidence so far.
I have two main areas of questioning, the first of which goes back to what you have said about investment to meet increasing demand as well as the complexity—and implementation of—recent legislation, including the 2025 act. It would be helpful for us, as we move into pre-budget scrutiny—and more generally for the Government and the wider Parliament—if we had an indication of the amount of resource that would make a difference with regard to personnel, and the technological investment and any other capital investment that might be required for physical assets, whether it be more buildings or whatever. We understand if you cannot give us that information today or are not able to state anything on the record now but, if that is the case, perhaps you can follow up with the committee on that.
As we question ministers and others in the weeks and months leading up to the budget, it would be helpful to have an idea, whether for one financial year or several, of what you need to make the difference and meet the strong demand, the need for continued technological improvements— noting the efficiencies and changes that have already been made—and the implementation of acts that have been passed by the Parliament. If you have anything to say about that now, I would welcome that, but I would also understand if you wanted to follow up on that.
I am happy to try to answer that question in part. As the deputy convener has said, there will be a pre-budget scrutiny evidence session, at which we will be in a better position to go into more detail on the annualised budget cycle.
With regard to investment for modernisation, there are two points to make. First, according to an outline business case that the SCTS has developed, the high-level framing of which has been submitted to the Scottish Government, we will need investment of £62 million over the next five years to develop a revised approach to managing criminal cases from the courts perspective.
Alongside that, I have been leading work with other justice partners on developing what we call the joining up justice programme—that is the modernisation that I have been speaking of. There is no plan from the Scottish Government in that respect; it is right that the system convenes and makes propositions to the Government, and the Government is a key part of that activity. We asked for £2.5 million this year; in May, we made a submission to the Scottish Government’s £30 million invest to save fund, which the Cabinet Secretary for Justice and the First Minister made available for public service reform programmes. We are now sitting in the second week of September, talking about annualised funding, and I do not have a clear answer yet to the question whether that funding will be available for this year.
I do not think that that is good enough, and I have said as much to the cabinet secretary. If we are spending any money in year on developing a business case for doing this sort of thing across the justice system—in this case, recruiting people—we cannot hear the result in September and be expected to spend the money in year. Indeed, a similar thing happened with other matters last year.
On a broader point, £62 million for the SCTS might sound like a lot of money, but how important is the criminal justice system as a piece of national infrastructure that underpins the rule of law, the very democracy that we enjoy and the safety and security of the nation? Let me draw some comparisons with investment made in other areas—and these are from the published figures that go regularly from the Scottish Government to the Parliament’s Public Audit Committee. We spent £277 million on the social security information and communications technology system and £140 million on Scotland’s national census system; the Scottish Government has spent £64 million, I think, on its own Oracle finance and human resources system; and there are various other things that I could mention such as the more than £300 million that has been spent on the national health service digital front door.
Those issues are all hugely important, but I contend that we need to invest in the criminal justice system at a similar scale, which will need some strategic perspective and preparation. I am disappointed that, although initial conversations with the Government about the need to get that investment up and running this year have been positive, they have not yet resulted in any conclusion.
Alongside that point, we need, as we have said, to sustain and continue to grow the current services. The public service reform agenda makes it clear that the size of the workforce in public services should reduce. Set against the pressures that we have already laid out, that will be challenging. The spending review that was published in advance of the election makes it clear that the SCTS will get a significant real-terms reduction in our budget for next year. Something does not square up, which is why I am making a big pitch for a requirement to invest in reform and modernisation. No matter how much we make the call for growth in capacity and additional resource, that will not be the answer to the problem, and, in any case, I do not think that we will necessarily get that growth.
Thank you, that was most helpful. Yvette Greener, do you want to add something?
To put the spending review in context, it requires us to drop more than £6 million from our budget next year, which is the equivalent of 100 members of staff. We are expected to do that next year. We had a plan for that and we still have a plan, but that plan must be set off against an increasing number of cases. We are a demand-led organisation and we cannot control what comes at us, which makes meeting that requirement incredibly difficult. If we are kept to that requirement, we will need to make some quite challenging decisions. That will all come through as we go through pre-budget scrutiny.
We have started conversations with our exchequer colleagues, because the Crown Office budget is set separately from that of the wider justice portfolio budget—it is not done through the Cabinet Secretary for Justice. We are in direct conversations about what the budget might look like and what challenging decisions might have to be made. Unfortunately, that could have impacts that we do not want on our ability to provide a proper service to victims and witnesses.
There are also elements of legislation that are unfunded at the moment. There is a lot from the Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Act 2025 that has still to be implemented, whether that is ongoing work on evidence on commission or the sexual offences court. That all needs to carry through as well. As we have said many times, legislation does not come free. If you want to truly meet the intent of something that you have done, some funding will need to be allocated—we have been clear about that since we started the conversations on this issue in 2023.
We look forward to receiving any figures about that in due course.
Mr Lenehan, do you want to add anything on that, or based on the points that you made earlier?
About funding?
Yes, or about personnel and capacity.
To make things work, we need good people doing the work. There are ongoing cuts in the amount that legal aid is paid at. You will understand that legal aid in the High Court is paid per unit of work. I do not get a fixed level each year, or anything like that; if I earn more, it is because I do more work. There is no reason to suggest that simply returning to the pound of 2005 would be a fair way to treat people who work hard and are an important part of improving the journeys of witnesses, victims and accused people. I am not sure that I have ever seen the justification for continually paying less, because if you keep paying less you will get a poorer quality of worker. From my perspective, capital expenditure does not matter, but the quality of the worker does.
That is very helpful. Thank you.
May I ask one last question, deputy convener?
Yes, of course.
: The previous responses contained a lot of comment on the additional demands of the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018. Do you also want to express anything about the demands and resourcing requirements relating to the number of organised crime cases that have been through the system in recent years or are currently outstanding, and about the challenges that we face in parts of urban Scotland, including in the constituency that I represent in the Parliament, due to the growing levels of serious criminal activity from a small but very challenging minority of young people?
I will not pretend that I am over all the detail of those cases, but what you have outlined is crime that is much more cross border, that is much more complex, and that can be a lot more international in nature. A few weeks ago, I spent time with some of the serious organised crime prosecutor teams on cryptocurrency fraud. That area is mind boggling in terms of the different levels and channels you go through in trying to identify everything. That in itself makes it much more complex to get a complete case to the point of prosecution and to take that case successfully through the system.
I am happy to write to the committee with full details on serious organised crime. Much has been in the press on such cases, particularly in the Glasgow area, but I am happy to come back with more detail on that and on where the crimes that have been reported to us are being committed.
That last set of answers to Ben Macpherson’s questions is deeply concerning to me, if I have understood correctly what the witnesses were saying.
Malcolm Graham, you produced the criminal courts modelling paper, which shows, as I think Tony Lenehan said, that, even with additional courts, the delays get longer. You said that we need a systems solution, and £62 million is a figure that you came up with from somewhere as an initial investment in the creation of a case for further modernisation.
I do not really understand the answers that you gave to Pauline McNeill. That is probably no reflection on you, but I do not really understand, or feel that I can get my arms around, what we are talking about.
You then said in answer to Ben Macpherson, “Oh, by the way, we are going to have cuts next year.” Is that what you said?
I said that the Scottish Government’s spending review projects that the real-term budget of the SCTS will reduce in a material way.
Right, so that means cuts. You are expecting that your budget will be cut next year.
That is what has been heralded in the spending review.
You have asked for £62 million of investment. You specifically asked for £30 million in order to begin the work of creating a business case.
The figure of £2.5 million was asked for this year.
What was the £30 million?
I do not think that that was a figure that I referred to.
Did you not? Okay, forgive me.
So, you asked for £2.5 million. You have not had that. What specifically does the £62 million get for us, then?
It will replace the 20-year-old criminal case management system, which runs and supports the Scottish courts every day. It will allow us to redesign that system as, I hope, a platform that can digitally link, and provide a different way of managing, all the data flows and information across the criminal justice system in the future.
Does that meet the need for end-to-end system change that you talked about? Is the investment for that purpose or to support capacity?
It is part of that change, but only for the SCTS element. At the moment, I cannot put a figure on what we would need for the wider criminal justice system. We have asked for the £2.5 million to develop a full business case for that—to get people in to work collectively to ensure that we are doing it across the whole system.
When did you ask for the £2.5 million?
We made a submission for that to the Scottish Government’s invest to save fund in May.
You did that in May, and it is now September, and you have not had any conversations about it since.
10:30
I have had conversations about it, and I have had an indication that it will not be supported through that means. I am still in conversation with senior officials and the cabinet secretary about whether we can find another way to progress it.
Which cabinet secretary are you referring to?
Mr Gray—the Cabinet Secretary for Justice.
Will you share a copy of the request letter with the committee, please?
Sorry? A business case was submitted to the invest to save fund, and I subsequently wrote to the cabinet secretary and met with him at a point when we did not appear to be getting an answer in what I felt was a reasonable time.
I think that the deputy convener is asking if we can have copies of that correspondence.
Yes, absolutely.
That will be very useful. However, this is very alarming, because here we are talking about having a trauma-informed justice process, when the process is dramatically failing people, particularly women, and you are saying, “Oh, yeah, we’ve asked for £2.5 million to do an outline business case but we’ve been told we’re not going to get that, and we’re going to have real-terms cuts in the system next year.” The mind boggles. What was all the court modelling stuff about, then? Is it just a vanity exercise? Is it just drawing sandcastles in the air? What was it all about? This is going to cost money, is it not?
The court modelling presumes that we uplift the number of High Court venues by four, which we will do during the course of this year. As I have explained, we are doing that through the capacity that we have created from other parts of the system—
Yes, but you want—
The things that we are talking about for the future—
But you have also put the number of courts down as 26. That would require more money, right?
Yes.
That is the bottom line.
Yes.
You have a budget for 16 courts, and you are currently operating 22 on that resource. The figure of 26 is a potential figure, but that is about capacity only—it does not address the system.
This is just about increasing the number of courts, and you are right that, each time we do that, it costs more money.
This is very useful. It is an insight—an under-the-bonnet look at things that is quite disturbing.
Yvette Greener, from the answers to Ben Macpherson’s questions, it seems to me that you are the bottleneck in all this. Do you agree with that?
No, I do not.
I am looking at the Government’s own report, “Journey Times in the Scottish Criminal Justice System 2024-25”, and the biggest blockage with regard to sexual cases in Scotland is the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, but you have said you do not agree with that.
I said no, because, although we are sitting on cases, I would not say that we are the blockage at all. It is only right for an independent prosecutorial system to give full consideration before putting a case through for indictment and then into the court system. It is absolutely right that we do that in the most comprehensive manner possible in order to ensure the best outcome for victims.
There is the issue of the sheer volume of cases. I spoke earlier about the uplift in High Court cases, the vast majority of which are sexual offences cases, which take so much longer to deal with than other cases. That is compounded by the fact that we are dealing with the parallel time bar for the next six months, which is putting added pressure on the system.
Do you have a capacity problem, then? Is that a fair statement?
The Crown Office has grown in recent years—do not get me wrong. Our resourcing level has been increased, and we have received additional funding from the Government to deal with the time-bar issue and Covid deaths.
Is that limited funding?
Yes, we are due to start to lose that from the next financial year.
When you said that you were going to have cuts in the budget, were you referring to that money, or will there be cuts on top of that?
I was referring to a number of things. There will be cuts to the funding for the time-bar issue—we will lose half of that. We also have natural efficiency targets—even for this year, we have a self-imposed efficiency target of £5 million—so there is not much left at the bottom of that pot for us to go for. There are wider court recovery reductions, too.
That does not take into account any potential pay rises for our people. Pay has been settled for this year, and we have modelled pay growth at 2 per cent from next year onwards, but we do not know what it will be, due to, for example, inflation. Pathology and mortuary services represent a major cost within our resource budget, aside from people, and those services not taken into account, either.
Fundamentally, even a flat-cash settlement is a cut, and we are expecting to lose some of the additional funding that we were given.
Phew. That is very shocking stuff, given that we are trying to speed things up and reduce journey times. Both of you seem to be saying that you are facing cuts that will probably further lengthen journey times and slow progress.
You have got reduced resources, reduced capacity and none of the system investment that Malcolm Graham mentioned. It does not add up, at least in my head. In terms of public policy strategy, I cannot get my head around it.
Can I put a question to John Good, convener?
I can give you a couple of minutes, Mr Kerr.
Is the legal aid question, which Tony Lenehan referenced in relation to the work of the advocates, not even more acute for your profession?
It is.
It is not being resolved.
There was a partial—
When does the 13 per cent increase kick in?
It is coming in in stages. Some of it has started, and there will be a further—
It started in September, did it not?
I started practising criminal law in 1999, which was the year that fixed fees were introduced. That is similar to piecework for factory workers. It is about how many units one can produce each day. The fee at that time was £500. It subsequently fell below £500 because of cuts, and it has now increased again.
However, the position is similar to that of High Court fees in 2005. There has been a 30 to 40 per cent real-terms reduction. The amount of solemn work that we do has increased significantly, and the payment scheme has changed to unit payments, as Mr Lenehan said, so we are back to a somewhat more piecemeal way of working.
The types, complexity and scale of cases are increasing because of, for example, advancements in technology and prosecution techniques. It does not make sense. Our cases are getting larger, more complex and lengthier, but we are receiving a fixed amount of money to deal with them.
I think that I know the answer to this question, but how does that affect the availability of solicitors to do the work?
We have suffered. When I started in 1999, nearly 1,600 registered solicitors were practising criminal legal aid. There are now fewer than 800.
Ooft.
Working out the impact of that is a simple piece of arithmetic.
What is the knock-on effect on journey times?
It means that we cannot expend the time because we simply do not have it. We cannot invent time. We can do only a finite amount of work every day, even working 12 to 14 hours a day, and we have fewer solicitors. The profession is becoming less attractive, and payments have not kept up comparatively with other—
It all compounds the delays. The wheels of justice are very, very slow.
It seems like that. From the Law Society perspective, we are very keen to oil the wheels a bit better, and we support as many younger lawyers as we possibly can to try to come into the profession. However, as Mr Lenehan said—
But it is not very attractive, is it?
It is not the most attractive profession. It is an interesting field in which to practise, but you cannot deal with High Court cases, or sheriff and jury cases, effectively and efficiently at the sharp end until you have acquired the gravitas, experience, terminology and intellect that are required. That comes only with experience. We need people to enter the profession, be trained, appear in court and work hard, and that will bring us up to speed. At the moment, that is not feeding through.
Thank you for that.
Before I get told to stop—
You are sailing close to that point, Mr Kerr.
Tony Lenehan, you have not commented on this round of questions. I think that the committee would welcome your views.
On what, specifically?
On the whole issue of the cuts and their effect on your profession, and on the legal aid question relating to solicitors, which you have already referred to. The whole system seems to be collapsing in on itself.
It is certainly at its unhappiest point in the past 20-odd years of my working life. Morale is at an all-time low. It looks like more will be asked of people who do my job.
There is a particular skill to being properly trauma informed, given that my role in court is to challenge what someone says. To do so in a trauma-informed way is really hard. The harder that you make the job and the less that you pay people to do it, the more that you will have failings in that job. If you want to achieve the 2025 bill’s lofty goals, you need to pay people, even just what you paid us in 2005, to get the right people to do the job that the victims, the witnesses and the judges need them to do.
To say that this is a 20-year morass for your profession is quite a statement.
Yes, I am sure of it.
I am conscious that we are getting quite close to the end of our time, but it is a larger panel, and we are picking up a lot of evidence. With colleagues’ permission, I will run this part of the session on a little longer, because I want to bring in two other members.
Thank you for describing with clarity and detail a system that is fragmented and complicated, with increasing pressures coming from the volume of serious crime. I am genuinely sorry to hear about the low levels of morale.
You have described the courts system as facing an impending crisis. The SCTS plans to increase High Court capacity, but I seek clarification: is the plan to increase the number of trial courts from 16 to 26 per day, or is that already happening?
No—we plan to increase the number to 22 in January.
Okay. Even if that happens, the waiting lists will still be very long.
Thank you for discussing the joining up justice programme, which would shift reform from a series of organisation-led improvements towards system-led improvements. Who would oversee that project, and who would ultimately be responsible when things go wrong?
As you have said, it is a complex system that is under significant pressure. It has suffered from underinvestment over a long time, but I am optimistic that it can be improved.
In response to your question about accountability, everybody is accountable to somebody, but it is not necessarily the case that a single person is in charge. I do not want to go through in detail all the various constitutional accountabilities in the system, because that would take considerable time. In essence, it is down to the people who are leaders in the system to get together and lead the work. The Scottish Government and leaders of the key agencies and organisations are part of that. We have demonstrated that we can do that through summary case management, with some judicial leadership, whereby the police, the Crown, the courts and so on all come together—
I am terribly sorry to interrupt you. I have just been informed that there are some issues with the broadcast—there is no sound. Given the Parliament’s obvious emphasis on transparency, and in the interests of the members of the public who are following our proceedings but are not in the room, please allow me to suspend briefly to find out what has happened.
10:43
Meeting suspended.
10:48
On resuming—
We will resume, colleagues. Our colleagues in the official report are now capturing the information that they need to allow us to continue our proceedings, and I will hand back to Ms Bland, who was in the process of pursuing her line of questioning.
Do you want me to repeat the question, or can we just continue?
No, I think that we can pick up from where we were.
I think that I had 98 per cent finished answering the question, so I will not burden you with a repetition of my answer, if that is okay.
Just to clarify, do you feel that the leaders of each organisation have the capacity, the will and the way to make this happen and to oversee things?
I am not sure that we have the capacity, but I think that we have the responsibility to try to develop it, and to ensure that we are leading. It is not just about what the leaders in the system can do—we need to work hand in glove with the Scottish Government, which is also a key part of Scotland’s justice system.
My next question is for the whole panel. From what I have heard today, a trauma-informed justice system does not exist; indeed, the system is creating more trauma for victims. Would you like to comment on that?
I will certainly do so—I note that Mr Kerr, too, said that the system is failing victims. I do not agree with that at all; there are some very concerning projections for what might happen, but there have also been some really significant and impactful improvements to trauma-informed approaches and services to victims through the courts and the criminal justice system.
We have already talked about summary case management, and I will not repeat what was said. We now have eight evidence on commission facilities across all six sheriffdoms, and more than 1,000 vulnerable witnesses gave pre-recorded evidence in 2025-26, reducing the need for their attendance at a subsequent trial.
Moreover, the 2026 SCTS customer user survey found that, among victims, witnesses and their supporters, 85 per cent were satisfied overall with the service; 88 per cent were satisfied with the helpfulness of staff; and 92 per cent were satisfied with staff courtesy. The survey also shows that consistency of communication and information remains important, with 79 per cent of victims, witnesses and supporters saying that the services met their expectations. I could go on, but I think that any contention that we are routinely failing victims across the system is not borne out by the evidence.
I would like to come in on that question, too. The domestic abuse statistics that came out yesterday show that 91 per cent of those cases are actually producing prosecutions, so we are not failing victims in that way.
As for taking a trauma-informed approach, there is, of course, always more that we can do—we are not saying that there is no room for improvement. However, I highlight the work of our victim information and advice officers, who support, within certain guidelines, victims or the nearest bereaved next of kin in cases. We are also supporting things such as the bairns’ hoose initiative by having officers embedded there.
We are continuing to work on wider trauma-informed practices. Malcolm Graham mentioned the evidence on commission rooms, but we, too, are changing a lot of the space that we use when we talk to victims in our offices. We now have a much better environment for people to come into.
Going back to summary case management, it is surely right that we are trauma informed. After all, we need only look at the number of children who are no longer being required to come and give witness accounts in court, because of summary case management. Indeed, Sheriff Principal Anwar’s report very clearly highlighted the number of those who had no longer needed to come and give evidence as a result of that approach. That is being trauma informed.
Body-worn video is another important aspect. If we were able to bring that, and summary case management, into solemn trials, we would actually have evidence much earlier on and would not need to call people to give evidence in cases.
The treatment of vulnerable witnesses and complainers is better at the moment than it has ever been in my 20-odd years as an advocate. Great care is taken, both with the provision of pre-recorded evidence and with their treatment before and in court. They are entitled to have a meeting with the defence counsel and, at that meeting, I will explain what I am going to do, why I am there and so on. The sense that I get is that we have improved year on year on year as far as that is concerned.
Good—it is very reassuring to hear that. Thank you.
The trauma-informed approach is one positive aspect of our job. We probably did not start from a terribly high base, decades ago, but I know from my own experience that the Law Society offers online training to all solicitors about how to approach the issue, how to deal with it in court and how to question appropriately. The judiciary has been trained, too, with case law given as guidance on how it should be done. If we are looking at what we might call tangible progress, that is one of the aspects of our sphere of influence in the work that we do that has positively, and quite markedly, improved over the past five or six years.
I agree that a trauma-informed justice system is absolutely critical; it is just that I felt, from what you previously said, that the system was not allowing that to develop and be effective. That was what my question was about—I was not questioning the trauma-informed approach itself.
That is not a characterisation that I would recognise from my experience, both in the Law Society and as a day-to-day practitioner.
Thank you.
This question is for Malcolm Graham. You talked about the SCTS seeking £62 million for criminal case management reform over five years. If that money materialised, what measurable improvement would it deliver for victims, witnesses and accused people, and by when?
We have not worked through the detail of exactly what the performance outcomes would be, or when. We have made some propositions in the outline business case. We are still working on that and developing it. However, as I mentioned earlier, the intention is to create a platform for starting to provide a more efficient system.
To go back to your earlier question, and to repeat what I said at an earlier point in the conversation, if we introduce the delays that the modelling has projected might happen if we do not intervene, that will, fundamentally, not be a trauma-informed approach. If people are going to wait for three or four years for a case to be resolved, we cannot describe that as a trauma-informed system. The investment in a new approach to designing how we provide our services, using technology and linking that into existing and emerging technology needs of the people around this table and beyond, will give us a whole range of opportunities to become more efficient and effective: sharing data, understanding better what we are doing, communicating more directly with victims and witnesses, and making sure that we make the best use of the limited resource that we have.
I am very conscious of time, and we will return to some of those issues in pre-budget scrutiny. I appreciate my colleague Marie McNair being so patient, so I give the last round of questions to her.
Thank you. You will be glad to know that most of my questions have been covered.
Yvette Greener, can I take you back, to the bairns’ hoose? What challenges remain in achieving a national roll-out?
Fundamentally, it will come down to funding. We have been provided with some funding by the Scottish Government to support that really fantastic initiative, which is having great outcomes. To extend that further will require additional funding support, fundamentally, if we are to roll it out nationally and continue to embed deputes within it.
Resources seem to have been covered quite a lot by my colleagues, but I will mop up a wee bit. What areas of the justice system are currently most unresourced?
The way in which, constitutionally, the funding is allocated in the main, leaves it up to SCTS the choice of how it is then apportioned. I do not wish to speak across the whole system on behalf of other organisations but, from a courts perspective, the criminal justice system is under most pressure, and the high court element of that is under the most pressure at the moment, because of all that we have spoken about when it comes to case volumes.
Just for the record, how confident are you that the current budget will be sufficient to meet the existing demands? What will be the impact if you do not receive further funding?
The impact will be significant when it comes to the services that we can provide, the delays that it will introduce into the system and ultimately, not just the impact—horrific as that is—on individual witnesses, victims and accused people, but the big lead-through into other parts of the system. If people are on remand for longer—the highest proportion of remand cases is in the high court—that has a negative effect on the prison population, which is under extreme pressure, as you are all well aware. Ultimately, my concern is that public trust and confidence in the system will start to be undermined, and we need to make sure that we do everything that we can to avert that.
Thanks. Does anybody else want to comment on the budget?
Fundamentally, we must be recognised as being demand led. We cannot control that. The nature of the offence determines the correct forum for it to go to. Prosecutors decide independently on the most appropriate route for the case.
Being demand led is the most important element of that. However, as I spoke about earlier, there also needs to be a recognition that our demand starts right from the police, who I am sure will put their case about what they need and how that relates to things such as digital forensics and their capabilities in respect of reporting, which comes through to us when we consider the cases.
We self-impose efficiencies as much as we can—we are consistently driving that, alongside areas of reform to our operating model. However, if we are unable to maintain sufficient funding, we will need to give serious consideration to further delaying things such as Covid deaths investigations, and there will naturally be longer timelines. We may well find that people wait longer for justice because we are not able to provide it as quickly as we should.
Thank you for that answer.
This has been a rich evidence session. I apologise again for the slight technical error that we had earlier on. We will no doubt return to many of these issues in the course of our deliberations, not least when it comes to pre-budget scrutiny. On behalf of all members of the committee, I thank the witnesses for their attendance and for the time that they have given us. Before we move on to the second panel, I will suspend the meeting for five minutes for a brief comfort break.
11:01
Meeting suspended.
11:07
On resuming—