Justice and Home Affairs Committee,

Meeting date: Wednesday, May 10, 2000

Official Report 287KB pdf

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Budget Process

Item 2 on the agenda is scrutiny of the 2001-02 budget. Some of the minister's personnel are changing, but I note that one official is staying.

I remind committee members of the purpose of this exercise. We are expected to report to the Finance Committee on the relevant chapter of "Investing in You" so that that committee can take an overall view of the budget proposals. We should ask whether the aims and objectives that are set out in chapter 5 are the right ones—in other words, do we think that the Executive will spend money on the right things? We should also ask whether the distribution of money among the principal headings in table 5.24, in which figures are expressed in real terms, is about right and whether the overall figure for justice and the Crown Office is sufficient. I remind members of the objectives because we have a tendency to get bogged down in the detail, which would not be appropriate at this stage.

I am not sure whether there is a necessity for you to speak first, minister, unless you feel hugely moved to.

I would like to inform members that I have had less time to prepare for this than I had to prepare for the regulation of investigatory powers bill. I apologise for the fact that I will rely heavily on officials.

I am not sure whether this will be helpful, but I could offer committee members contact with one or two of our senior justice department finance officials in an informal setting. Having read copies of the Official Report of previous committee meetings, I am aware that there is a thirst for information of a detailed nature about figures, acronyms, practices, flows of money and so on. I believe that an information-gathering session similar to the one that the minister and I had after our arrival would be helpful.

Thank you. That might be useful and we will take you up on your offer if we can fit that into people's diaries.

Before we begin, I again remind members that there have been many detailed questions and that I am hoping to steer committee members away from anything too detailed.

I will start by asking the minister two general questions that arose from the issues that we discussed last week. While a number of targets are indicated for the various bodies, there is no indication of whether last year's targets were met. We have no way of assessing whether previous performance has been up to scratch. I know that some information has come in as a result of questions that we asked last week, but I do not see information about targets. Could you explain why it was decided not to include information about previous performance in the document as a comparator?

Table 5.13, which details the Scottish Police College performance indicators, gives specific and clearly measurable targets. We cannot assess them using a previous year's targets—which would have been helpful—but next year, we will be able to use the targets that are in this document to assess the performance. The same cannot be said of all the chapter, which contains much vaguer, less measurable targets elsewhere. That will make it harder to measure the performance of certain departments. How did that unevenness come about?

I am not sure what the answer is to your last question, but I accept that the information is uneven. I also accept that it would be more useful if an assessment were given in each of the sections as to whether the preceding year's targets had been met. We intend to provide that information in future years. I am not clear about the specific reasons for the variation in the information. I assume that it might relate to historical factors to do with data collection and the extent to which individual departments or sections performance-manage the outputs of their activities. I appreciate that that does not fully answer your question, but all I can do is assure you that we will undertake to move towards a performance management structure across the Executive and that we will include in future reports information about the success of attempts to meet targets in previous years.

I am certainly mindful of the fact that this is the first time that the budget has been under scrutiny. By putting it under the microscope, we can be sure that lots of issues will be raised that may not have been considered before.

Notwithstanding the minister's opening remarks and his comment about preparedness for this session, I would have thought that, given current pressures, he would find it difficult to sleep at night thinking about the justice and home affairs budget. He will certainly have had time to become well acquainted with the figures, if we assume that ministers had serious input into the overall budget settlement announced by Jack McConnell. Given that and given the promises that the Deputy Minister for Justice and Home Affairs and his leader, Jim Wallace, made when they were in election mode, why have police budgets been squeezed so much? Why is there such a large reduction in the number of serving policemen? The budget does not seem to reflect the need to reverse that trend.

Mr Gallie will not be surprised to hear that I am not sure that I accept the contention that the police are underfunded. Neither am I sure that the justice department or its activities cause me sleepless nights. I thought Mr Gallie was going to refer to himself when he talked about sleepless nights, but he failed to do so.

Police grant-aided expenditure for 2000-01 is £742 million, which represents an increase of £27 million, or 3.8 per cent, on the preceding year. Last year's funding of £715 million was £24 million higher than the previous year, an increase of 3.4 per cent. In addition, we gave the police a further £4.7 million last October specifically to assist them with the policing of the millennium celebrations. We are unambiguous in our commitment to giving the police service our strongest support.

The Scottish Executive and chief constables are committed to best-value principles and to the need to deliver efficiency savings. Mr Gallie will be aware that, given the additional money that has been made available to the police as a result of the chancellor's budget announcement, the Scottish police service can expect to receive substantial additional resources. Mr Gallie will be relieved to hear that I will not announce details of that today, but I hope that we will be in a position to make an announcement in the near future. The matter is the subject of discussion at the Scottish Cabinet and should be resolved within the next 10 days or so. In addition, the general priority that we attach to the police service will be reflected in the consideration given to overall expenditure in the next spending review.

More immediately, the Scottish Executive has set up a short-life working group to assess the funding required to resource the police service beyond the period of the current comprehensive spending review. We will consider carefully the outcome of that in taking decisions about future funding for the police. This is a relatively new approach. We are trying to take a more objective and more structured view of the kind of investment strategy required in policing and policing support services in coming years.

Mr Gallie and I have clashed on police numbers in the past. I repeat what I have pointed out before. When direct police officer and support staff numbers are taken into account, the figures are, I believe, at their highest ever level. The idea of civilianisation, expressly supported by chief constables, was to increase the number on the streets of officers who would otherwise be detained doing office jobs. It is therefore not irrelevant to say that the fact that civilian numbers together with police numbers are at a record level means a significant difference in the capacity of the police forces to deliver protective and detective services.

The figures that I have seen suggest that the fall in the number of policemen has not been made up for by the increase in the number of civilian posts. That is an area of dispute between us.

One thing that cannot be disputed is the fact that the outturn figure for 1998-99 was £31.4 million and that the plans for 2001-02 show expenditure of £31.9 million. That is hardly anything other than a stand-still budget, which recognises that there is a fall in the funding required to meet the Government's aspirations. What account was taken in the figures of early retirement and the continual build-up in pension fund requirements, given the fact that the pension fund for police is revenue provided?

Will Mr Gallie repeat the two figures he quoted, so that I can find the table to which he refers?

Table 5.24 on page 78 of "Investing in You" says that outturn in 1998-99 was £31.4 million and that planned expenditure in 2001-02 is £31.9 million.

The first thing to point out is that a direct comparison cannot be made, because the pension sums to which Mr Gallie refers fall outwith the police central Government allocation and are funded, I think, through the local authority contribution, which is made elsewhere.

Has the local authority contribution been increased to meet that requirement?

We are just trying to find the relevant table so that we can give you the right figure.

Table 5.18 on page 74 shows that there is a significant increase—approximately £40 million—in the investment in police current grant from the outturn figure in 1998-99 to the projections for 2001-02.

As I was trying to point out, the figures that Mr Gallie quoted are police central Government figures—in other words, figures for the 51 per cent of police funding that goes to central policing services, such as the Scottish crime squad, the livescan fingerprint service, DNA services and other services provided centrally across Scotland. The pension figures are covered by the police current grant in table 5.18. The figures speak for themselves. There is an increase of £40 million over the period referred to.

I thank the minister for correcting me on that. Can he explain where the central Government's contribution to policing lies? Does it lie within the allocation made to local authorities? In which table can I see the amount of the central Government's contribution to normal police officer services?

That figure, which is the 51 per cent of police costs that is contributed by the Scottish Executive, falls within the figure in table 5.18 on police current grant. On top of that, local authorities contribute 49 per cent to expenditure to make up the 100 per cent. Table 5.19 on police GAE gives the total figures. Disturbingly, the plans for 2001-02 say "N\a"—not applicable. I am not sure what that means.

I think that all of us are a bit unsure.

I am advised that it means that, at this stage, GAE for individual services has not yet been split up.

If that is the case, and given that local authorities plan expenditure on a year-to-year basis, what guarantee does the Executive have that local authorities will meet their percentage payment expectation? How relevant are the figures?

Grant-aided expenditure applies to a number of service delivery areas in local authority budgets. We are not dealing only with individual local authorities; in the case of police forces we are dealing with police boards, which can be composed of a number of police authorities. At present, only two or three police authorities are not spending at GAE, as directed by the Scottish Executive. Those that are not spending at GAE are within a small margin of error on either side. As far as I am aware, that does not have a significant impact on the capacity of the individual boards to deliver policing services. It should be noted that, if a local authority decides to spend beyond its GAE prediction, the additional costs must be met 100 per cent by the local authority.

In recent times, expenditure from local authorities has moved up towards the GAE limit. In the past, it did not always do so. We shall wait and see. Thank you for that answer.

You will not be surprised to learn that I am going to ask about civil legal aid yet again. I understand that it is demand led; the budget reflects the demand for civil legal aid. However, the amount of money that is being spent seems to be falling. There is a projected saving of about £9 million as a result of fiscal fines and so on.

That is criminal legal aid.

I beg your pardon. Nevertheless, the budget is not differentiated between civil and criminal legal aid. If there is £9 million that has not been spent, rather than regard it as a saving, should not we consider other ways of spending it where there are gaps in accessing justice? We should use savings from other areas to widen access to justice.

There are two points worth making, one of which has already been made. The legal aid budget, as you said, is demand led. If the call on the legal aid budget goes beyond what has been budgeted for, we would have to try to find sources from other areas in the department, or from outwith the department in extremis, to ensure that those demands are met.

The £9 million saving made in the legal aid budget in preceding years as a result of the fall in demand could, of course, be concentrated elsewhere in the legal aid budget, civil or otherwise. However, we must take a global view of the justice department budget. Although money is allocated to various sections of the department, those allocations are guidelines with greater or lesser rigidity, but there are constant flows across the budget into other sections and departments. When a saving becomes material, we must consider all competing demands on the justice department's budget.

There are a number of projects and areas, such as crime prevention, community safety and preventing and responding to domestic abuse, where expenditure is needed and where we are now providing significant funding. Those moneys are available only because we are willing and able to consider transferring money from other parts of the budget as the demand increases or decreases. That applies to the legal aid budget as it does to any other budget.

We cannot justify ring-fencing a given amount for legal aid without considering the other priorities that are competing for those resources. One could argue that, in theory, that £9 million should be retained in the legal aid budget and directed at specific issues, but in practice that is not appropriate.

What has happened to the pilot scheme for extending repayment of legal aid?

I am drowning in a sea of paper, but I shall answer your question in a moment.

Will that scheme continue?

Before you answer that, minister, I should remind Maureen that legal aid people are coming to the committee to give evidence. Those questions might be better directed at them.

I know that there are concerns about contributions. Maureen Macmillan is referring to the Scottish Legal Aid Board's pilot study into extending the period over which a contribution has to be paid. The report on the study has only recently come to hand, but we will agree to fund the extra costs associated with the extended payment periods. I hope that that will provide some comfort to members who felt that action was needed in that area.

Thank you.

In his evidence to the committee on 2 May, Professor Frank Stephen said that, although expenditure on legal aid is proportionately pretty much the same in Scotland as it is in England, 62 per cent of legal aid expenditure in Scotland is on criminal cases. He also said that, in England, a person pleading guilty gets legal aid, but that that does not happen in Scotland. The impact of that striking difference is that people want to negotiate a plea bargain or a plea in mitigation if they are pleading guilty. That has an impact in turn, as Gerard Brown of the Law Society of Scotland said, on the cost of legal aid. One can understand why people do that to get a better deal out of the system. Has the Executive considered and costed any plans to make legal aid available for guilty pleas? The European convention on human rights might also have an impact on entitlement to legal aid, and I would welcome the minister's comments on that.

According to Professor Stephen, 11 per cent of civil legal aid applications are abandoned after being granted. Because contributions have to be made, people are not taking legal aid and are therefore being denied access to justice, even though they have shown that they have probable cause. Professor Stephen's evidence shows that the proportion of applications rejected has increased substantially over the decade. Will the minister deal with that issue?

My final question is about costing the impact of devolution issues and ECHR issues on the budget. ECHR claims are anticipated and you may have to take them on board, and there are also grey areas in relation to which matters are devolved and which are not. Do you have an audit of that to date and do you have a projected figure in your costings for the justice department?

Last night I read the Official Report of the evidence given by Professor Stephen at the previous meeting and I noted with interest the statements that he made. I have some information to pass on to the committee.

The argument, as I understand it, is that making legal aid available for guilty pleas would effectively save the taxpayer money. In fact, the report referred to last week does not contain substantial amounts of hard evidence to support that view at this time. The report devotes half a page, out of 40 pages, to the issue.

There appears to be some confusion about what legal aid is available for guilty pleas. Legal aid is already available for those who intend to plead guilty, under the advice by way of representation schemes. In 1998-99, more than 119,000 grants of advice were made in criminal matters, and almost 16,000 grants were made in respect of ABWOR. Those grants cost the taxpayer more than £10 million. The duty solicitor scheme also costs approximately £1 million each year.

Another point that is worth making is that those who argue for legal aid for guilty pleas have not made clear how that new provision might work in practice. For example, should that provision be made for all offences or just for specific categories? Should existing eligibility rules apply or should new ones? Those questions would have to be addressed. Furthermore, primary legislation might be needed to effect such a change. Given what the committee considered for the first 15 minutes of this meeting, I am not sure that that would be thought the best use of time, although it might be. It may be necessary to amend section 21(3) of the Legal Aid (Scotland) Act 1986, which refers to pleas of not guilty.

Our tentative estimate would be that, contrary to the underlying assumption of the proposal, extending criminal legal aid as has been suggested might cost as much as £6 million each year, depending on the criteria that are used—that is a critical factor. That money is not readily available—we discussed the limitations of the legal aid budget earlier—and would have to be found at the expense of other initiatives.

It has been suggested that Scotland is out of step with England and Wales, where legal aid is available for guilty pleas, but the preliminary inquiries that our officials have made of the Lord Chancellor's Department suggest that the same availability generally exists both north and south of the border. Legal aid may be available in certain circumstances for guilty pleas in Crown courts, but not in summary criminal cases. However, in Scotland, provision is available under the Legal Aid (Scotland) Act 1986 for a court to grant legal aid. I am not sure what the substantive difference is, except that, before 1 April 2000, a contribution would have been required from an accused person in England and Wales. The situation in England and Wales is now in line with that in Scotland, where no contribution has been required. That is the information that has been given to me, following my reading of the report to which Christine Grahame refers. That is an area that would bear further examination, and further excavation of the facts might be useful.

Christine, I do not want us to go any further down this road, as we are some way off what we should be doing in this budget exercise. We need to return to the principles.

I thought that there would be an impact on the legal aid budget and that funds would be released for others.

We are spending too much time on this kind of detail at this stage. We will revisit the budget procedure and consider that level of detail later in the year.

Oh joy.

Christine Grahame raised two other points, one of which was on legal aid. I am afraid that I cannot remember the specific point.

It was whether you had reflected on the fact that the number of abandoned civil applications is running as high as 11 per cent. That is much higher than in previous years.

The committee discussed that issue when I produced two statutory instruments on funding for legal aid. A variety of factors can be at work in abandoned cases, and it is unclear whether there is a uniform explanation for them. That should be examined further, as there would be concern if individuals were abandoning cases for reasons that were not beneficial.

For legal aid support under the ECHR, the notional figure that has been budgeted for this year is £3 million. The figure for next year is £5 million.

I have a brief question on the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board. I am not sure what has happened to its funding. It has been suggested that that provision—some £5 million—has been transferred to the Home Office. I am not sure whether the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board is a devolved or a cross-border body. Does the Executive intend to examine the role of that board, to evaluate what it is doing and whether it is performing as we would expect it to?

The scheme is a cross-border one. Any attempt to evaluate or change it would therefore fall beyond the immediate remit of the Scottish Executive. In the past two years, it has been subject to a revision and is now a tariff scheme.

So, there is no role for this Parliament to look at the—

No, that is not true. Any conclusion about revising the scheme would have to be reached on a GB-wide basis: it would not be within the scope of the Parliament to make a decision unilaterally. We would want to take account of various factors. However, the matter is devolved, so it is within the competence of the Parliament to examine in any respect the working of the scheme and its application in Scotland. As a GB-wide scheme, however, any revision would require to take into account GB-wide factors.

I have one question for the minister. Previous questioning dealt with Victim Support Scotland. I have access to correspondence from the convener, which shows that the figures are in dispute. That will have an impact on the services that are provided by VSS and the programme that it will be able to undertake. I know that you are committed to using the services that VSS can provide, particularly for training judges and legal staff. Can you comment on that inconsistency?

I can comment on the Executive's funding of VSS. In its 1998-99 report, VSS stated that 85 per cent of its funding for 1999 came from the former Scottish Office. That is a substantial percentage, of which many other voluntary organisations in Scotland would be envious. This year's grant to VSS, for local services, is £1.2 million; for area headquarters and associated costs it is £325, 000; and for training it is £27,000. The total grant for victim support services under section 10 of the Social Work (Scotland) Act 1968 is £1.57 million, and £27,000 is also payable under section 9—in relation to training—which brings the total to £1.6 million. In addition, VSS will also receive up to £660,000 this year under section 10 for the roll-out of witness support services in the sheriff courts. The total grant is therefore £2.26 million.

I am questioning this merely because I understand, from the correspondence, that the services that Victim Support Scotland provides may be in jeopardy because of a lack of funding and the timing of the announcements.

I am not sure whether VSS has raised those points with us directly. Notwithstanding the point that you are making, VSS is not part of the base line, but recurringly funded from in-year savings. I am sure that VSS is conscious of receiving its funding on that basis. I presume that the fact that that has happened in successive years gives them some reassurance that that funding is likely to be available to them again.

If you have not already heard from VSS, you will in the near future.

VSS has not raised that matter with us directly.

I have to keep this brief minister, but I have a question on the important issue of prisons. There is effectively a reduction in prison funding. We have seen recent reports from the chief inspector of prisons expressing great concern about conditions in prisons such as Barlinnie. The number of people in prison is going up. How can we accept that the prison budget is going down?

There is no reduction in the baseline budget for the Scottish Prison Service. Prison numbers are steady at present: they are not increasing. As you will be aware, £13 million of end-year flexibility was transferred from the prison budget to the rest of the justice department budget, but the service's baseline budget has not been reduced. The service retained £11 million of end-year flexibility out of a total of £24 million, and that is available to it.

Minister, may I direct you to table 5.24, in which the figures are expressed in real terms? It shows a clear decline in funding for the Scottish Prison Service, from £199.9 million in 2000-01 to £195.9 million in 2001-02.

They are your figures minister, not mine.

That is an unusual occurrence, Mr Gallie. Convener, you are right to point out that those are real-terms figures.

So in real terms there is a decline.

Those are the real-terms figures. The committee can draw its own conclusion.

I have an endless number of questions minister, but you will be glad that I do not have time to ask them all. However, I will ask a couple of them and ask the rest in a letter.

Under the criminal justice social work section, on page 64, is the Executive proposing to increase the use of non-custodial orders or is it merely relying on the courts to make more use of the mechanisms that are already available? Are we planning to increase the ways in which non-custodial orders can be made, or is it simply that you are going to continue to make desperate efforts to get various sheriffs and justices to use the existing ones?

It would be fair to say that there is an element of both. A variety of disposals are available to the courts, and greater use could be made of them. We will seek to encourage that where appropriate. You will be aware that in a number of specific areas, drugs for example, we intend to look more closely at non-custodial—or custodial-related, but not immediately custodial—orders. With that in mind, it is fair to say that if we take those forward, it would be the Executive's intention to look at expanding the range of non-custodial orders that are available.

We have had information about the Victim Support questions that were asked last week. I am not sure whether this is one of the matters that Lyndsay McIntosh was getting at. Table 5.4, which is not expressed in real terms, indicates that aid for victim/witness support is static this year and next, at £1.3 million. We had a debate last week about that £1.3 million for 2000-01 actually being £1.57 million. Leaving that aside, either way, the proposals for 2001-02 show a decrease. I am sure that if the figures were translated into real-terms figures the decrease would be even bigger.

Minister, towards the bottom of the page, one of the objectives is

"To promote and develop services which provide support for victims of crime and witnesses through funding of Victim Support Scotland."

The target is to

"Increase from 41,000 referrals in 1998-99 to 48,000 in 2000-01."

There is no target for 2001-02. How can Victim Support reasonably be expected to cope with increases in referrals when its funding will not increase accordingly?

The figure for Victim Support in table 5.4 does not take account of in-year funding, to which I referred earlier, because it is funding that recurs annually but is not in the baseline budget. That funding is therefore not in the projections for 2000-01 and 2001-02. Unfortunately, that means that the figures in table 5.4 do not present the full picture in respect of funding for victim and witness support. It may be that we can do further work to make that information available to you when we are dealing with—

But the funding still will not increase, will it?

The advice that I am getting is that if in cash terms we are going to meet the pressure that is appearing, the funding will increase, but I can probably give you a more thorough answer to that question in writing once we have had the chance to source—

I am concerned about the disparity between the target, which is an increase in referrals, and the funding, which does not show a corresponding increase.

That is because these figures do not show the whole picture, which is why I am saying that once I get the information I can give you a more complete picture.

We have been through the issue of figures not showing the whole picture during previous meetings.

I appreciate that. May I say a bit more about Victim Support? I know that the evidence to the committee from representatives of Victim Support Scotland concerned the fact that the figures shown for Victim Support in the annual expenditure report disagreed with the 2000-01 grant for the organisation. This explanation might help. During the 1996 public expenditure survey, Victim Support Scotland received an additional £200,000 in grant for one year only.

We have all had the letter that explains that apparent discrepancy.

However, succeeding budget exercises in the Scottish Office and the Scottish Executive failed to find additional baseline funding for Victim Support, so the initial budget of £1.3 million has remained static, but at the same time, because it was acknowledged that Victim Support would face significant difficulties should it receive less than £1.5 million, we managed to keep Victim Support funding at £1.5 million, evidenced by the figures that I think you have received for outturn and the estimate figures in table 5.1, by transferring in on an annual basis additional provision from in-year savings accrued elsewhere in the budget.

The target fails to go beyond 2000-01. The target for increasing referrals goes up only to 2000-01, which we are in. There is no target for 2001-02. That is a gap, given that we are supposed to be talking about 2001-02. I will leave that issue for now, because we are pushed for time and I know that the minister will want to get away.

If the minister turns to pages 74 and 75, he will see something that looks a little odd. There may be a good reason for it. We have been looking at table 5.18 in respect of the police, but I wish to look at it in respect of asylum seekers. The estimated figure for asylum seekers for 1999-2000 is £8.8 million, but 2000-01 and 2001-02 are budgeted at zero. None of us imagines for a minute that money will not be spent on asylum seekers in Scotland in this financial year and the next, so what is happening?

My understanding is that about £5 million of the £8.8 million for 1999-2000 relates to Kosovan refugees. I say that by way of information. The reason for the figures for 2000-01 and 2001-02 is that that expenditure head is transferred to the Home Office. It is now funding those activities.

In total?

Yes; that is my understanding.

In total?

Yes.

So expenditure on asylum seekers has come out of the Scottish budget until now, but that will no longer happen.

My understanding is that effectively we have been carrying out that function as an executive agency, but the funding is now wholly covered by the Home Office.

It might have been useful to show that in the table. These are presentational issues, but simply producing a table of the sort that we have here is not particularly helpful.

Earlier, I offered the committee a meeting with senior finance officials. The budget contains a number of quirks and oddities that would become much clearer in the context of a presentation from them. That might help to iron out some of these issues.

I will desist from asking the other two pages' worth of questions; I will follow them up in a detailed letter.

I thank the minister and his team for attending. We have not yet completed item 2 of the agenda and will now hear from the chief executive of the Scottish Legal Aid Board and the board's director of legal services.

I welcome Mr Montgomery and Mr Murray. As you are already aware, the committee is extremely interested in the legal aid budget. Because we run the risk of going into too much detail for a budget exercise, and because members are tending to pre-empt a decision by the committee to undertake, when its timetable permits, a review of legal aid in Scotland, I will be strict with members. Some members' eagerness to get that review under way is overcoming their concern to keep themselves in order during this stage of the budget scrutiny. Am I making myself plain?

I will not ask a single question.

That would be a pity, because it would mean that we had invited two witnesses to appear for no purpose.

I want to ask about details of the pilot scheme for civil legal aid contribution repayments over two years, which I have discussed with you previously. What difference has that scheme made to take-up of civil legal aid? How much do you think it will cost?

I reckon that it will cost between £250,000 and £280,000 in a full year. It is not a huge amount because we get back a great deal of civil aid through recoveries or expenses, which means that the net cost will be in the order of between £250,000 and £280,000.

The pilot indicated that through the extension of instalments, about 14 per cent of people would take up legal aid who otherwise would not. We have added in a little extra for people who, having consulted their solicitor, have heard what the contribution may be and decided not to apply. That means the figure may be between 14 and 20 per cent.

When will the scheme come into operation?

As soon as we can get the administrative arrangements in place following the minister's announcement. The cost is not likely to reach £250,000 for another two years. In the first year the cost will probably be no more than about £60,000, which is marginal.

I do not think that I am allowed to ask you about policy issues, which are part of the minister's remit, so I will avoid getting into the whys and wherefores of family tax credit and so on. I think you know my views on the lack of access to justice in some quarters. I hope that this pilot scheme, when applied to the country as a whole, will make a difference.

If I waver from the straight and narrow, please tell me, convener. Professor Stephen said that 32 per cent of expenditure on legal aid goes on summary cases in sheriff courts where no trial takes place. That also accounted for 49 per cent of the increase in expenditure. It may not be proper for you to comment on the questions I asked about legal aid being available for guilty pleas, but when you look through auditing accounts—which show what is really happening on the ground—do you think that the criminal legal aid bill could be reduced if legal aid were available earlier for pleas in mitigation and plea bargaining?

As the minister said, we have the assistance by way of representation scheme, which is designed in part to put people in the same position as their counterparts in England. Having looked at the figures, we would want to work with the justice department to see whether there is something underlying them that we have not yet worked out. We do not think that it is clear that doing what you suggest would save money. In my short experience at the Legal Aid Board, I have found that everything is much more complex than initial figures show and I suspect that that may be true in this case. However, we want to examine the issue—along with eligibility—as we think there are difficulties with access.

A figure of £3 million is projected for the legal aid bill for European convention on human rights issues. Are you satisfied that that will be sufficient? Perhaps it is too much.

I doubt that it will be too much. To be frank, I have sympathy with the Executive in having to come up with a figure at all, as it is extremely difficult to say what the bill will be. We are probably less concerned than the Executive is, because the budget is demand led—if it turns out to be more, the Executive will have to find the money. However, we think that the Executive has made a reasonable stab at it, given the amount of information that we have at the moment, which is not much.

Can you provide the committee with any information about why 11 per cent of applications are abandoned, even though legal aid is offered? I imagine that there is still a solicitor's bill.

We do not always receive information on why applications are abandoned or why offers that we make are refused. It seems to happen for a wide range of reasons. Sometimes people resolve the problem before the process goes too far, which is a positive outcome for them and for us. However, contributions are also a major factor—people get so far and then decide that they cannot afford to proceed further. We hope that the change to the contribution arrangements will have an impact on that. We will monitor it over the next year to see whether there are other issues that we need to address.

More generally, we are trying to increase contact with the people for whom we provide legal aid and to get information from them on why they do certain things. That could be a useful way of getting better answers to some of these important questions.

Are you going to do a survey of people who make applications?

A survey may not be the best approach. We may try to obtain targeted information, possibly from solicitors as well as independently. At the moment we lack information on the outcome of cases, which makes me slightly uncomfortable.

I see. I have been disciplined.

About 6 per cent of expenditure on legal aid goes on administration. What moves has the Legal Aid Board made recently towards efficient provision of services? Do you seek capital investments to reduce administration costs in the long term?

I will deal with the second question first. We, and many solicitors who contact us, want to do our business through e-commerce. That would save them and us a large amount of money in administration costs. We have submitted a paper to the justice department that points out some of the investments that would make a big difference in that area and would lead to a reduction in the number of people we require for certain activities. That will be our major drive over the next two or three years.

On internal operations, we are in the process of carrying out a major review of applications, which are the bulk of our activity, with a view to identifying areas where we can become more efficient. However, at the moment my main concern is our effectiveness rather than our efficiency. We are looking hard at how we can improve consistency in decision making and in the information we provide to the people with whom we deal. That will be our main drive over the next year or so. We have indicated to the department that some investment in additional staff resources will be required to deal with matters such as the European convention on human rights. We will need more lawyers to deal with the cases that will come before us. We must strike a balance between investing to be better and increasing our efficiency

Given that the budget is bottom-line fixed, I imagine that if you intend to increase staffing that will account for a considerable proportion of your administration costs.

It will account for the bulk of the costs.

That does not appear to be reflected in the figures that are presented in the document.

Our submission to the justice department says what we think will be necessary over the next couple of years and the figures in the submission are slightly higher than those to which Phil Gallie referred. No doubt the department will want to discuss the figures with me soon.

In the previous financial year there was higher investment in staffing and on capital projects than was indicated in the original figures that were set three years ago.

If you were to take the e-commerce route, would that perhaps require capital investment? Staff levels might be frozen so that there was a break-even in the longer term and an improvement in effectiveness.

My guess is that that would lead to reductions in staffing levels for a number of activities. As well as there being an improvement in how well we do our job, there would be a net gain to the taxpayer over five or six years.

Can you give the committee a breakdown of the £127.3 million budget in respect of the proportion spent on criminal legal aid and the proportion spent on civil legal aid?

Spending on criminal legal aid ranges between about 58 per cent and 62 per cent of the total.

That is not reclaimable. Is the other 38 per cent reclaimable and recyclable?

Civil legal aid uses between £30 million and £34 million, minus the recoveries we make, which total about £11 million each year. The net cost is in the low twenties of millions of pounds.

I want to ask about increasing access to justice. Are there any changes to rules regarding civil or criminal legal aid—which would not impact on the budget—that you would like to see?

I am not sure whether this is the best place to discuss details of changes to our regulations that we would like to see. There are a number of things that we feel could be changed, which would improve access to justice. That is particularly so of the civil regulations, which is where the major difficulties lie. The board is hoping to examine in detail what we can do under regulation 18 of the Civil Legal Aid Regulations (Scotland) 1996, which is the special urgency provision. That constitutes about two thirds of our civil business. We might—by making minor changes in our practice—be able to expedite access to justice. The problem is not only about contributions; other aspects are involved. That will be a major piece of work in the next six months. There might be some budgetary impact, but we do not think that the changes would cost a huge amount.

I want to ask about the objectives and targets on page 67 of "Investing in You". Have those objectives and targets been imported?

The Executive produced the document and the figures are based on figures or materials from other documents. We have a separate corporate plan, which will be published.

I wanted to get on to that. This morning I mentioned the disparity between the objectives and targets that have been set for different areas. Some of the objectives and targets are very detailed and are easily measurable, but others are not.

We have a separate document that sets out our targets and objectives.

Can the committee see a copy? It is difficult for the committee to undertake real scrutiny if we do not know what targets you have set for your organisation and how well you have done in achieving your targets in previous years.

We will be happy to provide the committee with the document.

We submit the document to ministers—

So they have the document.

Officials have seen a draft. We will finalise the document in the next week or so. It will go to ministers who will say whether they are happy with the targets that we propose. At the end of the day, they set targets for the Legal Aid Board as a non-departmental public body. That is why the targets are different from those of other organisations that are agencies or parts of the department.

Will the targets relate to 2001-02?

Our corporate plan will cover the three-year period from 2000-01 to 2002-03.

Could the committee have a copy of the previous three-year corporate plan?

Yes.

Why—for the layman—do you expect criminal legal aid accounts to be paid on time when no such reference is made in relation to civil legal aid accounts being paid—

At all. [Laughter.]

Our targets cover all types of application and account, but criminal legal aid is mentioned because that is where we had a major difficulty last year. We changed the system. Previously we expected a percentage of the account to be paid within so many weeks, but we now expect all to be paid within 30 days.

We have established that the Executive's choice of objectives and targets is a rather arbitrary selection by officials from outwith the Legal Aid Board. It will be useful for the committee to see the board's own objectives and targets.

We will send you our existing corporate plan and the new one.

Have members been sent those already?

I would be surprised if the committee does not have the previous plan. On the new plan, we have conducted a major fundamental review of the targets and indicators including public meetings and meetings with local faculties of solicitors.

I want to clear something up. If, when the Legal Aid Board submits its targets, ministers examine them and do not like them, do they get changed?

Theoretically, yes.

So the committee will not necessarily see the targets that you really want to set.

The process is brand new.

That is why I am asking—it was a brand new thought that I had.

We—as a non-departmental public body—are, in the first instance, accountable to the justice department. Ministers are required to set targets if they disagree with ours, or to agree our targets. We are going through that process. In future years I expect that our corporate plan will be available to the committee and to ministers earlier than the new one. We have done a lot of work on reviewing our targets and indicators and the plan is about two months late.

Will what the committee sees have been processed through ministers and sent back to you? We could ask about that when we see the targets.

You might want to ask the minister whether the targets might also be sent to the Justice and Home Affairs Committee when we give him them. My guess is that it might of more than marginal interest to the committee. [Laughter.]

There are no further questions at this stage, but I am sure that you will be back before the committee at some point.

I adjourn the committee for brief pit stops and cigarette smoking.

Meeting adjourned.

On resuming—