Agenda item 3 is to take further evidence on the financial memorandum to the Police, Public Order and Criminal Justice (Scotland) Bill. As members will recall, last week we took evidence from the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, the Association of Scottish Police Superintendents and the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland.
Yes, please. We are glad to have the opportunity to discuss with you our financial assumptions for the bill. I listened with interest to your meeting last week when you took evidence on these matters from COSLA, ACPOS and ASPS and, in particular, to the suggestion that we could have consulted more widely on the figures while the financial memorandum was being prepared. I want to make our position on that clear. Although it is always possible to consult more, we did consult key stakeholders on the financial questions. Our overriding aim was to get the figures right and as realistic as they could be. To that end, we contacted all the organisations that we felt could help us to do that. We were in touch with HM inspectorate of constabulary for Scotland on complaints; United Kingdom Government departments on matters such as mandatory drug testing; Strathclyde police on football banning orders; the Crown Office, the Scottish Court Service and the Scottish Legal Aid Board on the likely cost to them of the policies in the bill; and ACPOS on most of the assumptions affecting the police, including the assumed £2 million time savings in relation to fingerprint readers.
Derek Brownlee wants to pursue the brownies question.
It was not so much the brownies that were concerning me as the more traditional parades of the south of Scotland. Last week, when COSLA was before the committee, the view was expressed that the bill would catch traditional processions such as common ridings. My understanding, on a plain reading of the bill, is that any march, as we would understand the term, would be caught by the bill, although I know that guidance may be produced. Is it your position that the bill catches, and is intended to catch, any march or procession?
The bill says that the only people who are exempt are funeral directors and any other body that is specified in an order that is made by Scottish ministers. We have asked the working group on marches and parades to identify bodies that it thinks should be exempt from notifications. We will put any suggestions to the minister for her to take a decision on whether those bodies should be exempt.
That gives you and us a practical difficulty in identifying the likely cost of implementing the bill. Those exemptions are not in the bill and we do not know what decisions Scottish ministers might make once the bill is passed. Does that not give us a huge degree of uncertainty as to the likely cost?
I hope that we will get some feedback on that from the working group fairly quickly, so that we will be able to get a view from the minister on the bodies that are likely to be exempted. That will give us more of a steer as to the bodies that will not fall into the categories of exemption.
A significant number of marches will be one-offs and specific to local areas, so they will not be organised by bodies, as such. Other marches throughout Scotland will be conducted by organisations that are bodies in the terms that you have described. Will the provision to give Scottish ministers the power to exempt such bodies also enable them to exempt individual marches? For example, a small community in the south of Scotland might have a traditional march that is unique to a town or village. How could that be dealt with?
It depends. If a march was held every year, we would need to see whether there was scope in the bill for ensuring that, where appropriate, it could be exempted. However, there is nothing in the bill specifically to exempt unique events such as the make poverty history march—they would have to go through the notification process.
In his opening statement, Bill Barron said that he stands by the figure in the financial memorandum. I have taken on board what he said about the uncertainty over what Scottish ministers decide. However, last week, COSLA was adamant that the figure in the financial memorandum is a significant understatement. How do you respond to that?
We have spoken to COSLA about funding right from the outset. We are happy to continue that dialogue and look at the evidence for what it thinks will need to be added on to the cost. We have not had a chance to speak to COSLA about its latest submission, but we are happy to do that. It is an on-going process.
The scope of the marches that will be included, which we discussed initially, is one thing, but COSLA said that its estimates are based on the type of marches that are caught by the current legislation so, even on the basis of the marches that you both think will be covered, there is a significant disparity in the cost estimates. This question might not be a fair one but, given the lack of detail on what councils are expected to do to comply with the proposed legislation, are there any plans to produce guidance notes before the bill proceeds any further, or will we have to wait until further down the line?
The working group will prepare guidance that we hope will be issued during the bill's passage. We hope that, by early next year, we will have draft guidance ready to circulate to key bodies for their comments and that it will allow us to address some specific questions that we are being asked at the moment.
Any appropriate guidance will also depend on carve-outs by ministers. Will it be kept under review until ministers decide whether certain marches will be considered for exemption? If we go back to the rather facetious point about the brownies, I imagine that the consultation for such marches will differ from that for more contentious and controversial marches.
We hope those decisions will be made fairly quickly so that we can take them back to the group and incorporate them in our work on drawing up the final figures.
Did anyone think about putting that in the bill instead of keeping it for guidance and leaving it to ministers' discretion?
Are you talking about exemptions?
Yes. Did anyone think about giving greater detail on likely exemptions and levels of guidance in the bill?
Not that I am aware of.
Given the lack of precision in the figures in your financial memorandum and COSLA's alternatives, the committee finds it difficult to take a view on whether either set is reasonable.
We are certainly keen to discuss the figures further with COSLA. For example, its new figures contain quite considerable costs for advertising that we are not sure are necessary. After all, the bill leaves it to individual local authorities to decide how they keep their communities informed. Moreover, it appears to have based the figures on those in the Orr report, which are figures for 2003, and we want to consider more up-to-date ones. As a result, we want to discuss several issues with COSLA and are happy to report back to the committee on any further discussions that we have.
Derek Brownlee's line of questioning has just opened up a new anxiety for me. Common ridings and other processions in the south of Scotland require roads to be closed. Under current guidance and the audit procedures that councils have to follow, the council is required to charge organisations for closing the road. I am a bit worried that if the legislation does not exempt events such as common ridings, the council will have to levy a nominal charge on organisations for this as well.
To be honest, I do not know enough about road closures, although I understand that charitable bodies are exempt from having costs placed on them for road closures.
Many of the committees that organise common ridings and so on do not have a constitution. Councils have managed to get round some of the road closure problems, but I am a bit anxious that the bill could place another pressure on some of those traditional events.
It is certainly not our intention to place unnecessary burdens on people that might prevent them from holding marches and parades. Unfortunately, I do not know enough about what has been said about road closures to be able to tell you one way or the other what the situation is.
I raise a procedural issue and pick up on Derek Brownlee's point. You propose a legislative change that is, at the very least, capable of different interpretation because of the absence of guidance. That places a serious difficulty on the Finance Committee. If you had given us even some preliminary guidance to define what you mean by contentious marches and the kinds of things that ministers might be expected to exempt, that would have narrowed the financial parameters. The absence of that places the committee in a difficult position.
It is worth noting that the COSLA paper that the committee received this morning also talked solely about contentious marches, which are what the debate on costs will be about. I am sure that there will be a resolution of the issues to do with non-contentious marches.
I hope that there will be, but it is not in your proposals and that is the problem. You have proposed legislation that says that all marches will be subject to the framework, but you now say, "Actually, we only mean contentious marches." That presents us with a difficulty. Although I appreciate that you might be able to give us greater clarification further down the road, by then the time for financial scrutiny will have passed. That will not allow us to go through the intended legislative process.
I hope that we can make the draft guidance available to the committee fairly shortly. We are currently consulting the working group to try to get the guidance into a format that we can issue to people for consideration.
I will follow up what the convener said. We are being asked to look at the financial implications of the bill based on a memorandum that has been provided to us by the Scottish Executive. In response to Derek Brownlee's questions on substantial areas, we were told that that information will be put into guidance, which we do not yet have. Knowing the way in which the Executive goes about legislation, I imagine that that guidance will not be finalised until a considerable period after the bill has received royal assent. I am therefore concerned about how we can fulfil our statutory duty to undertake proper scrutiny of the financial implications of the bill if substantial judgments about how far the bill will apply to different organisations will not be clear until the bill has received royal assent.
I hope that the guidance will be ready before then. We hope to issue it to everybody for comments at the beginning of the new year and we hope to receive responses fairly quickly so that the finalised—
My point is that we are currently looking at the financial memorandum that has been published by the Scottish Executive. There is a substantial amount of uncertainty about how extensive the financial implications will be, based on whether numerous organisations—whether they are brownie packs, the organisers of common ridings or remembrance parades such as the one that I was at in my constituency at the weekend, or the Orange order or republican groups—will come within the ambit of the bill.
I think that you have to go on what you have been given by the witnesses.
We have to go on what?
On what you were given by the witnesses from COSLA last week.
I think that the problem is that we raised this as a point of principle in the past when we encountered a similar situation. Now you are coming to us again with a bill whose financial elements depend on guidance that we will not see. The issue is whether the financial memorandum is adequate to allow the committee to perform its functions.
I want to pursue the remark that Mr Barron just made. The section on public processions in the Executive memorandum says that the additional cost to local authorities might be £200,000 per annum. In evidence to the committee last week, COSLA estimated that the cost would be £927,500. What you are telling me in effect is that the financial memorandum, which was submitted by the Government to allow the bill to go through, should not be observed and that we should instead look to COSLA's financial projections.
No. I am making the point that it is significant that COSLA evidence concentrated entirely on contentious marches.
But its estimate of the cost of dealing with contentious marches is still £927,500. Your view is that the extra cost for contentious marches would be £200,000. The committee is therefore no further forward in knowing whether only contentious marches will be in the bill's ambit or whether it will include, for example, every British Legion parade in every town in the country, common ridings or whatever else goes on in other parts of the country.
I think that we can help you today on the difference between our estimate and COSLA's for contentious marches. The point that I was trying to deal with was the procedural matter about whether you have to wait for guidance on the costs for non-contentious marches.
Yes, but I am left with the very strong sense that, until we see the guidance and know what the ministers decide to exempt, we will not know the bill's true financial consequences. That is the point that the convener made about the judgments that we can reach at this stage of the process.
There is a debate between COSLA and us about whether the costs for the contentious marches would be £200,000 or £1 million plus. I think that it would be reasonable for you to press us on that debate. If you wish to open up another debate about other marches, which neither COSLA nor we have opened, I am not sure that that will go anywhere.
With the greatest of respect, Mr Barron, you are here to talk to the bill's financial memorandum. I am unable to tell you whether the bill's financial consequences will include organisations such as those that organise common ridings or whether it will be only contentious marches. If it is just the latter, that is fine. However, I have been in this game long enough to know that by the time we get to the end of consideration of the bill, various other people will be brought within the bill's ambit, costs will increase and we will be left trying to establish, on duff financial information, what the true financial consequences of the bill are.
No. I understand the problem, but our position is made clear in the memorandum, which says that it is our assumption that the local authorities with contentious marches will need to increase staffing and so on. Our memorandum makes it clear that that is where we feel the costs will fall.
That might have been reasonable if you had produced outline guidance—it would not need to be detailed—to make it clear what kinds of marches would be exempt and what kinds of marches would be included within the bill's scope. I do not really see that made explicit. If you read the bill, you will see that it applies the procedures to all marches and is silent on how exemptions will be made. The difficulty that we have is that there are gaps between the bill, your version of the costs in the financial memorandum and COSLA's version. Therefore, we are trying to juggle three balls.
Both our figures and COSLA's were specifically based on the contentious marches, which are the ones for which we both believe significant costs might arise.
Perhaps I am just being slow here, but we have a bill that, as the convener said, will apply to all marches in Scotland regardless of whether they are contentious or non-contentious. Therefore, the financial memorandum should reflect the bill's impact.
We think that there will be significantly more work for people who are involved in pre-march meetings and post-march meetings with march organisations, and in places where more community consultation is going to be necessary. That will be for marches that we already know have issues, such as the ones that we have identified.
Let us look at the problem another way. What estimate have you made of the increased level of activity that will have to be undertaken to give authorisation for a non-contentious march to take place?
We do not believe that there will be any significant increase in the amount of activity. The organisation will still have to submit its notification to the council which, if it has no issues with the march, will give the go-ahead, although, obviously, the police will have to be notified.
So the council does not have to advertise the march publicly.
I do not think that that is necessary. The bill states that the council has to have a list of all previous marches and notifications of marches and it has to make that available. There is nothing in the bill to say expressly that councils have to advertise marches.
One of the points that the COSLA representative made last week was that it would be reasonable to expect a local authority, in fulfilling its statutory obligation under the bill to undertake adequate consultation about a march, to put an advert in a local newspaper saying, for example, that the local British Legion intends to march for remembrance day and any objections should be sent to the council by 1 November. In any local newspaper in the country that advert would cost £150 and that would have to be paid in order to satisfy the statutory obligation of consultation. If it is going to cost £150 for every advert for every remembrance day march, and for all the other marches that take place in the country, local authorities around the country will have to pay a fair amount of money. We need to know what is expected of consultation and the statutory obligations that local authorities will have to meet to make sure that it is done effectively.
The bill does not specifically mention community consultation. We have taken the view that under the Local Government in Scotland Act 2003, consulting on marches and parades can be done as part of the community consultation process that is already on-going at the moment. We have not specified how—
So that will have no financial implications for local authorities. That is your position.
At the moment, we take the view that the Local Government in Scotland Act 2003 community consultation process covers consultations on marches and parades.
Why, then, when you were framing the bill, did you apply it to all marches rather than limiting it to controversial or contentious marches? Would it not have been possible to leave the position in the Local Government in Scotland Act 2003 as it was for non-controversial marches and to design the bill in such a way that it applied only to those marches that you wished to regulate?
Part of the reason for having the review was the desire for consistency in the way in which marches and parades are dealt with across Scotland. Some of the recommendations that were made by Sir John Orr give us a framework for achieving consistency in the way in which issues are dealt with and decisions are taken.
Were Sir John Orr's comments on consistency not to do with the desirability of consistency across Scotland in the treatment of contentious marches rather than consistency between the brownies and the Orange order?
In the review, Sir John covered all marches and parades.
But the costings and the burden of his report were on contentious marches.
Yes, because those are the ones that we think will involve additional costs in terms of the notification process and the additional need for meetings with march organisers, debriefing sessions and so on.
I am not sure that I necessarily accept that. However, carrying on from what John Swinney was saying, can you give a clear indication that the guidance will be such that the arrangements for non-contentious parades will impose no additional burden on local government, or are you not in a position to make that statement?
Would it be helpful if we were to submit a paper saying what the guidance is going to cover and covering the issue of exemptions?
Something on the principles would be helpful. However, what would be particularly helpful from COSLA's point of view is an explicit answer to the question that I have just asked you. If the parameters of the bill are going to be such that the costs are associated only with contentious parades, as has been suggested, we need to know how "contentious" is going to be defined. We also need to know what is going to happen to those marches or parades that are not deemed to be contentious and whether there are any financial implications that neither you nor COSLA is currently taking account of. I would like an assurance that we are not talking about an unacknowledged cost.
We are happy to continue our discussions with COSLA about the implications of the provisions on marches and parades and we are happy to consider any evidence that it has about whether the proposals will go beyond contentious marches. Certainly, when we originally considered the matter, we did not believe that the additional burden of the provisions on non-contentious marches would be significant enough to justify extra administrative resources being sought.
On the issue of the contentious marches, can you explain the discrepancy between your figure of £200,000 and COSLA's figure of £927,500?
When we came up with the £200,000 figure, we had spoken to COSLA and Glasgow City Council to see whether we could come up with a formula that we could use. At the time, however, they were not able to give us anything. We basically took the figures in Sir John's report, which identified five local authorities as being the ones that had the most marches. We felt that the most significant impact would be on those councils and we came up with the figure on the basis of extra administrative costs for them. However, at that time, we did not have anything over and above that. We had spoken to COSLA about the Glasgow pilot with a view to getting more accurate figures from that when its results are published in December.
Given the information that you have now, is your figure of £200,000 or COSLA's figure of £900,000 more reliable? Which is more realistic?
I understand that the £900,000 relates to communication costs, advertising in local newspapers and so on. I would like to discuss the figure further with COSLA, because not every march will necessarily have to be advertised in a newspaper. The figures are probably higher than those that we would have given if we had gone down the route that COSLA took.
So the figure could be £200,000, if your original proposition is right; it could be £900,000, if COSLA is right; or it could be more than that, because COSLA's figure is based on the figures for five local authorities, and more local authorities may well have to deal with marches, as COSLA's submission says.
COSLA's figures are £400,000-odd for administration and £900,000-odd for advertising. We very much take exception to and challenge the advertising figure. That narrows the subject to a debate between £200,000 and £400,000, which is less than the difference that was discussed last week.
I will continue the line about the guidance on contentious marches. West Lothian, which is in my region, has a significant number of republican and Orange marches. However, many marches in Edinburgh take place here because the Parliament is here; they are political but are not necessarily republican or Orange order marches. Will such marches be classed as contentious? If so, how will the guidance be constructed to deal with them?
I do not think that such marches will be classed as contentious. The working group must consider the matter and provide more guidance on what will fall under the term, but I do not think that the make poverty history march, for example, would have been considered contentious, because it did not attract a negative reaction from the public.
A march in favour of congestion charging in Edinburgh would be a fairly contentious march on a current political issue. Will the definition be based on the wider community's response to marches?
Many marches are annual, so we hope that local authorities could identify those that would cause communities most concern.
Without advertising, the need for which Mr Barron questioned, how will it be possible to tell which marches cause communities concern? If the decision is for a council to make, that makes it subjective. Surely the advertising that the COSLA submission mentions will be needed to detect whether a march is contentious. COSLA makes it clear in its submission that it considers its figures to be
The bill's only express provision on local authorities is that they should maintain records of marches that are held in their areas. They will publish those records and the notifications of marches that are sent to them. Beyond that, it is for the local authorities themselves to decide how they publicise that information so that their communities know that it is available.
But Mr Barron questioned whether the advertising was necessary. You seem to be saying that advertising is a responsibility on local authorities and that it is for local authorities to choose whether to advertise. There is a difference. Is whether to advertise a choice for local authorities or, as Mr Barron seemed to say, is it unnecessary for local authorities to advertise?
Making lists of notifications available is not a choice—it is part of the bill—but how local authorities advertise them and make their communities aware of them is left up to them.
But COSLA states that meeting the requirement to
I was not saying that there should be no advertising; I was saying that I find dubious the suggestion that it would be necessary to spend more than £1,000 on advertising every one of 300 marches in Glasgow.
But do you acknowledge that there would be a cost for advertising, and that, given that advertising in the Edinburgh Evening News might cost £500 per advert, the City of Edinburgh Council might face considerable costs in advertising political, and therefore potentially contentious, marches?
I do not think that we know the answer. The bill establishes that there need to be working communication channels. I do not think that we know whether that would require advertising on that scale for very many marches.
I want to pursue a couple of issues that arise out of what Mark Ballard said. Presumably, the bill puts legal obligations on local authorities to comply with its requirements on notifying the public. Is it the case that a local authority could be legally challenged for not adequately advertising marches, and that that could lead to a situation in which, whatever your intention at this point, local authorities would be legally required to advertise on a much wider basis than you anticipate? Our difficulty is that you are putting an obligation on authorities, but you are not circumscribing it. Even if you tried to circumscribe it, could you effectively do so? The unintended consequences could be serious for local government.
Section 66(8) states:
Individual local authorities will know best how to make their communities aware of marches and parades in their areas, so we have done nothing more than leave it open to them to take a view on how to do that.
The convener made an important point in relation to the danger of legal challenge. Let us take, for example, Glasgow City Council, and the advertising of marches in newspapers under section 66(8). Anyone who has advertised recently in The Herald will know that it costs a tidy sum to do so. If, after spending £30,000 on such advertising in one financial year, the council decides that it will not do it again and instead puts up a notice outside Glasgow City Council headquarters saying that there will be an Orange order march in the east end of Glasgow, somebody might come out of a shop on the day of the event to see an Orange order march going past and say, "I didn't know about this, and I should have been told about it under the new law." That person could go off and raise an action, and the court could determine that sticking up a notice outside Glasgow City Council's headquarters is not sufficient to notify the citizens of Glasgow that there is going to be an Orange order march. There is a danger of legal challenge to local authorities, whose representatives have, quite reasonably, highlighted a number of additional costs that are likely to arise out of the bill.
I have to be honest and say that I do not know the potential for legal challenges. I would have to take that point away and come back to members with a view, but I cannot say off the top of my head.
Nora Radcliffe, who was present earlier, talked about expecting people to do their best, but I would like to put a different scenario to you. Suppose that a small political organisation—not necessarily the Green party, but perhaps a group that was interested in marching routinely to demonstrate about congestion charging or some other issue—could muster 10 people but decided that it wanted to notify authorities right across Scotland of its intention to hold weekly marches on a certain issue. Presumably such an organisation could require local authorities to advertise its presence and activity over a period. It would be an effective way of ensuring wide publicity for a cause and getting local authorities to pay for it.
Be careful how many good ideas you throw out, convener.
Would that be permitted under the bill?
The councils would have to deal with that situation as they saw fit.
That brings us back to the danger of legal challenge. You are putting a duty on local authorities on which—certainly, as I read it—a local authority could be tested. That could be controversial ground. If people have strong feelings about a specific march, whatever it might be about, and if there is a duty on local authorities to provide adequate notification, local authorities will be in the frame for legal challenge if people take exception to the manner in which the matter is handled.
As I have said, I do not know the answer to the question on legal challenge, but I am happy to take it away and respond to the committee later.
On the question of what is contentious and what is not contentious, you have said that political marches would not generally be considered contentious, but what if the British National Party decides to march in an area with a high concentration of ethnic minority residents—or indeed, as far as I am concerned, if it decides to march anywhere? In those circumstances, the people who feel under threat might well feel that the march should have been treated as contentious.
As part of the guidance, we want to get the working group's view on such issues. The working group includes COSLA and all the other local government and police bodies, and we are certainly happy to consider the issue and see what can be included in the guidance to give people a better steer.
I have one final question. In the process of deciding the parameters of the bill, was consideration given to whether the costs of notification and advertising should fall entirely on the council taxpayer or whether they should be passed on to the march organisers or any other person?
The legal advice that we were given was that we cannot place any financial burdens on march organisers; any financial burden on them would infringe their human rights. Therefore, we were told that that is a route that we cannot take.
However, you are allowed to impose burdens on the council taxpayer that they might not have asked for.
Well, that is—
It is a rhetorical question.
Paragraph 246 of the memorandum, "Amendments To The Law On Knife Crime, Costs on the Scottish Police service", states that:
That paragraph is not the most important one on knife crime. The final sentence, which says that there are two effects that might cancel each other out, could have been worded better to say that we think that both effects are very small. To say that they cancel each other out is perhaps not helpful.
I am not quite sure where the miscommunication crept in—whether it was in what ACPOS told us when it said that it felt that it could not justify a position of cost neutrality or in what you are telling us about the consultation. Can you explain why we should listen to your evidence rather than to the evidence that we heard from ACPOS?
I am not saying that one is more likely to be right than the other. I spoke to the vice-president of ACPOS, who is the chairman of the crime business area; you spoke to the honorary secretary of ACPOS, who is the chairman of the finance business area. The miscommunication was between them.
Surely the job of the Finance Committee is to seek that clarification. If so, I ask you on what basis you assumed that the provisions would be cost neutral? Are you now saying that they will involve minimal cost rather than be cost neutral? We need to have some idea of the cost implications of all aspects of the financial memorandum if we are to do our scrutiny job.
As you noted, the financial memorandum refers to
The bill will allow the police to arrest people on suspicion of possession, and that wider power of arrest—if it is used—will result in additional arrests, additional visits to the procurator fiscal and so on; in other words, it will have additional costs.
I agree that that is the more important knife-crime issue for the committee to consider. In the memorandum, we have taken the position that the bill will provide a tool for the police. At the moment, an officer who does knife-crime enforcement will stop and search someone and, if they discover a knife, will ask them whether they have a good reason for carrying it. If they do not, the officer will ask for their name and address. Unless there are any suspicious circumstances—for example, if the officer does not believe the name and address that the person has given or thinks that a more serious offence might be committed—that person will not be arrested. They will be prosecuted later through the ordinary citation procedure. Under the bill, the police will have the option of arresting such a person on the spot and taking them to the station. When that power is used, we think that it will give quicker access to justice and send out a clearer signal to people on the street who carry knives.
I understand that the additional cost of the knife-crime proposals to the Scottish Prison Service is estimated to be £150,000. Given what you have just said about the total cost to the police force of the changes, how did you get to that figure?
As you recognise, and as ACPOS said last week, if the police use their new tool to do a lot more knife-crime enforcement, there could be more substantial costs to the Prison Service on the back of that. We have left that to one side because we think that the extent to which that tool will be used is the chief constables' decision.
The figure seems very low.
Indeed. That is because a very small number of prisoners go through that procedure for knife crime on its own.
The police organisations told us that they were uncertain about your estimate of the savings that would accrue from remote fingerprinting. They said that the fact that mobile units were not used in Scotland made it difficult to assess your figure for the savings. How did you arrive at that figure?
Those savings are difficult to estimate. The fingerprint readers will allow police officers who see someone out on the street committing a minor antisocial behaviour offence to ask that person to give a fingerprint reading there and then. That will let the officers check whether the person is wanted for something more serious. The practical effect of that will be that police officers will sometimes not need to take an individual back to the station to fingerprint them to find out who they are, because they will be able to do that there and then. That will often save time.
So we are talking about time-releasing savings rather than cash-releasing savings.
Absolutely. We agree with ACPOS about that, although we do not agree that all our costs are cash costs. In fact, the majority of the costs that we have netted off against the £2 million are also time costs.
I want to ask about central funding. At the moment, the majority of policing costs are met through the revenue support grant but, according to ACPOS, an additional 10 per cent of funding is met from council tax and non-domestic rates. ACPOS is concerned that, if the Executive does not provide funding for that 10 per cent, we might end up with a black hole in the funding. What is your view on that matter?
Our view is that, provided that we can get agreement with COSLA and the police authorities on what the exact figures should be, there would be agreement to follow the chain through in a way that ensures that the changes are cost neutral. We would intend to take the full amount out of the RSG even if it were true that a small amount of funding was normally contributed by council tax payers.
Do you anticipate that there will be a compensating bookkeeping entry to reduce the money that goes to local government?
Yes. If it is agreed that certain costs will fall on the Executive rather than be shared 50:50 or 95:5 or whatever the arrangement might be, we envisage that we will make a corresponding change to how the money flows around.
What benefits would accrue from such a move to central funding?
We believe that providing 100 per cent funding from the Executive for the new non-departmental public body for common police services will be a clearer, more transparent and—to be frank—much simpler arrangement than providing funding through several different funding streams.
Will that clearer arrangement result only in one-way traffic, whereby money flows down to common police services, or will benefits accrue the other way in the form of a clearer understanding of the effectiveness of policing?
That will be very much the case. Both the Scottish police services authority and the director of the SCDEA will be required to publish annual plans and annual reports. The authority's overall amount of funding, part of which will be ring fenced for the SCDEA, will also be published and will be allocated by the Scottish ministers in the first instance. The arrangements will be much clearer and more transparent than the existing arrangements, which have developed on an ad hoc basis for each of the separate common police services.
If we were introducing such a change in the commercial world to make crisper and more easily understood both the flow of cash and the flow of results back, there would be an anticipation that, over the piece, the financial benefits would increment year on year. If the financial memorandum was to be updated each year, do you anticipate that it would detail tangible financial returns?
That is our hope. We are putting in place a new statutory framework that will allow the common services to be run more efficiently as a whole. By the time that it is up and running, the authority will probably have a budget in excess of £70 million and 1,300 staff to provide services on a national basis. We very much hope that the new authority will be able to provide a better and more efficient service to the police as a whole.
I understand that. I heard the word "hope" a couple of times there, but the committee and the public at large are looking for more than that. Do you plan to distil the figures and produce distinct outcomes that you can use to benchmark effectiveness from one year to the next and show incremental improvement year on year?
Like every organisation in Government, the new SPSA will be expected to demonstrate that it achieves best value for money. As an NDPB, it will be subject to exactly the same rules on accountability and value for money as any other NDPB is. Perhaps I should have used the word "expect" or "intend" rather than "hope". We expect that the creation of the new authority and the establishment of the framework will facilitate improved efficiency. Self-evidently, the new organisation will have a much larger critical mass than any of the existing ones have. It is fair to say that, as we are putting together so many disparate organisations that have grown up separately over a long period, it will take time before the body functions as a single organisation and a single back office service. However, that is the direction of travel and that is what the new organisation will be expected to achieve. The bill is an opportunity to provide a more efficient and better service.
Another concern that ACPOS flagged up was about the costs of carrying out mandatory drug testing. The financial memorandum mentions pilot studies to investigate the costs. How will the pilot schemes for mandatory drug testing be funded?
The assessment part will be centrally funded and the funding for the treatment part is under discussion in the Executive. We do not have a funding package planned for the police costs, which are the smallest part of the costs, so they might need to come from existing resources.
So, for the police, the pilot scheme would have to be funded from existing resources.
That is not definite, but it may well be the case.
So you cannot ensure that the scheme will be funded in a way that does not divert resources from existing functions.
I am sorry; I may need to correct what I have just said. No, I stand by it. Will you repeat the question?
I presume that, if the pilot schemes are funded from the existing package of resources, there will potentially be diversion from other measures, although I am not saying that that is necessarily a bad thing. Will the police have to manage the pilot schemes within existing budgets?
Yes. The estimates in the financial memorandum are for £50,000 in police time and £72,000 in equipment and consumables. Those amounts would probably come out of existing police budgets.
Is that existing resource budgets and capital budgets?
Yes.
Will the same apply in relation to mobile fingerprinting?
That involves a much bigger sum—the total spend on equipment will be £4 million. Last week, ACPOS stated that it hoped that that amount will not come out of the capital budgets that have been set for the police to the period 2007-08. Normally, if a medium-sized new commitment to spend on capital came during the middle of a spending review period, we would talk to ACPOS about priorities. I found it fairly surprising that ACPOS said that its capital budgets were fully committed right up to 2007-08, given that flexibility is built into the capital system through prudential borrowing or spending from recurrent resources.
So you have not finalised discussions on that.
We have not got new money to bring as of now but, to the extent that that spend falls within the current spending review horizon—we think that much of it probably will—we would need to talk with ACPOS about the use of police budgets of whose existence ACPOS is already aware.
What if ACPOS and the Executive are unable to reach agreement about the use of the existing capital provisions in the budget? What would happen then?
We would not tell ACPOS that it had to spend money on fingerprint readers if it wanted to spend it on buildings, cars or other equipment.
So what would happen to the mobile fingerprint readers?
I do not think that the situation to which you allude would arise. Last week, Sir William Rae said that ACPOS was looking forward to the technology and acknowledged the big time saving that it would bring. I am sure that ACPOS will be keen that it is funded.
Sir William said that there would potentially be a big saving of time, but he also questioned whether any cash savings would be associated with that. What is your view on that?
As the financial memorandum makes clear, we view the measure as one of time saving. That is what it is. It means existing officers not having to spend time running back to their police stations. That is a matter of fact. If the question for further down the line is whether that could have an impact on how much budget is made available for police staffing at the time of the next spending review, I would say that that is obviously possible, as all things go into the melting pot when such decisions are taken. However, that is a matter for the future.
The committee has no further questions, so I thank the witnesses for coming along today. There were one or two items on which we requested additional information. We will probably need that before Thursday next week—that is, 24 November—in order to complete our consideration of the financial memorandum to the Police, Public Order and Criminal Justice (Scotland) Bill and to submit our report to the lead committee.
Next
External Research