Item 9 is two oral evidence-taking sessions on the draft budget. I welcome our first witnesses, who are from the Scottish Prison Service: Mike Ewart, the chief executive; and Willie Pretswell, the director of finance and business services. Gentlemen, we are grateful for your attendance and for the fact that you arrived early, as that will enable the committee to get through more business today than might otherwise have been the case.
Mr Ewart, can you confirm who is responsible for the prison projections?
Responsibility for the prison projections lies between the SPS and our colleagues in the statistical service in the Scottish Government.
In your correspondence, you said that you are disappointed at how far out the figures appear to be this year.
I obviously am concerned that there has been significantly more growth in the prison population than was projected. However, to use the word that you used, Mr Martin, the numbers are projections; they cannot be predictions.
What information do you feed to the organisation that is responsible for the prison projections?
We continually try to improve the process of making the projections. My understanding is that colleagues in the analytical services division in the justice portfolio are seeking ways in which they can improve the quality of the projections. However, the numbers will remain projections—nobody can predict the future.
In your correspondence, you said that the projection for 2009-10 was originally 7,600 and the outcome was 8,427, including people who are subject to home detention curfews. From a public perception point of view, the figures—based on projections that were developed in partnership with your organisation—are disappointing.
The figures are alarming in that they show significant growth above what was projected. The fact that the figures are greater than the projections obviously suggests that we need to do more work to try to improve the quality of those projections, but I am afraid that I have to insist on the fact that we cannot predict what the future will bring. The figures that we end up with are the result of thousands of individual decisions that are taken daily in the courts.
I understand that, but the point that I want to amplify is that your correspondence and your recent media interventions create the public perception that you do not have responsibility for the prison projections. However, you are telling us that you feed into the process that comes up with the projections in the first place.
That is right. The projections have to take account of a series of factors and other data that come from various sources in the criminal justice system.
So you need to take some responsibility for the projections as well.
I am sorry, but I fail to understand the point of your question.
I am trying to clarify the point that you have some responsibility for prison projections. Is that the case, yes or no?
Yes, of course we do.
So when your correspondence says that you are disappointed at the figures that have been reached, you should be equally disappointed at the role that you have played in projecting those figures in the first place.
I can only repeat what I have said: we can provide the information and make deductions based on historical evidence, but we cannot predict the future, either alone or in consort with our colleagues.
The statistical information shows that there are seasonal downturns. Can you add any commentary to those figures?
The pattern of the seasonality of the figures, particularly the tendency of the figures to drop sharply and then rise again at the turn of the year, is mainly driven by the seasonality of the court process. Those figures relate to the flow out of the sheriff courts across the country. The period of quiet at the end of the year occurs simply because the courts are not sitting at that time.
Do you accept that the current figures will, in all probability, reduce towards the end of the year, due to the seasonal downturn?
I certainly hope that that will happen.
Are there signs of that already?
No. There has been fairly steady growth through the summer. The figures have been significantly higher than they have been in previous years, as you can see from the levels that I have reported to you. Over the past week, there has been a slight flattening in the numbers. Yesterday, there was, of course, a court holiday in the west, so we are bracing ourselves for the outcome tonight.
What work is being carried out to review the projections?
As I understand it, work is currently being carried out to find out whether we can get better short-run information by examining the data on inflow to the courts. Colleagues in the analytical services division of the justice portfolio are working with colleagues from the Crown Office and the Scottish Court Service to find out whether we can make better predictions from those numbers. However, they will be short-run numbers, and we do not know what the quality of the information will be.
What plans does the SPS have for responding to the situation of overcrowding in the short term?
In the short term, plans have to be made at a local level within each establishment to try to maximise the amount of available accommodation and services. There is no capacity in the prison system to allow us to expand beyond the limits of our existing building envelopes. Expansion beyond the current extremely high levels of prisoner numbers will involve short-term expedients such as mattresses on gym floors.
Sorry—such as?
Using mattresses on gym floors.
Do you have contingency plans for that? You say that you are bracing yourself for what might happen in the west of Scotland following the court holiday weekend.
Yes. The establishments are ready to do what they can to accommodate another significant inflow.
In your submission, which is dated 25 September, you state:
We have stated clearly in our evidence to the committee that we believe that we can manage within the budget that has been set for the coming year, provided that there is a significant downturn in the current levels of the prison population, and a return to the levels—or close to the levels—that we expected. If that is not the case, we will need, as we have said in our evidence, to seek relief from the Government by way of additional resource.
Have you asked the Government for additional resource to supplement the costs for this year? Presumably, the SPS puts in a bid at budget time.
We have not asked for additional funding at this stage. We are still talking to ministers about potential measures to reduce the prison population.
Given what you say in your written response, why have you not asked for additional funding? Any commitment to such funding presumably would help you to plan better.
We have not made a specific request at the moment, but there was an understanding from the Government at the time of the spending review that if the prison population numbers increased significantly after the budget was set, we would have a case to return. That undertaking is in place, but at the moment we do not have the basis on which to make a specific request.
The convener mentioned what we have been reading in the press and hearing on the television and the radio in recent weeks about prisoner numbers. If the SPS is in such a position that it feels it necessary to go to the press, why have you not gone to ministers with specific details so that they can consider the necessary budgets?
Because the Government's objective at the moment is to reduce the prison population. I assure you that we are in continual dialogue with ministers on pretty much a daily basis.
But the fact is—and you have to deal with this—that the prisoner numbers are not decreasing. Surely you have to deal with the number of prisoners who are actually coming through your doors, rather than talking about things that we all hope will reduce prisoner numbers.
Absolutely. We are ready to make that case. The conversations continue.
If you are ready to make that case, can you indicate to the committee how much it would cost the SPS to be able to deal with the present situation?
A series of questions need to be addressed before we get to the simple question of a figure. If we are to continue to deal with current prison population levels, we will need to consider not only additional financial resource but additional resource in relation to the ways in which we cope with those people, potentially outside prison, because even with additional money, the pressure on our existing staff is significant, and there is a limit to the amount of overtime that prison officers would be prepared to work and a limit to the pressure that we can put on management and the other staff in institutions. It is not simply a question of money.
Perhaps you will be able to share that information with the committee at some point. We are scrutinising the budget, and we want to ensure that the SPS has enough money to deliver a very important public service.
Absolutely.
In your submission, you mention dealing with health and safety issues that arise from overcrowding. What options do you have with regard to that?
According to the legal advice that we have received, the broad answer is that we have very little option. We will seek to avoid circumstances that are potentially risky to staff, prisoners or visitors in the establishments. However, we have an obligation to take whatever numbers the courts commit to prison. Equally, we have a duty to adhere to our obligations under health and safety legislation. We are caught between the pressures of the two statutory requirements, neither of which trumps the other.
Is increasing the ratio of prison officers to prisoners through more overtime an option to ensure health and safety within establishments? Are your budgets able to cope with that at present? Have you built that into your submission for this year?
We have been dealing with significant additional levels of overtime—for obvious reasons, given the rise in the prison population over the past year. As I mentioned earlier, the pressure is not just financial and about being able to afford the overtime: it is about the capacity of the staff to deliver that overtime.
I will pursue a related point. Accidents, which are nobody's fault, happen from time to time, even in the best of organisations. What would happen if there was a fire, which was caused not by vandalism but by an electrical fault, and you lost a hall in Barlinnie for six months?
We would need to seek the authority of the Cabinet Secretary for Justice to have an emergency release of prisoners. That would allow us to maintain the stability of the operation by reducing the population to take account of the loss of accommodation that we had suffered. That action would then have to be homologated by Parliament.
I am not trying to put words in your mouth, but are you saying that there is no contingency plan for the loss of a facility following the sort of accidents or incidents that can happen in any factory or business?
There is no spare capacity in the system to absorb a significant loss of accommodation. There would have to be a controlled approach to dealing with any significant loss of accommodation of the kind that you describe. Part of that would involve seeking the approval of the Government and, subsequently, Parliament to allow us to correct the overall population level.
But surely somewhere down the line, and over a period of years, some sort of contingency planning must have been made to accommodate prisoners rather than simply releasing them. We are talking about a situation where 400 or 500 prisoners might have to be released. In my view, we could not do that without putting the public at risk.
If something on that scale were to happen, the question of public safety would definitely arise. We would have to take a decision on whom to release on the basis of the best possible information, taking into account the likely risk to the public. However, there is no spare capacity in the system to absorb a loss of accommodation. There is no contingency plan of the kind that you described. In previous years, it was possible for the SPS to make plans using the spare capacity in the system to absorb emergency levels of overcrowding. We reach those emergency levels of overcrowding on a daily basis now. There is no spare capacity.
I hear what you are saying, but I would have thought that there could be a departure from a thought process that appears to be totally predicated on the idea of simply releasing people if there is a problem of the nature that I described, rather than finding alternative ways of accommodating them in custody elsewhere.
Nowhere else is suitable to accommodate people in secure custody. There is no spare capacity in the estate, and there is nothing else that the SPS can readily commandeer to make secure accommodation out of.
That raises certain issues. However, we can look to the future. I understand that the new prison facility at Addiewell will come on stream in December. Is that likely to be the case? Will the facility be operational in December?
It will start to take prisoners from 12 December. That is the plan, and things are going well. There will be a slow ramp-up to begin with, to allow testing of the operational arrangements at the new establishment, then we will be in full operation by the end of March next year.
Is the SPS anywhere near requesting permission to use the emergency release power now?
Thankfully, we have not had the kind of emergency that Mr Aitken described, although obviously it could arise at any time. Some of the infrastructure is very elderly. There have been issues with drainage at Barlinnie, which caused significant loss of accommodation, and that could happen again. There is always the possibility of a fire of some kind being caused quite accidentally, as Mr Aitken says. We would have to deal with that situation. However, no such occasion has yet required us to make a live request to ministers.
What level would the current trend of an increasing prison population have to reach before the SPS considered using the emergency release power? We read in the newspapers last week that a judge considered that a sentence should be custodial but, because there was no room at the inn, the person got off without receiving a custodial sentence. It is a serious situation when our judiciary are faced with making such judgments because of prisoner numbers.
The exercise that we undertook recently was an attempt to measure the effective and safe limits of capacity at each establishment. I know that when the Audit Committee passed Audit Scotland's report to you, some members of that committee complained about the use of jargon in our responses, so I apologise if I use some now.
If you do, we will ask you to explain.
I will do my best to keep it to a minimum.
I do not want to put words into your mouth, so I will quote what you say in your written submission:
Yes. I have been answering two different strands of questioning, which it is important not to confuse.
I think that they are linked, though.
Absolutely. I agree entirely. I just want to be clear about what I am saying to you. If the population numbers continue to be very high—at the levels that I have described as creating emergency conditions—far from looking for additional budget cover, we might need something more dramatic in the way of relief. If population numbers remain high—above the projections—we will need additional budget cover to meet the costs of overtime, additional food, energy and so on. All those costs have risen significantly higher than projected at the time of the original budget.
According to the SPS submission, the budget is planned on the basis of a prison population of 7,600 prisoners. Above that, there are financial problems.
Yes.
In your discussions with the Cabinet Secretary for Justice, has any reference been made to the possibility of an emergency release of prisoners? Have any faxes or e-mails been exchanged—or anything at all—that have referred to the possibility of the emergency release of prisoners?
I am not at liberty to disclose to you what advice has been given to ministers by the SPS. We are a civil service entity and our exchanges with ministers are subject to the constraints or conventions surrounding the advice that is given to ministers.
Has the SPS considered that? Can you refer to any papers in which you have considered the possibility of the emergency release of prisoners?
I have described to you fairly clearly what the position is in terms of our contingency planning.
But there have been discussions within your organisation about the possibility of an emergency release of prisoners. Has a paper on that been provided or have there been discussions with management about it?
No. We have received advice on the legal position and we have considered the possibility of preparing for such an eventuality, if it needed to happen.
How recently did you do that?
We update the thinking on that pretty much on a daily basis.
Additional places are to be made available at Edinburgh and Polmont. What is the update on that? When will those places be available?
When will Ratho hall come on stream?
The new hall at Edinburgh prison, called Ratho hall, will be handed over to the prison around Christmas, and we expect it to be commissioned towards the end of January. It will have about 116 places. The new house block that is planned at HMP Polmont will be available towards the end of 2009 and will have about 120 places.
Before I ask my main question, I return to a point that Paul Martin raised about the projections. In your submission, you discuss the Scottish Government's prisoner population projections from November 2007. Are such projections published annually or quarterly?
I understand that an annual document is published in the Government's statistical series.
Have such documents been published for the past 10 or 15 years?
I cannot give you an exact answer, but the colloquial answer would be that they have been published "since time immemorial". They have been going for a long time.
In a previous life, I worked for a private sector company in which great emphasis was put on projections and forecasting, so I am concerned about what has happened in the SPS in the past. I fully appreciate your use of the word "unplanned" in your written submission. Nevertheless, in the past, when the documents and projections were being put together, surely that would not have involved only one set of projections or criteria. Surely there should have been criteria that seemed a bit strange or fanciful at the time.
As you will know, the document contains a range of projections—high, medium and low—that were made for the purposes of trying to plan. There is a wide range between the high and low end of those projections, particularly as one moves further away from the base year. That demonstrates just how sensitive the numbers are to a multi-factorial base of influencing events.
So you are saying that, in the past, although people considered many factors and various criteria, the vast increase in numbers, particularly over the past year, means that projection has not been particularly effective.
Yes. If a lay person—I would characterise myself as a lay person in relation to any statistical analysis—were to look at the underlying drivers that might be expected to be the conditioning factors in analysing the prison population, the factor that they would be likely to pick up on would be the underlying rate of offending. However, in our jurisdiction, as in many others around the world, the pattern of overall offending in the community and the pattern for the prison population appear to be completely independent variables. At the moment, offending is going down whereas the prison population is rising significantly.
I will move on to my main point. What is the forecast date for construction beginning at Bishopbriggs? Do any planning hurdles remain?
The procurement process for Bishopbriggs is under way. We have short listed three bidders, all of which have the tender documentation. We are using the European Community procurement process that is known as competitive dialogue. It will take us until approximately next summer before we are at the stage of awarding the contract.
I was elected to the Parliament only last year, and I found it strange that Low Moss was closed when it did not seem that another prison was about to come on stream to take up the Low Moss prisoners. Obviously, the prisoners were then dissipated throughout the rest of the prison estate. Why was Low Moss closed before Addiewell came on stream, or before there was a fixed timeline for Low Moss's replacement to come on stream?
Given the unexpected growth in the prison population, I can understand your concerns; but the circumstances bear a bit of careful scrutiny.
Could contingency measures not have been undertaken to buy some time until Addiewell came on stream?
In effect, contingency measures were in place, with the additional accommodation that was becoming available in the development prisons. The level of disruption that was caused by the movement of staff and prisoners out of Bishopbriggs was low and was readily accommodated by the rest of the estate. The significant growth has happened in the year since then.
I fully accept that we can all have 20:20 vision in hindsight. However, I return to the point that Mr Martin made earlier—basically, the projections were not right. Is that not unfortunately the case?
I am not trying to make this a mere debating issue, but it is important that we do not claim that the projections were somehow flawed and wrong. The projections and the reality were a long way apart from each other, not because someone made a mess of the projections but because the reality has been influenced by a set of factors that were not and could not have been taken into account in the projections.
We are where we are—the issue is historical.
Good morning, gentlemen—it is still just morning. There is a £10 million movement of capital from one year to the next. Can you explain the real significance of that? Will it make much difference to what goes on?
It should not make a significant difference over the period of the spending review, given that it is a borrow-and-pay-back arrangement. I will not only put words in Willie Pretswell's mouth but give him a role to play for the next two years. We will paddle as hard as we can under the surface and sail on serenely above it. Obviously, that will require some adjustment to planning. We think that we can accommodate that without detriment to the overall flow of the capital programme.
The key priorities include £21 million for capital investment to support on-going developments, the most crucial of which is Peterhead. How do you see that going? Are there any risks to the timescale for the Peterhead project?
Because of the business that I am in, when anyone asks whether I foresee any risks, both hemispheres start to grind as fast as they can and produce potential risks at a rate that surpasses my capacity to utter them. The honest answer to your question is that at the macro level the Peterhead project ought to be as secure as it can be, given that we own the site and can construct on it without demolishing all the existing buildings. Given our relationship with the local authority and the community in Peterhead, there should be no major planning permission issues.
Was the SPS consulted on the transfer of the £10 million that the Government reprofiled to the housing and communities budget?
It is fair to say that we were told about it beforehand.
I do not want to hark back to the transfer, but does it have an impact on your ability to deal with prison overcrowding?
Our current assumptions are that we can accommodate the shift between years by adjusting the overall flow of spending on various projects, without interfering with the ultimate timetables for delivery.
Is the £10 million related to the political decision to change procurement methods, to which you referred earlier?
No. The £10 million that has been moved between years is part of a bigger package, which is set out in the Government's budget statement, to bring forward investment in infrastructure, especially in social housing, as part of its countercyclical effort.
One of the consequences of the change in procurement methods is a delay to the projected finishing point. How long will that delay be?
Obviously, we are doing all that we can to minimise the delay, which the Cabinet Secretary for Justice instructed us to do, but because we reached a fairly late point in the original procurement exercise and had to restart, it would be fair to expect a delay of at least a year.
Good morning. What further progress has been made on ending slopping out?
Significant progress has been made on the provision of sanitation in almost every part of the estate. Formally speaking, slopping out in the sense that the term was previously understood has ended. Polmont prison was the last place in which there was slopping out in the old sense of the term; it has now ended across the estate. However, chemical porta potties are still used in Peterhead. There is no prospect of being able to provide reasonable integral sanitation in the buildings there because of their nature. Therefore, the use of chemical porta potties will continue until the replacement prison—HMP Grampian—is constructed.
I have a question about the sharing of cells, which relates to prison conditions and capacity issues. What proportion of the available cells are shared? Given the difficult times that we are in, is there scope to increase the sharing of cells? I accept that the sharing of cells is far from ideal, but we are not in an ideal world just now.
No, we are not. Obviously, the number of cells in use that can be doubled up at any one time will vary, depending on the pressures on individual establishments. A proportion of cells in almost all establishments were designed to be used for multiple occupation. Such cells are designed into new halls and new establishments as the elastic in the system—they give capacity to take additional prisoners.
That would be appreciated. Will the elastic in the system stretch a bit more?
When I described in what was, I am afraid, tedious detail to Cathie Craigie the development of the assessed operational limit, one point that I was keen to make was that we must consider more than just the capacity of an establishment's cell accommodation in working out whether it can cope with significant numbers of prisoners.
Presumably, issues such as the sharing of cells, while undesirable, will be fully explored before any request is made to the cabinet secretary for the emergency release of prisoners.
Absolutely. Every establishment considers that issue daily when it takes new receptions.
The final question on accommodation comes from Stuart McMillan.
In your submission, you mention that 165 places in the open estate have not yet been filled due to the additional measures implemented as a consequence of the recommendations in the Foye report. That being the case, would it be possible in the short term to erect a fence around part of the open estate to create more secure accommodation and fill the vacant places?
We are undertaking a feasibility study into the possibility of providing a fence around part of the open estate, which recently received some publicity in the Daily Record.
Do you have any projected costs for such action?
At this stage, I would be speculating, but they would be very significant.
We now turn to questions on running costs and other current expenditure. Robert Brown will open this section.
I want to get clear in my own mind the issue of the capacity and the design capacity. In part 2 of your submission, you say:
Yes.
That brings us up to a total of 6,625 places but, in the meantime, the average population has risen to well above 8,000, so you are about 1,400 places short, which accounts for the crisis that you have mentioned.
It will provide significant relief, particularly if we get seasonal downturn, which will allow us to manage the phasing in of Addiewell. That will be most welcome. If there is a plan B, it is precisely as you have described it—to get through until Addiewell comes on stream. All of us hope that we can do that in reasonable order.
I assume that the budgets for 2008-09 and 2009-10 include some money for Addiewell's running costs. How much has been allocated to Addiewell?
The projected full-year costs for Addiewell will be around £28 million or £29 million.
Is that the running cost or does it include an element of capital expenditure?
It is a public-private partnership contract and the contract cost involves buying 700 of what are known as available prisoner places each day. That cost includes the full running costs and the cost of the provision and maintenance of the prison facility.
I presume that that figure includes some part-year costs for the current financial year.
It includes a small amount for this year. As has been mentioned, the prison opens on 12 December and starts up very slowly—it will get 30 prisoners in the first week and will build up to housing 700 towards the end of March. Not a great deal of money has been allocated for this year.
I think that it was indicated that your budget is based on a projected prisoner population of 7,600. I appreciate all the caveats that Mr Ewart mentioned in that connection, but can you say that the extra cost will be £X per extra 100 prisoners? Can you give us a feel for the extra costs that might be incurred by going over the figure of 7,600?
The rough cost of a prisoner place in a modern 700-place prison is £40,000 per year. It depends on how such places are provided for.
Yes—if they are provided for by overcrowding the existing accommodation, that is not a realistic figure.
Yes. If extra prisoners are accommodated through overcrowding, the cost becomes the marginal cost of overtime and so on. The figure varies by prison and type of prisoner, but it would be a fraction of the figure that I quoted.
You have indicated that you are very concerned about the issue—the convener referred to all the publicity that there has been in recent weeks. You must be able to give the committee some idea of the amount that you are likely to request from, or the figures on which you will base your approach to, the Scottish Government.
As part of our internal budgeting, we allocate somewhere between £3,500 and £5,000 per annum to SPS prisons as additional budget to cover the marginal cost of providing additional places.
Is that amount per prisoner?
Yes. It is very crude, but that is the amount of money that is available for us to distribute to try to help the prisons to absorb some of the extra costs that are associated with an increase in prisoners.
So the total annual extra cost might be something like £5,000, if the amount is at the high end of the range, multiplied by 500 prisoners—or more than 500, as we are heading that way?
We would need more analysis than that. As was mentioned, that is perhaps deliverable in the short term, but it might not be sustainable for a longer period.
The longer it goes on, the more difficult and expensive it becomes, because of the rerostering and the complications.
As Mike Ewart said, it is not just about resources. Staff are currently experiencing fatigue, which affects their ability to service the number of extra hours that are needed.
In the second graph in your submission, which refers to short and long-term prisoners, it appears that the increase in numbers is substantially an increase in the number of short-term prisoners. If I am reading the graph correctly, the number of long-term prisoners has gone down substantially between 2004 and 2008, while the number of short-term prisoners—the green line at the top of the graph—has gone through the roof. Is it the boost in the number of short-term prisoners that is giving you the problem?
There appears to be significant growth in a number of sectors, but short-term prisoners and remands have been the most significant areas. As we discussed this time last year, that growth is a particular issue because of the recycling that happens with short-term sentences. Such sentences are not a matter of somebody being admitted once and serving a sentence for four, five, six, seven or eight years. They are a series of receptions and liberations that take up a significant amount of time in the prison week. The problem is not just the numbers but the administrative churn that goes with them.
As we know from the McLeish report, your ability to provide services for the short-term prisoners is much more restricted because of the timescales.
The conventional wisdom has been that, although prison can do some good through the application of structure to people's lives and the provision of certain types of programmes, it does not have much effect on prisoners whose sentences are less than a year or six months.
My final question is on the restriction of programmes for prisoners due to budgetary considerations. If the prison numbers are going up—if I am following the argument correctly—there are only three or four ways in which to do something about it. One is a change of policy, perhaps to tackle the number of short-term prisoners; and one is a longer-term policy to cut reoffending rates and levels of crime in general.
Our concern is less that the budget provides a constraint on the capacity to deliver programmes, and more that the sheer weight of numbers in an establishment means that there is not the staff capacity to move people round in order to allow them to take part in education, work and programmes to the extent that we would like them to be able to. The restrictions are much more operational than budgetary.
What about health facilities? It has been suggested that the health facilities in Barlinnie have been almost restricted to supplying people with methadone, and have been largely unable to tackle mental health and other problems.
That is an issue of considerable concern. I would not say that we are unable to deal with the health needs of prisoners, but the pressure to deal with the prescription needs of prisoners—not just methadone but other prescription medicines too—is very significant in an establishment such as Barlinnie.
You have mentioned problems with staff numbers. Do you intend to recruit more full-time people to the SPS, to help you to cope with that pressure?
If the longer-term aim of the Government to reduce the prison population were not achieved, we would have to increase the staff resource. At the moment, it is being stretched significantly. As Willie Pretswell has said, we are seeing increases in sickness absence and other indicators of fatigue.
But you are not recruiting more staff at the moment.
No. The policy—and this also relates to the overall accommodation envelope—is to reduce the long-term prison population, not to increase the capacity of the system to deal with it.
This year, the SPS must again achieve 2 per cent efficiency savings. Have you been able to produce a plan for efficiency savings? Last year, you told the committee that you were in the process of producing such a plan.
Among Government services, we are unique in being unable to predetermine and then publish the contents of an efficiency plan. There are reasons for that. When the legislation that prohibited industrial action in the prison service was repealed in 1997, it was replaced in Scotland by a voluntary industrial relations agreement, which requires us to operate in partnership with the trade unions to negotiate changes to terms and conditions of service affecting the employment of prison officers and prison staff. Anything that cannot be agreed through that process is subject to binding arbitration. As you know, over the past couple of years in particular, that has had an impact on pay.
I accept the distinction that you make between prisons and other services.
I am sorry to be tedious about this, but I am afraid that it is the nature of the beast. Subject to the issues that we have raised in evidence on growth in numbers and growth in particular costs, we are confident that we can live within the cash envelope of the budget for the current year—although it will be nip and tuck.
Well, I will simplify it. Do you have an efficiency savings plan in black and white?
We have an efficiency savings plan that is being negotiated.
But it is in black and white, and you are discussing it with the trade union.
Yes.
Can you share with the committee some of the ways in which the efficiency savings will be made?
That is yours, partner.
What we have been describing are staffing efficiencies. As we must negotiate those with the trade unions, I cannot talk about those particular cases just now, but I will give you some other examples.
Could the committee get some further information on, and a breakdown of, those savings to assist us in our scrutiny of the budget process? As I said, we are basically on your side and want to ensure that enough money is being allocated to the service in the budget. The more information the committee has, the better able we will be to question the minister when he comes before us.
It would be helpful if you could write to us, indicating where you are targeting the savings, in so far as you are able to do so. It would also be helpful if you could get that information to us fairly speedily, as the minister will come before us next week.
I have a question on the figures that have been mentioned. You said—albeit with some caveats—that a prison population of 8,126 was the safe operating limit. However, according to your written submission, the recorded custodial population in September was 8,137. Allowing for the fact that HMP Addiewell will come on stream, it seems that the SPS has already breached what you regard as the safe operating limit. I presume that, if there is an increase in that number in October, November and December, you will face a significant challenge. Would you like to comment on that, given your observation on the safe operating limit?
The caveat that I gave about the operating limit was that it is not useful to give the committee that total and say that it is the line in the sand, for two reasons, which I have set out. First, the limit does not take account of the fact that prisoners are in different categories and need to be accommodated in different places. It is most obvious that that applies to the categories of women prisoners and men prisoners.
So the situation is even worse than the figures technically suggest.
I ask my question because I am a member of the Audit Committee as well as this committee. Recently, Mike Ewart and Robert Gordon sent the Audit Committee correspondence, which has been forwarded to this committee. The eighth point that the Audit Committee raised with you was about a recommendation that you
From watching a video of the Audit Committee's proceedings, I remember that "community-facing prisons" was described as an obscure term. I apologise for appearing to use jargon, but I will go on to make that worse. The phrase entered the public consciousness when a previous Home Secretary—Charles Clarke—spoke about the desirability of introducing community prisons, which appeared to be prisons that were based close to relatively small communities and which would handle the prisoner populations that those communities produced.
We must move on but, before we do, I will bring in Cathie Craigie, as I ignored her when she tried to get in earlier.
Are any efficiency savings that the SPS makes reallocated to other departments, or can you keep them and reinvest them in the SPS?
In the previous period, the SPS sought to make efficiency savings internally, which were recovered and largely used to fund capital development. The efficiency savings that we are talking about now are savings that are being made across the whole of Government so that it can live within the envelope of cash available to it. The savings are effectively netted off from the cash that is available to us before the budget is set—our budget is net of the efficiency savings that we have to achieve.
I thank Mr Ewart and Mr Pretswell for their attendance. I am sorry that the evidence session went on for so long, but a number of issues had to be explored. We are not, in some respects, terribly happy as a result of some of our explorations, but we are grateful to you both for coming.
Thank you.
I am obliged for those comments.
Meeting suspended.
On resuming—
The second panel comprises Chief Constable Kevin Mathieson, chair of the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland information management business area, and Doug Cross, chair of the ACPOS finance management business area.
What is the latest total number of police officers in Scotland?
I do not have that number to hand. I take it that your question relates to the recruitment of additional officers.
Yes. I just wanted to know the numbers. If you cannot answer that, perhaps you could—
Doug Cross, who is chair of the business area, is here to answer the financial questions and I will answer any questions that arise on operational issues.
Thank you. With respect—I am sure that the convener will agree—the committee is very knowledgeable about how you reallocate the resources when you are going through civilianisation. If you need any advice on it, I am sure that the convener would be willing to offer it.
That is fine. Thank you. I do not have that information to hand, but I will get back to you.
Thank you.
I know that we are a couple of days ahead of ourselves here, but the information should be readily available. It would be particularly helpful if you could let us have the number of officers in post as of 30 September—or, if not, as of 31 August.
I will strive to get that for you, convener.
The Government has decided to ring fence the funding for additional officers, unlike other areas in which it has taken away ring fencing. Does that cause any difficulties for the financial management of our police forces?
No. The fact that the money for the additional police officers is ring fenced does not cause us any difficulties; in fact, it is very useful for us to be able to identify absolutely the amount of money that will be available for those officers, and for the money to follow the recruitment of the officers.
What is the process after funding is provided to police authorities? Do they invoice the Government?
Yes. We must complete returns to let the Government know how many officers have been recruited, and part of that is an invoicing process.
Is the funding always specifically for recruitment? Can it be used in other areas?
No. The money for the additional officers must be based on the numbers of officers who have been recruited against a target of an extra 1,000 over the three years.
That money is only for the recruitment of officers and is not for associated costs such as advertising or additional training costs or whatever.
A figure of about £28,800 per officer has been identified, which includes the salary costs of the officer, some equipment costs and some ancillary overhead costs relating to the officers, which might include a bit of training and so on, but would not include the recruitment process. Those kinds of costs are well built in to forces' procedures, so the additional officers do not cause forces a strain as far as that is concerned.
To reiterate, as soon as you recruit an officer, you invoice the Government or follow an audit process to clarify that the officer has been recruited.
We are normally asked to provide that information in a quarterly return.
If the recruitment process does not take place, does the money go back to the Government? There must be cases in which the recruitment target is not reached.
The money is not released until there is confirmation that the officers have been brought in. The first 150 officers came in at the back end of the previous financial year. We are into the second year, in which 450 additional officers will be recruited. We are not at the stage to which you referred and I do not anticipate that we will be.
I am not sure whether you have answered this question. However, following on from Ms Craigie's earlier point, I want to look ahead at how many officers will be in the recruitment pipeline. How many officers are in the pipeline for this year and for 2009-10?
Again, I do not have those figures just now, but I can provide them for you. What happens is that, to allow planning at the Scottish Police College, forces must provide an estimate of the number of officers to come through in each of the intakes across the year. The estimate will be based on the number of officers who we anticipate will retire, the number of new recruits and the number of officers who might leave the service by other means. The estimate will be continually refined until, about six to eight weeks before the recruitment date, the final figures will be considered. That will be based on the numbers who have retired or have indicated that they will retire, and on others coming through—the additional officers that we were talking about earlier.
Can you indicate, or will you be able to do so in the immediate future, how many college intakes there will be between now and March 2011? Similarly, do you know how many officers are due to retire between now and March 2011?
The college intakes happen roughly every six weeks. There is a break at some point during the summer months, so they may not happen every six weeks, but we can get the exact number of intakes on an on-going basis.
We fully accept that that is a matter of personal choice, but it would be interesting for the committee to know how many officers are eligible to retire, as opposed to how many opt to do so.
Yes.
It would also help the committee if we could get some idea of the intake of new officers that the Scottish Police College expects between now and March 2011. Can we have that figure as well, please?
Yes.
We do not have that figure before us today, unfortunately. When we have it, we will be able to discuss the matter with the cabinet secretary. I am amazed that figures such as those sought by Mrs Craigie and Ms Constance have not been forthcoming. I am disappointed, in fact.
Yes. The figures should have been available.
What progress is being made in discussions with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities and the police about a long-term solution for police pensions?
There has been quite a lot of discussion in the past couple of months. ACPOS sought to get the matter on the agenda as early as possible because we need a degree of certainty when we set budgets, and the eventual position on pensions is also important in relation to recruitment.
Your written submission states:
The spending review that covers 2008-09, 2009-10 and 2010-11 is the first one in which full provision for police pensions was not made within the police settlement. In the current year, we are living with that. The identified shortfall of £17 million in the pensions figure for 2008-09 has been addressed through various funding measures that local authorities and police boards have put in place. The problem in 2009-10 is much bigger, as I am sure you appreciate, and we are having further discussions with the Scottish Government about how to plug the gap, which will be some £40 million.
Since devolution in 1999, has provision always made within the budget settlement? I am not too interested in going back further than that.
It was certainly included in all previous spending review settlements. This is the first time that full provision for police pensions has not been made in the police settlement.
I seek some more information on trends in the police force. How many people are there in each intake to the Scottish Police College and how many of them drop out? Can we have that information for each of the past five years?
Yes. We can add that to the information that we will provide.
Secondly, can you provide information on the number of officers who go through the Scottish Police College and then leave the force during their probationary period, and the number who leave within five years?
Yes, we can provide that—we have the data on that.
It is important to establish the past trend so that we can consider what will happen in the future.
What progress has been made on the efficiency savings that police forces planned and what efficiency savings are planned in addition to those that have been achieved?
As you are probably aware from our previous evidence and our written submission, ACPOS has for some time been pulling together the work on efficiencies on behalf of the eight forces. We will shortly publish the best value annual report for 2007-08, which will pick up on the last year of the three-year Government efficiency programme and show that we achieved the target that was set for us. In the previous three years, the efficiency target was split between cash savings and non-cash savings, with the emphasis on non-cash savings. For the present spending review, the overall efficiency savings target for local government is 2 per cent. There is no set target for the police, but the expectation is that each component part will achieve its share.
Your written evidence states that it will be more difficult to make efficiency savings. Paragraph 7.6 states:
One measure is to build on the capital programme of business change that we have been developing. The programme has several central planks, including measures on mobile data and common information management systems. Through investment in the technology in those applications, we hope to free up officers from some of their current duties. For example, officers will not have to return to the police station for some information, but will be able to get it online. Through those types of efficiency savings, we hope to go some way towards meeting the target.
You say that you will go some way towards meeting the target. Are you not confident about meeting the target? Your submission states that the level of efficiencies will "be blunted" as a result of the savings that have already been achieved. Are you confident that you will be able to meet the target?
The situation is similar to the one that the SPS witnesses described. The efficiency targets have in effect been netted off against the settlement that we have received. We are confident that we will operate within the settlement. We hope to demonstrate not only that we have operated within the settlement, but that we have achieved efficiencies without an impact on service delivery, so that they are true efficiency savings.
That is a desired aim. It is good to hear it stated, but it will be even better to see it delivered.
In some ways, the SPSA will be in a better position than we are to answer that question.
Yes, it is only around six months since ICT was transferred to the SPSA.
ACPOS and the SPSA are working closely together on the business change programme that Doug Cross mentioned to secure a more efficient use of police ICT in future. An ambitious programme is being developed—some of it is on the cards—and if it is realised, it will bring significant efficiencies to the police service. It is still early days, though, and there are a lot of hurdles for us to get over.
I understand that.
You would need to take a view a year, or possibly a bit longer than that, after the ICT arrangements were transferred. They are a considerable add-on to the SPSA's services, as are the forensic services. Some form of review in 2009-10 would be appropriate.
Okay. What is the position with VAT payments and the SPSA?
Discussions have taken place involving ACPOS, the SPSA and representatives of HM Revenue and Customs on how the SPSA can act as an agent on behalf of the police forces to procure ICT goods and services. Each of the police boards and the SPSA will be required to sign up to an agency agreement, which is being developed. When that agreement is finalised to the satisfaction of those who represent the interests of the police boards and the SPSA, it will allow arrangements to be put in place.
When do you expect the agreement to be finalised?
I hope that it will be finalised within this financial year to allow us to take it forward. At the moment, interim arrangements are in place through which forces are continuing to procure such goods and recover moneys from the Government. There is therefore no loss of VAT in relation to ICT.
So you expect the agreement to be finalised within 2008-09.
Indeed. That is the hope.
I am grateful for that.
I want to follow up on ICT-enabled projects. You say in your submission that the business change programme
The programme is still developing, but it will potentially cost in the region of £60 million, depending on the mobile data and information management solutions that are eventually put in place. We have already tackled several projects to put the infrastructure in place that will allow information to be shared, and that will be completed within this financial year. All the forces are moving towards a common command-and-control application, which will mean that information will be shared better. We are managing to do that within our own resources and the top-slice funding. The two big projects that it will be impossible to deliver within the £5 million top slice and within a reasonable time are the mobile data and information management projects. Those represent a cost of around £40 million between them. If we do not have access to some pump priming, it will take eight years to deliver the projects using the £5 million top slice, which means that any benefits would be significantly diluted over that time.
What kinds of benefits, in financial terms, would you anticipate as a result of the developments?
We touched on some of that earlier, when we talked about the need to demonstrate efficiency savings. Mobile data will save officer time, as officers will be able to give and receive information without having to come back to the office. The efficiency savings arising from information management will be more to do with using the common applications to share information and intelligence across the piece.
One of the key benefits that will accrue to the service is a significant reduction in bureaucracy. Officers have to fill in the same details time and again for different parts of our process and bringing together the ICT will eliminate that extra work. That is one of the major business benefits that we foresee.
I have concerns about how achievable your efficiency savings goals are, given that a high proportion of the budget is for staff costs. It is difficult to make savings while trying to retain staff or increase staff numbers. Could you say a bit more about that?
On the staff issue, you are right: more than 80 per cent of our budget is staff related. However, there is some wriggle room. My force has conducted a best-value review of all our operational police staff and has identified a significant number of roles that could be carried out by police staff at a significantly reduced cost. That shows that, even though we have had many years of civilianisation, there are still opportunities for us to revisit what is currently in place in order to make some savings.
Does the 80 per cent of your budget that is taken up by staff costs include civilian staff costs?
Yes.
How will you deliver the pay increases for the year? Has that been budgeted for?
Yes. We have budgeted for the 2.5 per cent pay inflation in the settlement for those years. Obviously, discussions are continuing and we need to see how they work out.
If you are able to provide the information, it would be interesting to know what percentage of the efficiency savings was made in the staff costs and what percentage was made in the other aspects of the service's administration.
We have broken our savings down into categories such as managing absence and management improvements. There may be some crossover between some of the categories, but we can certainly have a stab at breaking the savings down into those that are staff related and those that are about procurement or joint working arrangements with external agencies.
Thank you very much, gentlemen. Staff costs are clearly the major part of a budget such as yours—indeed, the almost-all-consuming part of it—so we fairly urgently need the answers to the questions that were asked earlier in this evidence-taking session. It would be very useful to get them by the end of the week if that is at all possible. You appreciate that, next week, we must pursue with the minister the question whether the budget is adequate. We do that on your behalf as well as everybody else's.
Convener, will those questions be provided? I did not manage to take notes.
The clerk will contact you, Mr Cross.
Thank you.
I thank both the witnesses for attending. The committee will now move into private.
Meeting continued in private until 13:31.
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