Agenda item 4 is consideration of the Scottish Government's response to our letter in connection with the Auditor General's report "Police call management—An initial review". We have circulated to members a copy of the initial correspondence and the reply, dated 23 November, from Robert Gordon, who is the director general justice and communities.
Police response times have been raised in previous discussions. The second paragraph on page 2 of Mr Gordon's letter indicates that "a draft performance indicator" will be in place "from April 2008." I presume that the first data might not come from that until a year later—perhaps 2009. That is a bit long to wait to get an indication of police response times to incidents within communities. I am fairly certain that a lot of members receive constituents' enquiries on response times from time to time. Can we do more to sharpen up or hasten the process?
Are the Auditor General and his team aware of any work that is being carried out on police response times at present?
Yes. I confirm that the Scottish policing performance framework for 2008-09 contains a formal indicator on the proportion of emergency calls that are responded to within force target times, broken down into urban and rural areas. The time is usually 20 minutes for rural areas, with different target times for urban responses—often 10 minutes. The indicator will be included and formally reported on, as Mr Coffey said, at the end of 2009.
The call centre management systems have been in place for a wee while now, and I anticipated that, even at this stage, some data would be available to show the public how well the police perform on response times. I want to clarify what you are saying: you are talking not about response times within the call centre management system, but about response times for police to get to incidents in the community. That is important to the public, and we need that element to be captured and embedded in the system. I was hoping that it would be done a lot sooner than 2009.
The data will exist—it is just a question of whether they will be reported on publicly. The earliest that the data can be formally included is from the beginning of 2008, through the Scottish policing performance framework, which will be done, and that will raise the profile of the issue. Individual boards will be able to ask for the data earlier. The information should be available for the introduction of the Airwave system.
We will need to ask for that information.
We can do that.
It might be that I got out of the wrong side of bed this morning. We had an excellent report from the Auditor General, which the committee discussed in great detail. Hugh Henry then sent a well-drafted letter to Robert Gordon, asking five specific questions. He wrote:
We have a number of options. We can correspond further with the Government, saying that we are unhappy with its response and that we want to pursue matters further. We can invite the accountable officer, Robert Gordon, to the committee to give oral evidence, if that is the view of committee members. We can simply note the Government's response. Alternatively, we can refer the matter to the Justice Committee, which is currently pursuing a fairly broad-ranging inquiry into the police. Given that the Justice Committee is already doing that work, we might spend a lot of time investigating the issues and duplicating what that committee is doing. It is entirely in committee members' hands to decide how we pursue the matter.
As a member of the Justice Committee, I know that we have touched on the issue of response times, but we have not examined it in any depth. That is not to say that the Justice Committee will not return to it later in the year, although up to now we have not considered it in great detail.
I propose that we invite Mr Gordon to come and give evidence to the committee and answer the points in Hugh Henry's letter. Depending on his response, we could decide whether to refer the matter to the Justice Committee.
Are other members inclined to support that proposal?
It is a good proposal, but I would like to give Robert Gordon the chance to respond in a bit more detail. We could write to him again, saying that we are not happy with the response that we received and asking him to answer the specific questions in more detail. If the response that we get is along the same lines as the response that we have already received, I would be happy for us to invite him along to the committee.
The issues could not be made any clearer than they are in Hugh Henry's letter. He got some help in drafting it from Tracey Reilly and others. It is a clear letter that asks specific questions arising from the excellent report. It could not be clearer.
I support George Foulkes's proposals. As has been said, the letter asks specific questions, but the response is vague and does not address the committee's concerns. It is reasonable to invite Robert Gordon along to speak to the committee to get clarification on the specific issues that are addressed in Hugh Henry's letter.
Given that we have already put those specific questions in writing and have not received a detailed response, I am disinclined to write again. In my view, if we want to pursue the matter, we should invite the accountable officer to the committee. Are members content with that as a way forward?
Perhaps Tracey Reilly and the clerks can find an appropriate date for us to invite Robert Gordon to come and give evidence so that we can pursue the questions further.