Official Report 579KB pdf
Agenda item 3 is an evidence session on custodial and community sentences. We have a stellar panel before us, and I know that members are keen to put some questions to our witnesses. I warmly welcome Councillor Maureen Chalmers, community wellbeing spokesperson for the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities; Jackie Hamilton, Social Work Scotland’s chief social work officer in South Ayrshire; Karyn McCluskey, the chief executive of Community Justice Scotland; and Sheriff Scott Pattison, from the Scottish Sentencing Council.
We will move straight to questions. My first question is directed to Ms McCluskey, although I will also seek to bring in Sheriff Pattison. When Community Justice Scotland made representations to the sentencing and penal policy commission, it suggested that strengthening the presumption against short sentences does not go far enough and that sentences of under 12 months should be abolished or restricted to exceptional circumstances. Where have we got to with the presumption against short sentences? What might be helpful for the committee to be aware of in that regard?
On the presumption against short-term sentences, numbers have come down from the levels of five or six years ago. Slightly under 75 per cent of sentences are for under six months. The evidence that we are seeing shows that, when people go into prison, there are no treatment options available and they will not receive behaviour-change programmes because they are there for too short a time. Often, we are making people homeless. We send them back into communities where it is almost like a cliff edge. The likelihood of those people returning to prison is significantly increased.
We believe that there is much more that we could do with community sentences in our local areas, but funding would have to be provided to keep people safe and properly managed and to allow them to repay their debt to society through measures such as unpaid work.
The evidence base is poor. We know that the reoffending rate for people who serve sentences of under 12 months is about 56 per cent, whereas it is about 23 or 24 per cent for those who receive community sentences. It is not an exact science—there is no randomised controlled trial—so we need to take into account background details, such as criminal history.
However, all the studies show that people reoffend more if they are on short-term sentences, regardless of some of the evidence-based briefs. The more sensible and evidence-based approach is to keep people in their communities. There are exceptions. I always say that this is about smart justice. We absolutely must jail those whom we are afraid of, but those whom we are not afraid of should remain in their communities.
I invite Sheriff Pattison to comment on where we are with the presumption against short-term sentences.
Before answering, I will provide a little context about my evidence and the capacity in which it is given, just to make that clear for members.
I am here as a judicial member of the Scottish Sentencing Council. Some of what I say will draw on my experience as a sheriff, but I should make it clear that I am not speaking on behalf of the Scottish judiciary today.
I will provide some brief background information on the council. It has a statutory role in promoting consistency in sentencing, assisting with the development of sentencing policy and promoting awareness and understanding of sentencing policy and practice. As members might be aware, one of our key functions is the preparation of sentencing guidelines, which have force once the High Court approves them. It goes without saying that, as a council, we are bound by that remit.
Part of our role involves education and promoting awareness of the sentencing process and what it entails to promote public confidence in it. We are always happy to provide briefings or information on that process, including to the Parliament and parliamentarians, with the slight caveat that we are a small organisation with a full work programme. However, we always try to accommodate such requests whenever we can.
On the presumption, I will not comment on the policy itself, but I will say that, in 2021, the council undertook research with sentencers, who were supportive of community-based alternatives and found them to be a robust alternative to custodial sentences, assuming adequate resourcing of social work programmes. Rehabilitation offers long-term public protection, and sentencers support that.
If there is to be an enhanced presumption against short sentences, there will be a need to look again at the range and variety of programmes that are available to local authorities as direct alternatives to custody. There will be a need to consider issues such as the length of restriction of liberty orders and how robustly they can be enforced. There will also be a need to look again at breach processes—when court-imposed orders, such as community payback orders and restriction of liberty orders, are breached—to ensure that they are prompt, effective and robust. That is for two reasons: to increase sentencers’ confidence in those disposals and to increase public confidence in them.
Assuming that there are adequate resourcing and an increased variety of programmes, sentencers will continue to have faith in community alternatives.
Would I be right in inferring from that that you do not think that there is an adequate amount of information? I think that Social Work Scotland has said that it wants prosecutors and sentencers to look for compelling reasons why someone could not be managed in the community. Is it your view that those involved in sentencing have not got adequate information to make some of those decisions?
In my experience, social work reports are usually of a very high standard in assessing risk and giving recommendations on how an individual could be managed in the community. Where things fall down slightly is in this regard. Through local liaison, improvements could be made by increasing the judiciary’s awareness of the range of local programmes that are available as alternatives to custodial sentences.
If there is to be a more robust presumption against short sentences—I will put it that way—there will be a consequential need to ensure that local authority social work departments are adequately resourced to provide alternatives to custody that sentencers have confidence in.
09:45
That brings me, quite helpfully, on to my next question. I do not know whether you have seen my notes, Sheriff Pattison, but you seem to be following the choreography.
Before I bring in our local government colleagues, I want to ask you about drug and alcohol treatment orders, which we do not appear to be using as often. Is that because they are not available, or is there a presumption against using them?
There is no such presumption. The current legislation is a bit cumbersome when it comes to alcohol and mental health treatment requirements, and a number of hoops require to be jumped through before they can be imposed. For example, a designated medical professional must be identified before a particular programme or requirement can be utilised.
I am speaking from personal experience and the experience of my colleagues in south Strathclyde, but most sheriffs will, instead of imposing a specific alcohol or mental health treatment requirement, try to encompass that under a general supervision requirement and perhaps give direction to the social work department at the sentencing process or the sentencing diet that it should focus on mental health or addiction, whenever possible. Sheriffs sometimes draw back from things such as alcohol and mental health treatment requirements, because they make the process longer. There are a few administrative things that require to be done.
Can you give some practical examples of those administrative roadblocks? It just strikes me, from looking at the research, that we are not using such options as much as we should be.
First of all, it is simpler to say to a person, “You will be supervised by the local authority social work department, and you will have a supervising officer who will route you to programmes to deal with your alcohol issues”, than it is to say, “I’m going to impose a specific alcohol treatment requirement where I need to nominate a particular person and set out a particular programme for you.” I am sure that, for the mental health treatment requirement, the law says that you have to have a report in advance and you have to nominate a particular medical practitioner to supervise it. I might be wrong about that, though.
Is that why you are saying that the process is a bit cumbersome at the moment?
It is a bit cumbersome. Another issue, which you will be aware of, is the delays that we encounter in the court system when we seek psychiatric and psychological reports. We usually allow up to eight weeks for a psychiatric report, for example, and that delays the sentencing process. I think that sheriffs and sentencers want the process to be as swift as possible, for the benefit of everyone involved—the victim of the crime, the person accused of the crime and the public. At the moment, it is simpler to deal with most of the rehabilitative mechanisms under the auspices of a general supervision requirement.
That is very helpful. I appreciate that you will not have all the details in front of you, but, if you do not mind, could you write to the committee on some of the blocks that you see in that respect? We would be keen to have a look at that.
I am, of course, happy to do that.
I appreciate that.
I turn now to our social work and local government colleagues. Are there any capacity issues that you want to highlight? I know that there has been a lot of success with community payback orders, for example. Other colleagues on the committee will have questions on resourcing, but perhaps, Councillor Chalmers, I can start with you on capacity issues with regard to alternatives to custody.
Absolutely, and thank you for inviting us along today.
Justice social work services have experienced significant growth in diversion, bail supervision, structured deferred sentences, throughcare and public protection responsibilities. There has been quite a lot of new work in recent years. Services are facing recruitment and retention challenges as well as increasing case complexity involving trauma, addiction, mental ill health and high-risk behaviours. No doubt we will come back to that issue.
Although the workforce vacancy rates in justice social work are lower than those in the wider social work sector—the figure is just around 5.9 per cent for justice social work, compared with about 9.5 per cent overall—retention, case load pressures and the increasing complexity of cases remain significant concerns. Indeed, one in six social workers leaves the profession within five years, and we are working jointly with the Scottish Government to consider the justice social work workforce in the context of the broader look that we are taking at justice social work capacity.
It is key that we develop a baseline for the profession, which will be crucial when scaling up any community justice interventions. The key message is that capacity must precede demand. Local government absolutely supports further reform, but community justice services must be adequately resourced before additional responsibilities are transferred from the prison system. I am sure that Jackie Hamilton can provide details on that.
Great—you have set up Ms Hamilton nicely.
In response to the convener’s question about a presumption against an extension of such sentences, I do not disagree with anything that the other witnesses have said about the difficulties that would be presented to justice social work in relation to resourcing, for example. We probably need to do a bit more work to understand why things have not fully worked, given where we are. We need to think about sentencers’ confidence in community sentences.
As the sheriff pointed out, court reports are extremely robust and are full of risk assessments. They go through all the sentencing options that are open to the court, with information provided on what would happen to the person if a certain option was chosen. They cover the risk of harm, the risk of reoffending and the needs in that regard. At the end of the report, things are summed up and there is an action plan if, for example, a community payback order is given. At that point, consideration is given to alcohol and drugs, mental health and so on. The sheriff is right about the problems relating to the alcohol and drug treatment requirements. We need to name providers, but, when court reports are produced, we do not always have providers ready to be named, because risk assessments are dynamic and continually change. We need to get to know the person before we find the right provider for them.
In relation to shorter-term sentences, an increase in court reports and assessment at that stage would probably be extremely useful. Social Work Scotland has said that we would need to do more assessment at that stage in order to see whether a community disposal would be more appropriate than custody. However, that would require resources, because we already produce a huge number of court reports every year, and we are talking about an extension of that.
I suspect that we will come back to the issue of resourcing, as we have done in many of our evidence sessions thus far. I know that members have questions about that.
I have a final question for Ms Hamilton, from a social work perspective. I have been learning more about orders for lifelong restriction, because I am interested in them. What is your experience, from the social work sphere, of managing individuals on OLRs?
I have very little personal experience of that, because orders for lifelong restriction are few and far between. However, the risk management plans that are developed for such orders are extremely robust and rigorous. They are developed in line with the risk management of the person, and they involve the risk management authority, psychiatry and psychology services and whatever other services are necessary. The plans are reviewed regularly as the risks rise or reduce.
Ms McCluskey, given your experience, do you have anything to add on OLRs? I realise that I have gone slightly off piste—I am probably abusing my position as convener by asking that question.
I do not have anything to add on OLRs, but I will make a point about drugs. As you know, the drug death figures were published last week. A third of the people who died had been in contact with justice services over the past 12 years. We cannot punish people out of addiction.
The evidence base on drug treatment and testing orders has been declining because of the variety of drugs that are now used. In a way, it was quite easy—well, it was not really easy—when we were dealing with people on heroin, because we could put them on a reducing amount of methadone and so on. However, we are now dealing with nitazenes, cocaine and a range of other drugs. Increasing the number of rehab beds and alternatives is a much better way of doing it. It is a health issue. I have known people who have said that drug treatment and testing orders have been the starting point for them getting on to a recovery journey, but it is incredibly complex.
Each year, around 6,000 people who come into contact with the justice system are both homeless and in addiction; they might be serving life sentences or short-term sentences. They are constantly in and out—there is a churn—and, if we could tackle that, we would almost solve our prison population issue at the lower level, because around 6,000 people come in every year for short-term sentences—sentences under six months. That is about 780 prison cells, although we would need significantly more justice social work capacity. I have done a very rough piece of maths, which I am sure will be wrong, but, on average, to take everybody out of the system who is sentenced for under six months, we would probably need to give justice social work an extra £25 million. England and Wales have just had the Gauke review and the Sentencing Act 2026, and an extra £700 million has just been announced for probation. It is not like for like, but the equivalent here would be an extra £66 million into justice social work, However, it is not just that, is it? It is also housing, drugs and mental health—that is where we need to see an increase.
I can see that at least one of my colleagues is making a note of that, so I imagine that you will be questioned further on it. In the meantime, I will hand over to Ms Chapman, who might also have a declaration of interest to make.
Good morning, everyone. I remind colleagues that, before I was elected, I worked for a rape crisis centre in the women’s sector.
I thank the witnesses for being here and for their contributions so far. Karyn, I will pick up where you left off on what is needed to support effective community justice. You articulated quite clearly the cycle of conviction and reconviction. How can we shift our thinking about what we measure, because, if we measure reconviction rates, that is only one element. How can we shift our thinking about measuring things such as harm reduction and substance abuse reduction? How does community justice work?
That is a great question. In lots of jurisdictions, they measure wellbeing. Criminal social work does itself a disservice—no offence—because it has really blunt metrics such as, “Did we see you within seven days?” or, “Did you complete your order?”, which are no measure of improvement. The services, including third sector services, are amazing and do much more in trying to move people towards a more stable environment, sometimes getting their children back, getting free of drugs and alcohol and getting into employment. I talk about employment all the time, because it is important to get people into employment so that they pay tax and their kids see them going out in the morning. It is those things that make a fundamental difference to people’s lives.
We need a paradigm shift in our thinking about what keeps people out of offending. My whole career has been based on having fewer victims; I focus on the perpetrators because I want fewer victims. To do that, I need to provide perpetrator programmes, we need to look at things such as anger management and I need to be very involved in drug treatment. We are doing some work at the moment on community justice to rehab, so that, when we know that somebody has an addiction to drugs and alcohol, we can offer them a pathway in from the very earliest point that they hit the justice system. Things such as that require a shift.
It is not about being soft—I hate using the word “soft”, because everybody uses it. It is about being smart and following the evidence. The evidence is about what works, and you are quite right that we need to measure that differently. It will provide the public with a much better understanding about what works in community justice. We need to make things such as unpaid work more visible to the community, because that is how people repay their debt. I see great unpaid work taking place. Since unpaid work orders started, we have had 11.5 million hours of unpaid work in Scotland. Communities are transformed, but we need to make it more visible. That is a job for me, too.
Thank you for that. If I have time, I might come back to the unpaid work question.
Jackie, how do you respond to the comment about measuring success differently through how we see harm reduction coming through the process?
I absolutely agree with what Karyn McCluskey said, because we are in a cycle of measuring how quickly we can get somebody started in unpaid work, how many days it takes us to see somebody, how often we see them and the length of time an order lasts. It is all the very practical and easy-to-measure things. The things that Karyn is talking about are a lot harder to measure.
10:00
To see the shift from the start, we use a risk tool called the level of service case management inventory, which looks at a person’s risks and needs. You can see the shift in the scoring from the start to the end, and we need to get better at promoting that. Sometimes, it can be a very tiny shift that does not show in the raw data, but the fact that the person has left court and appeared at a justice social work office can be an immense step for them. They manage to come in when they have been asked to, or they contact us when they are in need—those wee bits are steps towards them not reoffending.
We have to be careful that we do not measure the reoffending as the ultimate thing, because it can take someone quite a while to get to that point. Just as Karyn said, it is about reducing the number of victims, and, if we can reduce the level of offending, that in itself can be seen as success. It is not always the success that you want to see on the front page of the paper, but, for someone who is homeless, is in addiction, has mental health problems or has had a life in the care system and so has had no stability at all, to be able to reduce the number of times they go to court and to reduce their reoffending can be extremely good for them.
Maureen, what do we need to start measuring the right and more appropriate things? Just because we do not measure something does not mean to say that it is not important. What resources or other things would we need to achieve the shift?
One of the difficulties that we have is that everybody is working in silos, whether nationally or locally. A benefit of having local community justice partnerships and community planning partnerships is that you can start to pull things together. Effective community justice depends on a wider ecosystem of services including housing services, mental health services, alcohol and drug services, employability support services and violence against women and girls services. Public protection arrangements and all those services need to work together.
We need to pull all that together and work differently, which, due to the complexity and the demand, requires a combination of the way in which we plan things nationally with national policies and the effectiveness of local community justice and community planning partnerships. However, we are not starting from zero, because a lot of work has been done to feed into the sentencing and penal policy commission. We did quite a lot of work in COSLA from day 1 of the commission being set up, with our professional advisers feeding in to say what it could look like. Preparation has been done. If we are doing it in a multidisciplinary way, we can look at what data we need to collect and how to do so. The tools are there, so it is about pulling it into one place and ensuring that it is working effectively.
And resourcing it appropriately.
Absolutely.
I know that other members will come back to the figure of £25 million. Scott, you talked about the willingness to use alternatives to custody across sentencing. We still have examples of those alternatives not being used. How do you balance the information that you get about the availability of programmes and what needs to be there to give you confidence to use the system, and things such as public confidence and people questioning whether the alternatives are punishment?
That is a good question. I will address the last part of it first. There is a huge issue with public confidence in alternatives to custody, and the system needs to grapple with that and do better to assure the public about the robustness of those alternatives. The Sentencing Council is doing its best to get that message out. Someone may have to do 300 hours of unpaid work or they could be supervised for three years. They may be under a restriction of liberty order for 10 months or have to pay £2,000 in compensation. There is a good message to get across about the robustness of the alternatives, and we need to do a better job of assuring the public about that.
You asked about cases where those alternatives are not being used. In every case, we try to do justice and sentence in a fair and proportionate way in pursuit of a particular sentencing aim or a combination of aims. Judges and sheriffs are primarily looking at the seriousness of the offence and considering how culpable the person is and what harm has been done. For the committee’s purposes, we are looking at summary cases. There are some serious cases that are being prosecuted in summary procedure in Scotland. There will always be cases for which custody will be required as a sentence of last resort. As I understand it, that is what the law sets out at the moment.
We are still seeing some very short sentences. The Sentencing Council has a pilot study under way and the results of it will be published in due course. Karyn McCluskey may want to come in on this, but the early signs from some of our interviews with sheriffs suggest that many short sentences are awarded to people who have repeatedly breached a community payback order. If someone has breached their sentence once, twice, or even three times, it is very difficult for sentencers to deal with that. Many sentencers will give people a second and third chance and will err on the side of mercy and rehabilitation, which, as I have said, is about public protection in the long term. Some short sentences are awarded when people have been on remand and their sentence will be backdated.
We need more research and we will share ours with the committee once we have it. There will always be cases in summary procedure where custody is required—for example, charges such as assault to severe injury and permanent disfigurement are now appearing to a greater extent. We need more information about the very short sentences, which the council is trying to contribute to.
That is helpful. The committee will look forward with interest to the research from the pilot when it is published. Do you get adequate information when there have been breaches of community conditions to enable you to distinguish between wilful disregard of justice and unmet needs, such as housing or addiction support? Can you use that information in determining whether you award a custodial sentence?
We are talking about when there has already been a disposal in the case, a community payback order has been given and the court receives a breach report from a local authority. Breach reports are usually fit for purpose. I am not saying that they always have all the information that we need. Sometimes, as part of the job, sheriffs have to be proactive and ask for information. On the basis of the report that I have received and when I have asked for anything else, I have found that I have always been able to get the information that I needed in order to make a decision.
Sometimes, we receive breach reports when an individual has not turned up for unpaid work for the first 10 occasions. There is not always much more information than that, because the person has not been in touch and it may have been difficult to get hold of them, which we understand. On the face of it, it looks as though that is a flagrant breach. A sentencer may be justified in moving to a custodial sentence straight away; I am not saying that that is not appropriate sometimes. However, sometimes, with a little bit of prodding, you can find out that the person is living in absolute chaos. You may already know that they have a background of significant trauma in their lives. All that feeds into the sentencing process, because the information is mitigatory. I do not know whether that answers everything that you asked me but, in my experience, I find that information is usually available and, if not, you can get it eventually.
You alluded to the need for a holistic approach to sentencing. I have found that to work extremely effectively on several occasions, with social work working alongside health and housing to create a problem-solving approach for the individual concerned. Sometimes the problem is where the person stays, because their peers are all around them. When they are sent back from court with a community payback order with a number of different requirements, and when they perhaps have a significant drug problem in their lives, living next door to people who have similar issues can be at the root of the problem. In such cases, rehousing has worked. Karyn McCluskey mentioned measuring wellbeing: I can think of a number of cases in which an individual has been rehoused and placed under significant social work supervision as part of an order, and their wellbeing has gone from zero to 99.
Thanks, Scott, that is really helpful.
My final question is for Karyn McCluskey. You responded to a question about the difference in reoffending rates, and we are also aware of the harm that custody can cause, particularly to people who have experienced trauma and other vulnerabilities.
Locking people up might be appropriate in some cases, but how do we reduce the number of circumstances in which custody is necessary? What do we need in the community system to reduce that number?
I am a huge advocate of problem-solving courts and problem-solving sheriffs who think not only about the harm that the person has caused and how to address that through a sentence, but about what the person needs in the courts.
There is a whole thing around procedural justice, bringing people in and saying, “What is it that you think you need?” and taking a much more holistic approach to sentencing. Sometimes that can involve bringing people back into court. I see sheriffs across Scotland who are adopting that approach because they realise that those people are constantly coming back. There is great evidence for that problem-solving approach and, although it can seem more expensive, it costs less in the long run. That is one thing that I hugely support, particularly in relation to specialist courts such as domestic abuse courts, because you can look at things in the round and achieve good sentencing outcomes.
People always think about the court building, and the average cost of a problem-solving court is around £3 million. That calculation was made in around 2022. However, you can have a problem-solving sheriff and give them some of the supportive elements that they need in the courtroom, as well as some of the services that people need, and you can prove that you can achieve a reduction in offending and a better outcome.
Housing is at the heart of all this, though. The number of people I see just circling through homeless accommodation—it is chaos. We had something like 4,300 breaches last year. We have done some work on it, which involved looking at 209 cases where people breached. Sometimes they do not have the money to be able to turn up. Sometimes they are in debt. Sometimes they are in chaotic environments. Sometimes they are unwell.
We have worked with social workers to consider what assertive outreach looks like in the first seven to 14 days, so that we can start to reduce the number of breaches and provide sheriffs with better breach reports. The breach report was most recently revised around 20 years ago. It is quite old-fashioned, so we need to revisit it with social work colleagues to work out what sheriffs need in order to consider what sentence might be appropriate.
Given the number of breaches, why are we talking about something that has not been updated in 20 years? Why do we have so little data? It seems astonishing to me.
It is astonishing to me as well, Mr Kerr.
I was going to say that I have a lot of sympathy for you, but that word sounds patronising, so forgive me. You have a very difficult job, because you do not have any levers to pull, do you?
I trained as an intelligence analyst and was in the police. That is my whole background. I know that there is a paucity of data in justice. We have tried our best. For example, we had to ask social work colleagues to pull out 209 cases. In some cases, they had to go to four different systems to get the data that we needed.
It sounds chaotic.
It is not chaotic. We have to work around the situation. I do not have a magic wand or £300 million.
10:15
You have been in the role for 10 years, I think.
Yes—for 10 years. We started up from nothing.
You are almost on the sidelines. You are like the coach on the sidelines.
We are a system actor—we try to look over the whole system.
But you cannot have an impact on anything that is delivered.
We can. We have legislation, under which we can issue improvement notes. We can issue improvement notes if we feel that the system is failing. We can issue improvement notes to local authorities; we even issued an improvement note to the Government.
Do you have any enforcement powers?
I do not have as many teeth as I would like to have—
You have no teeth.
—but we can issue improvement notes to local authorities and, indeed, to the Scottish Government.
But they can just ignore those, can they not?
Yes, they can ignore them. The Sentencing Commission for Scotland suggested that we should have more teeth so that we can hold people’s feet to the fire in relation to services that are not delivered. We also need to be able to talk about money in the system and what that means for the provision of services. We cannot be the Cinderella service. If we want to tackle the prison population, the answers lie in robust, visible community justice.
On the issue of the lack of information in the system, where do you go to say, “This needs to be fixed—fix it”?
The criminal justice board.
That is part of the problem, is it not?
Data is absolutely critical—
No—part of the problem is the lack of accountability in the system.
The people who have the data are the police, the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service, the Scottish Prison Service and, to a lesser extent—because they involve 32 different systems—social work services.
But, on CPOs, they have all the data.
They give us the figures. They present us with the hard numbers, because we do the CPO report for social work every year.
Is the data complete?
Yes, the data is complete. It is good that we get the numbers, but the detail behind them is missing.
You are talking about the whys.
Yes. We have to say to colleagues, “Give us some intelligence behind why this is happening.”
Does that tend to be anecdotal?
It does, but it backs up some of the figures. We look at the experience of social workers and ask, “Why is this happening?”. The issue might be partly a workforce issue, or it might be partly to do with the complexity of the cases—we might be talking about people with a really high level of need. There are sometimes good reasons for why the figures are as they are.
However, you are right in the point that you are making about data. In last year’s outcome activity report, we said that one of the big ways in which we needed to improve was in relation to data. We are constantly trying to bring together data sources—
I almost feel guilty for putting you under the spotlight, because I do not feel that you can be accountable for any of this. In his 2021 report on community justice, the Auditor General suggested that there were six areas where the system was not functioning that were of heightened concern. I have gone through those six areas in an attempt to find out whether anything has changed. Nothing has changed in five years. There have been marginal improvements in one or two areas. We can go through them one by one, if you would like to, but the number 1 issue was accountability and leadership. In fact, this very year, the sentencing and penal policy commission said that there were a lack of national leadership and a lack of co-ordination and accountability. The system was weak and fragmented in that regard. Why has nothing changed in five years?
I think that there have been a lot of improvements in justice, but—
Not in that specific area, though.
When it comes to accountability specifically, the problem is that each part of the system is accountable for its own—
I know—it is too fragmented, is it not?
It is fragmented. I talk about the criminal justice system, but sometimes it feels like a series of processes rather than a system, because it does not work as a system. I absolutely agree that it needs substantial investment. Even following someone through the system is incredibly hard.
It is not cohesive enough.
It is not.
That is why there are people, including me, who are dreadfully concerned about the direction of policy when it comes to early release and the presumption against short sentences. The current community justice system is not cohesive. It is fragmented. There are no clear lines of accountability.
I am addressing my comments to you, Karyn, and I feel guilty about it, because I do not feel that you have any levers to pull. You are on the sidelines saying, “Here’s the best practice—here’s what we should be doing,” but you do not get to deliver anything.
We work with individual local areas and community justice partnerships, as you have mentioned, and we give—
But that is the weakness, is it not?
It is. I have to achieve more by encouragement than by going in and saying, “This is absolutely terrible.”
I know.
We work closely with local areas, but you are right. I have to say that it is not the community justice system that is fragmented; it is the justice system. This is not just about community justice.
Yes—it is a reflection, is it not?
I understand your comments about early release. There is a bit of a Hobson’s choice just now. Early release is happening all over the UK. We have people who are in their cells 23 hours a day. The prison service cannot cope, so something needs to be done.
The people who I want to protect and, ultimately, the people who are at the centre of my concern, are the victims. I do not want the victims to become easy to disregard in this. You talk about Hobson’s choice. You think, “We have a problem here, another here and another here—the system does not work. Therefore, we’re going to release these people back into the community, even though we know the community justice system doesn’t work properly.”
I am going to take the heat off you for a minute, Karyn, because you are getting all the questions. Jackie Hamilton said something earlier that set alarm bells ringing for me in relation to my concern for victims, given the current direction of policy and the weakness of the system. Jackie said that we have to be careful that we do not measure reoffending as the ultimate thing. Why not? We want to get people out of the justice system and back into—
I meant that we should not do that immediately. It needs to be somebody who has—
But you said “ultimately”. Surely, the ultimate thing must be that we help people to get out of the system.
Yes. Ultimately, having somebody who is not in the system is definitely where we want to go.
Right.
At the end of the process, we want a person who has been through the system and comes out at whatever point. At the earliest point possible is the best but, with some cases, given the needs, it is not going to happen overnight. That is what I mean. We should not think, “Oh, that person has reoffended four times in the last year,” without noting that, the year before, they reoffended 44 times. It is a gradual process and it is about working towards getting people out of the system.
I accept that. We are all a work in progress—I understand that. However, the ultimate objective is to get people not to reoffend and to get them out of the system. I am glad that we agree on that.
I turn to COSLA. The second area of weakness that was mentioned in the Audit Scotland report was about geographic variation. Councillor Chalmers, that is your bag at COSLA, is it not? What is the reason for that? Five years after that report and 10 years after the Community Justice (Scotland) Act 2016 was passed, we still have a variety of uneven, fragmented and sometimes difficult-to-access services.
Every local authority in Scotland has a different shape and size and different demographics, so that is part of it.
So, can they not do it, then?
It is about unwarranted differences. I am in South Lanarkshire Council, which is a huge council with a range of services and a particular demographic. There are smaller councils, such as island councils, which look different, including in the way that they approach community justice.
That is not what the report says. It does not say that they look different. It says that there is “geographic variation” in the way that community justice is administered, in terms of access to support, supervision and specialist interventions. Are you saying that local authorities across Scotland are not equipped to do this?
Some local authorities will be struggling with capacity and workforce. Some local authorities, because of their size and focus, can pull in resources and do that differently. Others would struggle to do that because of their funding and workforce capacity.
Thank you for being absolutely transparent in that answer, because clearly that is a problem. If we are going to put more pressure on the system and we do not deal with the geographic fragmentation and uneven distribution of services, we are failing victims and the people who are the offenders.
The third area that is mentioned in the Audit Scotland report is data and the ability to measure outcomes. Five years on, that has not got any better.
Convener, I can feel you breathing down my neck.
You have one minute, Mr Kerr.
We have touched on funding and capacity. Do I have time to ask about the £66 million and the £25 million, convener?
Go for it.
He is very indulging as a convener.
Tell me about those numbers, Karyn. I wrote them down and thought, “What does that mean?” That is not a lot of money.
It is not a lot of money. I took the figures from the increase in the probation budget in England and Wales, which is the £700 million that the Westminster Government has just allocated to probation. The way that I worked it out, although it is very back-of-an-envelope stuff, was to take the number of cases—
That is okay. We get a lot of back-of-an-envelope stuff—do not worry about it.
I was doing it for the committee. It is about the number of cases that a social worker can carry at one time. They often have around 25 cases, but they can have a mixture of complexity. You can get someone who has done a one-off offence and is on a CPO but who does not have much complexity, and then you can get somebody else who is just in chaos. That makes a difference to how many people the justice social worker can deal with.
Yes, and they are under a lot of pressure.
They are under pressure. We need to keep their workloads down so that people do not leave and get burned out. I was working out how many cases they can hold and how many extra social workers we would need if we were to transfer people with sentences under six months—I know that it would not be all of them—back into the community.
Was that the £25 million figure?
That is the £25 million.
What is the £66 million?
That was just a percentage of the £700 million, if it were translated to Scotland.
Is it 9 per cent?
Yes—it is just what it would be if it were translated to Scotland.
Okay. I get where you are coming from. The bottom line is that resource for front-line capacity is lacking, and you are advocating that as a starting place.
It must matter. We need to assess in the way that the health service does. The health service will know how many people come in with fractured necks or femurs, brain tumours, or anything else. The justice system does not do that work in advance and think about how many people are coming into the system. That is not about the number of cases, which is what the sheriffs would look at; it is about the number of unique people. What needs do they have? How many have addiction? How many are homeless? That would allow us to estimate how much resource local areas need to address the issue and get better incomes.
I will conclude, because of time, and move on to the sixth area in the Audit Scotland report—I have missed out the fifth one but we might come back to that. It is about outcomes. We talked a little bit about that. You have now landed on outcomes.
Absolutely.
The current situation is that we have an unsatisfactory amount of resource committed through local authorities, particularly in the area of justice social work, and you are advocating for more. However, we need a more defined framework on what a good outcome is. Do you agree?
I absolutely agree.
That report is five years old, and we are still talking about this, which is lamentable.
We have outcomes performance indicators, which we revisited. Predominantly, those are based on the data that we could gather from each local authority, and you will see that in our outcome activity report. We measure them year on year. Is it fulsome? No, it is not. Could we get better? We absolutely could. It would be a success for community justice if we could prove more of the outcomes in the round and demonstrate them to the public.
The case is proven when you can prove it, right?
Indeed.
That is obvious, so I agree with that.
The one thing that we did not talk about—
We do not have time to talk about it, Mr Kerr. We are running out of time, so I am going to—
There is tremendous pressure on the police as well.
Yes. I will bring in Ms Bland. If I have time towards the end, I will bring you back in, but I want to be fair to colleagues.
Good morning. Sheriff Pattison, you said that sheriffs “draw back” from imposing specific alcohol or drug treatment programmes because the administration is cumbersome and it is simpler to use a general supervision requirement.
Stick with me on my thought process here. Karyn McCluskey talked about the idea of
“problem-solving courts and problem-solving sheriffs”.
Taking into consideration what we have heard this morning, where are the time and resources for that idea?
That is challenging, for sure. I need to be clear that I am speaking not for the Sentencing Council at this point but from my experience, and that was the context in which I answered that question earlier. However, I am aware of a number of problem-solving courts that are extremely effective—for example, there are some in Glasgow. Obviously, there has been significant investment there.
10:30
Karyn McCluskey’s point was that judges and sheriffs, being informed about the nature of the particular case in the sentencing process, can approach it as a problem-solving exercise in the course of their normal work. Please bear with me on this. Sometimes, that involves asking social work for more information. Sometimes, it involves—
But that goes against what you said about time delays and being conscious about moving things forward for everyone involved. What I am trying to get at is that there is an ideal situation, and then there is the reality.
When I addressed the issue about alcohol treatment requirements and mental health treatment requirements, I based my answer on my experience that it takes a longer time to sentence someone. As one of my colleagues said, no information is fronted up in the first social work report to name the particular individual or medical practitioner who will be able to supervise the mental health treatment requirement, so there is an in-built delay in that. Sentence would already have been deferred for four weeks. You would have to go back and defer sentence again to have that information, but one could get to the same end through a supervision requirement. That is where I was coming from in that answer.
In relation to problem-solving courts, I am sure that Karyn McCluskey would agree that, if we were to try to roll that out across Scotland—
That would need heavy investment.
Absolutely. That stands to reason. However, much can be done in the judicial process. I have done it myself by trying to bring different parts of the system together at the sentencing stage to try to create an order that will genuinely punish and rehabilitate the person.
I can think of a number of cases—I referred to one earlier—where housing was key. We can have a package of measures involving drug treatment and testing orders, unpaid work and a housing move. There are things such as that where the system comes together. It can be a bit disjointed, but the sheriff can have a kind of convening power, if I can put it like that, to ask different bits of the local authority, where they might not have done this already, to come together in pursuit of a legitimate sentencing aim, which is the rehabilitation of someone who may have—I think that I said this earlier—been through significant trauma in their life and who presents as completely addicted to something. They are causing society harm, but they can be rehabilitated. That is my answer.
In roughly what percentage of cases is the procedure that you have just described used, with the sheriff being able to pull all that together into a multi-agency approach?
It is not routine.
I understand that it is not routine, but I am trying to understand the situation.
I think that over a—
What you are really talking about is best practice, is it not?
That is purely my own experience. It perhaps reflects the experience of a couple of my close colleagues, but in perhaps two cases a month where someone who is a significant recidivist—
So, it is a tiny number.
It is a very small number. We can contrast that with the problem-solving courts, which are hugely effective, in my view.
How many problem-solving courts do we have?
We have about four at the moment. We have a women’s court and there is a drug and alcohol court in Lanarkshire.
Out of how many courts?
There are very few. I do not know the number of courts in Scotland, but I will find out for you. I have to declare an interest—
It is a tiny number.
It is a small number. However, we have started them up. Sometimes they have been driven by a proactive sheriff. We have such courts for women because of the unique challenge there, and the evidence base on drug and alcohol courts shows that they are effective, too. Some of the analysis that has been done of the Lanarkshire drug and alcohol court is incredibly positive.
It sounds as if people who are convicted would be lucky to find themselves in such a court, because the majority will not.
Yes. That is a fair comment.
I am just going to throw this out. Things are difficult for people with chaotic lifestyles and traumatic experiences, and community payback orders are almost setting people up to fail.
You are right. Too often, justice social work is used as the last resort. People who have really complex needs struggle to access services in the mainstream, so, when they get to the court stage and they end up on a CPO, that is the point at which they can start looking at things such as housing. Sometimes we get people who do not have a doctor, who are unable to get access to basic care—
Why are we giving people CPOs when they are not managing to deal with them and we know that they are going to really struggle with them?
It is because that is the start of the process. If we do not give them a CPO, what do we do with them? They will just wander around, going from service to service and office to office with nothing, racking up offences and victims because we have not tried to target our support.
Is that because we are trying to manage them in the community?
The approach also does not work in custody, because those people do not get access to the services that they need—
So, nothing is working.
They might see a general practitioner for five minutes while they are in custody, but there is no follow-on when they come out. Problem-solving courts would give agencies a duty to co-operate, because that is where justice social work sometimes struggles. For example, it can be very difficult to give someone access to a mental health practitioner, and then, if the person does not turn up for the appointment, we are back to square one. That comes back to the robust, aggressive outreach that Karyn McCluskey mentioned.
The public could be at risk as well.
I would say that 70 per cent of CPOs are effective, and the person finishes their order—
What is the definition of “effective”?
I was just going to come back to that. Someone being seen within seven days and completing their order is the definition of completion.
I said to Ms Chapman and Mr Kerr that the outcomes need to be different. However, the outcomes from people going in for short-term prison sentences are much worse. That actually makes people homeless and takes them away from any connections that they might have in local areas and from recovery services. Those are very poor outcomes.
I am conscious of the time, but I have one last question.
You can have another minute or so.
Just to round this up, why should any members of the public who are watching this discussion and taking notes have confidence in a system with silo working; staff shortages; rising breach rates; lack of transparency regarding the intensity of supervision and compliance with community justice programmes; pressures on social work, housing and addiction services; and cumbersome administration?
You could be talking about health, justice or any part of the system. The outcomes for those who go in for short-term sentences are very poor. Our approach has a success rate, but it also has people who breach their orders and might end up back in the system. This is a complicated area.
I understand that.
I understand that you were in policing previously, so you will know that the people whom the services see most frequently often have florid mental health conditions. Trying to get people into psychiatric treatment or a bed in an appropriate facility is enormously challenging. I try to do that weekly for people whom I am helping out, and it is enormously challenging.
However, the issue does not involve only social work. There are a range of third sector organisations out there that also support people, and they are sometimes more effective in supporting people in their accommodation. That is also part of the community justice services that we put out there. However, they are struggling. There is little doubt that the third sector is really squeezed.
Thank you for that. I am conscious of time, but would anybody else like to comment?
I would like to comment on the public confidence part. Some good work is being done, although there is definitely more to do in terms of the wider general public confidence in community disposals.
I will use an example from my area in South Lanarkshire, where community payback work is extremely active in our communities. Many of our community projects, such as community gardens, and various community organisations use that service to support their work. They understand it and value it. That creates a sense in the community that it is really helpful and people can see how it works, although we need to do more on that. There is also accountability, because the report on that service comes to our social work committee in the council, and an annual report is produced and shared. There are different ways of building community, but there needs to be much more of that.
Do you agree that there are some excellent community payback order situations and some that are inadequate?
Seventy-seven per cent of CPOs are not returned to court under breach. A lot of work was done recently under operation anchor, which is the prison population work. Colleagues have done a lot of work on this, and breaches that led to custody, which represent less than 5 per cent of CPOs, have been considered in that prison population work. The individuals who breached a CPO and were given custody were a particularly complex group with high levels of additional need, as has been explained.
I still have Mr Macpherson and Mr Merrick to bring in and we are starting to get a bit tight for time, but I will hand over to the deputy convener now.
Good morning. Colleagues have probed and highlighted many of the challenges that we are facing collectively. I would like to shift into more of a solution-finding mindset for this set of questions.
Karyn McCluskey, I was just re-reading the evidence that I heard you give to our predecessor committee on 9 October 2024. It has stuck with me since then, and so much of what you said then is still true now. Some of the issues have been exacerbated, problematically, but there have been some improvements too. As the Parliament goes into the budget-setting period, given the impact of preventative work and the benefits of investment in community justice—I am thinking of that preventative spending return and the social prescribing that can be achieved—is there anything that you want to emphasise to the committee and to Parliament more widely? What can we press the Government on to help improve the situation for all our communities?
It is interesting—obviously, you are the Criminal Justice Committee, and all the questions have been about justice, but, as I mentioned earlier, the issue that we are dealing with is really about housing. I look at that as a public health issue, because that secondary preventative work needs to be done.
We have done quite a lot in Scotland around trying to keep children in school, and the number of young people who are entering the justice system has dramatically reduced. We do not have any under-18s in prison, and we have fewer 18 to 20-year-olds and 21 to 22-year-olds, so that number has gone down. I hate to use this phrase from the pandemic period, but we are almost flattening that curve. There is a long-term preventative journey.
The challenges that I see are around addiction and, as we know from the details that came out last week, we are still not providing services to people early enough to prevent the absolutely traumatic figures that we are seeing now, which are what we see in the courts on a daily basis. The trauma side of the issue has been mentioned, and I know that people think, “Oh, that’s quite a trite thing to talk about,” but we see people in our courts who have had the most traumatic experiences and their stories all start with, “See when I was seven”, “See when I was five” or “See when I was 11”. Those people end up in the court system, and, as soon as they turn from a child into an adult, we view them very differently.
The evidence base shows that there needs to be a holistic approach, so we absolutely need there to be preventative spend. I know that the Government is doing work on where to put our preventative spend to get the greatest effect. Of course, I am going to say that it should be put into things such as early years parenting, because we see generations of people in a family—grandfathers, fathers and sons—ending up in the justice system.
We absolutely need to keep kids in school and try to get them into jobs. When I started up the violence reduction unit, I always said that the best way to stop a gun or a gang or a knife is a job. We need to get people into employment. Although we are talking about the mechanics of justice here, I hope that we do not hit the target but miss the point about the wider preventative environment for the people who end up in the system in the first place.
10:45
There is, rightly, a dialogue across the Parliament on implementing the recommendations of the Christie commission, and the progress that is being made towards that. You emphasised the fact that we are the Criminal Justice Committee. I appreciate that there are 32 different local authorities and that there are pressures on social work more widely, so the situation is challenging, but, with regard to throughcare in relation to both the homelessness system and improved support and rehabilitation for those with addictions, do you want to highlight any standout solutions that the committee can help probe and advance?
It is very early days, but, as I said earlier, we have been doing a bit of work on trying to provide access to rehab at the very earliest time that somebody hits the system, so the person might be diverted, but we have identified that they have an addiction issue. We have only got that system in four local authorities, and I think that we have almost bust the budget with those four, because people are saying, “Look, I want to change; I don’t want to be in this situation”, and we need to give them that opportunity.
Rehab is not for everybody; some people need different methods to try to manage their substance use, but if we can get help for people earlier, we can prevent lots of reoffending. I am sure that Sheriff Pattison acknowledges that, because his court is replete with people who are addicted to alcohol and drugs.
On homelessness, I do not know how you stay out of trouble if you have an addiction and you are homeless. It is probably one of the biggest challenges that we face. Even when people have got themselves clean in rehab, I sometimes have to put them right back into the environment that they came out of, which are places that most of us would avoid. How can we expect someone to stay free of drugs and alcohol when everyone in their peer group is abusing those substances? That is a real challenge.
Housing is a massive issue for everybody just now, but it is one of the things that we struggle with the most—there is no getting away from it. We have housing first models—I sit on the board of Simon Community Scotland, which is now buying flats in Edinburgh, using social investment funding, to try to house people—but the situation is endlessly challenging. I am sorry—I wish that I had a solution for you. The housing first model is fantastic—Finland has shown us that—but we need to manufacture accommodation.
Yes, and there is also an issue about where the accommodation is.
And where the accommodation comes from.
Reducing siloed working would be a huge move forward. We need a whole-family approach. We have started the process of addressing the issue, but we can have five different social workers and a couple of voluntary agencies going into the same house.
How do we reduce that siloed approach?
We need an approach that looks at the family holistically, and we need a lead officer who takes responsibility for the situation.
Should the lead officer be a council officer or someone else?
It should be the person who has the best relationship with whoever we are trying to assist. For one person, that might be a council officer; for a younger person, it might be someone in education; for another person, it could be someone in addiction services. We have peer mentors working right across justice social work in the addiction field, and they have been invaluable in getting into houses to help the whole family. A whole-family holistic approach is certainly a way forward.
I would not be doing my job properly if I did not talk about the funding of justice social work. Aside from the issue of the amount of funding, the fact that that funding is provided year on year is problematic. I have been involved with justice social work since the very beginning, and, technically, I should have a temporary contract, because we have annual funding, which means that we cannot plan ahead. As Karyn McCluskey suggested, we commission third sector colleagues to do certain work, but that becomes really difficult by the end of the year, when we do not know what our funding will be for the next year. Across the country, we are having those conversations with the third sector, saying that we need to wait to see whether we will get funding for the next year, but that, if we have got enough funding, we can move forward. Again, justice social work cannot do this work on its own—we need involvement from people across the board.
I forgot to mention the advances that have been made in electronic monitoring, which I talked about the last time that I was before the committee. We have GPS technology, and there is also alcohol monitoring, whereby a tag around your ankle measures the ethanol in your sweat. We can say to the people who are being monitored, “Look, you’re not allowed to drink for the next 120 days, but we’re going to support you”—after all, these sorts of approaches need to come with support.
I know that the Scottish Government is looking at this just now, but there would be advantages in expanding our use of electronic monitoring in a much more thoughtful way. Countries such as Portugal and Belgium have a very effective electronic monitoring system, and we need to expand in that direction.
Sheriff Pattison, did you want to say something?
I would just echo everything that Karyn McCluskey has said about what would be helpful, but I would re-emphasise that rolling out problem-solving courts in our society would also be helpful. Obviously, it would be resource intensive, but I am speaking as a sheriff at this point.
Moreover, as the committee will be aware, mental health is a significant issue, too. The range of unpaid work programmes for those suffering from some form of mental health issue is very limited, and that often creates an issue for sentencers. Therefore, we need to look at that more closely and see what programmes might be available.
Speaking personally, I think that the system is challenged, and there is room for improvement, but tremendous work is going on day to day across the criminal justice system. Whether it be from my colleagues on the bench, from social work or from Karyn McCluskey’s organisation, some excellent and hard work is going on to treat people in a humane way. Sometimes that will mean treating them very robustly, by imposing a sentence of imprisonment, but that can be done in a humane way, and in a way that seeks to help and change them. That sort of thing is going on day and daily in our courts in Scotland. I know that the committee is in problem-solving mode at the moment, but I do not want members to lose sight of that.
I hope that it is okay that I said that.
Absolutely.
We are very tight for time now—I know that we were late starting, due to witnesses not being able to get here quite on time. I will now hand over to Mr Merrick for the final questions.
Good morning. We have already heard a wee bit about CPOs, and we know that the reconviction rate for those on such orders is far lower than that for those with a custodial sentence. What capacity is there to have more CPOs, and what barriers do we need to remove to see them being used more? That is a pretty open question.
The sentencing and penal policy commission developed some work with our professional advisers that resulted in an estimate that local government could support a much greater proportion of the prison population within the community. However, using a really high-level baseline, we concluded that approximately £18 million would be required to support an additional 1,000 people in the community over a 12-month period. That piece of work, which was published with a lot of detail attached, looked at what we could do, what we could do more of, and what it would cost, and that became part of the commission’s work and its report.
So, it is pretty expensive.
I would say that it is not as expensive as dealing with the crimes, and the victims, at the end of the day.
CPOs are not the only thing that we should be using. Some sheriffs use structured deferred sentences, too, but please do not ask me for any detail on them, as I am sure that Sheriff Pattison will have to correct me. In any case, with such sentences, sheriffs can bring people back. We have seen some really fantastic work in that respect, and people have been able to have a sort of relationship with the court in which sheriffs can look at them over a period of time.
Therefore, we would advocate for the use of structured deferred sentences, because they can give the court a much better idea of someone’s progress. In a lot of procedural justice, there is a sort of relationship with a sheriff—if you can have a relationship with a sheriff—and the person realises that the court is interested in their progression. We would like to see much more use of those kinds of sentences, but that is, of course, a sentencing decision.
Such sentences are effective. Generally, they involve a deferral of sentence with a potential view to admonition at the end. Usually, they are used for people who have addiction or some kind of vulnerability, and the person will work with a social worker over that initial period, which is usually three months but can be extended to six. I would echo the view that they represent a very useful sentencing alternative.
Your question was about more use of CPOs. I cannot speak to the resourcing issue—that is not something for the Sentencing Council. However, the piece of work that we are doing on short sentences will bring out the reasons for—and some data, finally, on—the use of such sentences. Our instinct is that they are being used in circumstances of breach to a significant extent. When you have someone who has breached an order two or three times, and they have had two or three chances, I can understand a sentencing decision that custody has to be imposed. Otherwise, there is no incentive to comply with the order.
However, if there were some alternative to custody at that point that was more robust than the CPO but less than full custodial detention—
What like?
That is a difficult question. What I will say—again, speaking as a sheriff—is that, when dealing in the sentencing process with breaches, sheriffs will, with someone who has breached an unpaid work requirement, often move to a restriction of liberty order before they will move to custody. Custody, at summary level, really is a sentence of last resort. I know that sheriffs up and down the country are imposing community payback orders day in, day out in summary work for every category of offence, for the reasons that you have mentioned. They are robust; they can be punitive; and they can be rehabilitative. As you have said, they seem, according to the research, to prevent reoffending more than short-term sentences anyway.
I would also highlight the work that is being done in Northern Ireland on enhanced combination orders, which last much longer and have, as a mandatory element, psychological support. A whole range of work goes on around those orders, and I know that Scottish Government colleagues are looking at that work and some of the evidence base in that respect.
Those orders will require extra resource, because they are more expensive to deliver, but they are much more efficacious, particularly for women who end up in the justice system and then in prison, often for very low-level offending. Enhanced combination orders are much more effective for that type of client.
In the deep dive that we did into breaches, we found that less than 5 per cent of orders that were breached ended up with the person in custody. That is a very small amount, and we work with sentencers to look at why the person has committed the breach. Is it just wilful behaviour, or are there other reasons? I absolutely take what was said earlier about doing more with and changing breach reports—indeed, we are working on that at the moment—but we will say in a breach report that the person can come back and do X, Y and Z to try to get them through. Again, not a huge number of those who breach CPOs will end up in custody.
I thank the witnesses for their evidence this morning and for allowing me to run the session on a little longer, because of the delayed start. Given that we had a four-person panel, there was quite a lot that we had to get through. I thank you all for attending.
I hope the others will forgive me, but I also want to thank Sheriff Pattison in particular. He was at great pains to make it clear today that he was wearing numerous hats in giving evidence, but I cannot overstate how helpful it is to the committee to hear somebody speaking from their experience on the bench. I realise that it is a very difficult line to walk when you are giving evidence, but it is important for us to put on the record our sincere thanks for your insight. I have certainly found it very helpful this morning.
I suspend the meeting to allow for a changeover of witnesses and a three-minute comfort break.
10:58
Meeting suspended.
11:03
On resuming—
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