Chamber and committees

It has certainly remained at the top of my to-do list. I would reflect on the fact that, after a month in post, I have presented to Parliament a plan to achieve a sustainable prison population.

On the day after my appointment as justice secretary, I visited HMP Edinburgh to see the level of pressure that the Scottish Prison Service is facing due to an increasing prison population. It is clear that staff want to focus on rehabilitation and reducing reoffending but that it is increasingly difficult for them to do so. I put on the record my thanks to the dedicated prison officers and staff across the prison estate, who are working tirelessly to maintain a safe and supportive environment for those in their care.

Although recorded crime in Scotland has fallen overall, over the longer term there has been a marked increase in the reporting, investigation and prosecution of serious offences including sexual crime and serious organised crime. I welcome the fact that, through the police and the courts, our justice system is ensuring that justice is done. Victims show enormous bravery and trust in our legal system in reporting crime, and I want that to continue. We are strengthening confidence in the justice system and ensuring that police, prosecutors and the courts have the powers that they need to bring perpetrators to justice.

I am, of course, concerned by the rise in sexual and domestic abuse crimes. Although I welcome the fact that victims have the confidence to come forward, including on historical crimes, we must remain focused on tackling such horrendous crimes and, importantly, prevent them from happening.

Sexual and domestic abuse crimes are overwhelmingly perpetrated by men against women and, ultimately, men must change their behaviour. The Scottish Government-funded Caledonian system is a good example of a community-based programme that aims to address the behaviour of men who have been convicted of domestic abuse, alongside providing support to affected women and children. My priority is to prevent crimes, but, when they happen, prisons must be a safe and effective place where such offending behaviour can be challenged and addressed through programmes and other rehabilitative work.

More individuals now remain in prison for longer, which creates a cumulative demand on capacity across the estate and also means that the population is increasingly more complex to manage, including dealing with health and social care needs.

I make no apology for saying that serious crimes should merit serious sentences. Scotland shows a clear and persistent trend of increasing the length of average custodial sentences, including a 37 per cent rise between 2014-15 and 2023-24. Those figures should not be interpreted as being solely attributable to sentence inflation, because other factors, such as the mix of offences in cases heard in court, continue to apply.

The remand population also remains high, with complicated and detailed cases taking longer to conclude. Scotland is not unique in experiencing prison population pressures, with many comparable countries recording increases in their prison populations. However, the fact that we have one of the highest such populations in western Europe must be addressed.

I have already referenced that we are building two new prisons and that we are expanding capacity. We already have one of the highest levels of custody per head of population in western Europe; we need to tackle that issue alongside the capacity issues that I will go on to discuss.

Attainment of a sustainable prison population will require fundamental change. The independent Scottish Sentencing and Penal Policy Commission’s evidence-based report recognised the need for a greater focus on community interventions to reduce reoffending and for rehabilitative work in prison to support the effective reintegration of individuals into the community. The commission was clear that prevention is the most effective route to a sustained reduction in the prison population.

My first priority is to prevent crime before it happens and, as a consequence, to reduce the number of victims. Therefore, the Government will continue to intervene early to steer people away from crime and focus on areas such as substance dependency, health, poverty, homelessness and employability, which are all significant contributing factors to offending.

I will be clear, as the Government has always been, that, for those people who pose the highest risk, the removal of liberty is an important and integral part of our justice system and that prisons will continue to be necessary. However, we want to see less crime so that we have fewer victims, which is why support is needed even after an offence has been committed if we are to minimise the risk of an individual reoffending and returning to prison following release. That is why my priority is the prevention of crime and further reoffending behaviour.

That approach makes financial sense: every prison place costs us more than £52,000 a year; this financial year, we are spending nearly £510 million in resource funding for the Scottish Prison Service to run our jails. However, evidence shows that community sentencing in areas such as non-violent crimes is more effective, with the reconviction rate for those people who were given community payback orders in 2022-23 at 28.6 per cent, compared with 53.2 per cent for those people who completed custodial sentences of one year or less. That approach is also significantly cheaper to the taxpayer, with an estimated cost of a CPO per unit between £1,251 and £6,778, depending on its requirements and complexity.

Today, I am proposing bold reform that will strike the right balance across custodial sentences, community sentencing and the need to robustly protect victims and the public. Other countries have achieved reductions by changing their approach, and we can, too. I will outline those plans in more detail.

First, I have instructed the Scottish Prison Service to exhaust all options for further maximisation of the existing estate and to set out an approach to further increasing the number of places, which will include the affordability and deliverability of additional capacity, with consideration of temporary modular accommodation and further housing blocks at existing prisons. I expect to receive business cases on those proposals soon.

Alongside more places, a smarter approach to custody is needed, and I remain committed to using all levers at our disposal, including continuing to expand the use of home detention curfew, which supports reintegration of individuals by providing for their structured return to the community. We have already made GPS technology available, and I want to expand that: we will now introduce a geographical pilot of GPS with bail, building on action that we have already taken to allow radio-frequency monitoring of bail curfews.

I also want to make full use of community-based alternatives where it is safe, proportionate and effective to do so, because we know that short custodial sentences can increase the likelihood of reoffending, whereas community sentences are more effective at supporting lasting rehabilitation. A statutory review of the national strategy for community justice, which sets out the long-term aims and priority actions that strengthen alternatives to custody, has been published today and will give stakeholders the opportunity to have their say on the direction of community justice.

I am also publishing several proposed changes to make a sustained change in our prison population, with a focus on rehabilitation and reducing reoffending, which will be the subject of an eight-week public consultation period. The consultation will seek views on amending the definition of a short-term prisoner from

“those serving less than four years”

to

“those serving less than five years”

to better reflect the existing sentencing powers of the courts and to bring Scotland into alignment with the Council of Europe’s position that sentences of five years or more constitute long-term imprisonment.

The consultation will also seek views on how we can deliver a more effective approach to custody, including—as the Scottish Sentencing and Penal Policy Commission recommended—extending the presumption against short sentences from a threshold of 12 months to one of 24 months, enhancing community payback orders to increase confidence in their effectiveness and support their wider use, and strengthening the bail test to reduce the number of people remanded with no real prospect of a custodial sentence of less than 24 months.

The Scottish Sentencing and Penal Policy Commission noted that the current arrangement for long-term prisoners, whereby some are released into the community on non-parole licence six months before the end of their sentence, does not allow for effective reintegration, and it recommended that those individuals should have more time under supervision in the community on licence. The vast majority of long-term prisoners will, ultimately, be released from custody. The question is, therefore, not whether those prisoners will return to the community, but how safely that return can be managed.

I agree with the commission that an extended period of supervision could benefit the management of risk and, ultimately, reduce reoffending. Therefore, the consultation will also seek views on release arrangements for long-term prisoners, including amending the point of release on non-parole licence for some long-term prisoners to two thirds of their sentence, with the remainder of their sentence being served in the community under strict supervision and licence conditions. That is the position that we had in place before 2016, and prisoners convicted before that date still have that in place. The consultation will also seek views on extending those changes to those on extended sentences.

It is imperative that we find the right balance among punishment, rehabilitation, risk management and reintegration. The proposal would enable a more proportionate approach, in which an individual still serves their sentence but with a greater proportion served in the community, under supervision, and therefore a greater likelihood of their successful reintegration into society, which will reduce the risk that they reoffend. Robust safeguards are in place to manage long-term prisoners in the community who are subject to individualised risk assessment and licence conditions. They must abide by all conditions on their licence and can be recalled to prison. Individuals convicted of sexual offences and some violent offences will also be subject to multi-agency public protection arrangements.

I recognise that the proposed changes are bold, and I hope that they can contribute to a thoughtful debate today on the consequences of not addressing the rise in our prison population. The outcomes of any sentence for a crime committed should be that justice is served and no further reoffending happens. Change is needed, and the consultation provides an opportunity to hear the views of victims, partners and the wider public on all those measures. I assure colleagues that my officials and I will continue to work with victim support organisations throughout that process.

I believe that the proposals outlined today will help us to strike the right balance between recognising the concerns of victims and survivors and charting a clear course towards a sustainable prison population in the long term. They will ensure that prevention is at the heart of our system, with prisons housing those who pose the greatest risk, rehabilitating them to effectively support successful reintegration into society and, ultimately, reducing crime and protecting the public. Less crime and fewer victims are the outcomes that we all wish to see.

I move,

That the Parliament recognises the scale and complexity of the current prison population, which is above the design and operational capacity of the estate and causes significant associated operational and safety risks for prison staff; notes that Scotland has one of the highest prison populations in western Europe; acknowledges the underlying drivers, including the growing number of individuals convicted of serious violent and sexual offences who receive longer sentences, reflecting progress in how the justice system supports victims and holds offenders to account; notes that the cost per prisoner per year to the public purse is £52,000; recognises the importance of effective rehabilitation to reduce re-offending and to benefit the communities that individuals return to; agrees that public safety is paramount and that it is vital that victims are supported and have confidence in the justice system, and agrees, therefore, that a balanced package of measures to increase capacity in the prison estate, expand effective community sentencing, and enact preventative measures to stop people entering or re-entering the prison system, are necessary to achieve a sustainable prison population now and in the future.

14:48

I certainly do not regret, and nor will I apologise for, the fact that we are prosecuting more serious offences, including sexual offences and historical sexual offences. That has driven the increase in the long-term prison population and is a significant contributor to the current prison population.

I hear that and I understand it. I heard very clearly the point that was made by my friend and colleague Fulton MacGregor about the comparative investment between community justice and custodial sentences. I understand that. We have increased the budget for community justice to £170 million a year, and it is almost an inevitability that, if we are expanding the use of community justice, we will need to fund the support that goes alongside that. That support needs to be iterative and considered. I believe that, if we are successful in the approach that I am setting out—a more preventive approach—it will become what Pauline McNeill is looking for.

I very much welcome Yi-pei Chou Turvey’s approach and the Liberal Democrat amendment, which we will support. I absolutely want to move to a more preventative approach. I have set out in my response to Pauline McNeill where we want to go and that we want the system to be more proactive than reactive.

Alyn Smith was very kind in his contribution. I thought it was a very complimentary and very thoughtful speech from the new convener of the Criminal Justice Committee. I welcome him to that role and congratulate him on his election. He remarked that recorded crime has come down since 1991. Much of the increase in the recording of sexual and violent crime—there was an exchange between Alyn Smith and Stephen Kerr on that point—is due to a significant shift in prosecution. That is a legacy of the previous Lord Advocate and previous justice secretaries, which has generated an increased confidence in reporting, which is absolutely fundamental.

Carol Mochan’s intervention on Alyn Smith about women in custody was also very important. During my visit to HMP Stirling, which the previous justice secretary invited me on when I was the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care, I saw very clearly that many of the women in the justice system are victims themselves, so we have a big job of work to do in that space. Alyn Smith also made good points about older people in jail and moving upstream into prevention.

I recognise the point that Katherine Sangster made about the perception of whether sentences fit the crimes. However, I again point to the increase in the long-term prisoner cohort, which is up by 600 people in the past two years, while the average sentence length has increased by 37 per cent.

Similarly, David Linden was very thoughtful in his speech and he put the scale of our levels of incarceration into context. He also referenced the genesis of what I have set out today, which is the independent sentencing and penal policy commission. Its membership was comprised of a range of independent expert professionals: Martyn Evans, the former chair of the Scottish Police Authority; Catherine Dyer, chair of Community Justice Scotland; Cathy Jamieson, who is well known in this parish; Sheriff David Mackie; Dr Hannah Graham, the senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Stirling; and Lynsey Smith, the joint chair of the Social Work Scotland justice standing committee. I commend them for their work and I thank David Linden for raising the fact that their work is the genesis of what I am presenting today.

We need the whole Government and the whole of the public, community and voluntary sectors to move towards prevention. In my former life as the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care, I often pointed to the fact that 80 per cent of the drivers of poor health are outside the control of the health service. I do not have a similar statistic to quote for the justice system, but the figure will be very similar. My portfolio and victims across society will be the greatest beneficiaries if we can move to a more preventative system, which is exactly what I am seeking to corral with colleagues in the Government; that is absolutely the focus of this Government.

Michelle Campbell referred to the £169 million that has been invested in community justice, her experience working in the health service, the drivers of mental illness, the link between mental illness and the justice system and the impact that we wish to see from the Promise. She was also right to emphasise that we must have prisons to deal with the most serious and dangerous offenders.

Fulton MacGregor has significant professional experience, as well as experience that has been gained through membership of the Criminal Justice Committee, and his speech was informed by that experience. He commented on the issue of investing in community versus custodial sentences. I readily understand that point and will, no doubt, engage with Mr MacGregor on it.

Mr Simpson suggested in his speech that this Government has somehow been soft on crime. On the basis of what I have set out, I cannot understand what planet that comment comes from. We have the highest levels of custody per head in western Europe, the long-term sentence population has increased by 600 in the past two years—that is equivalent to the size of Kilmarnock prison—and there has been a 37 per cent increase in the average length of sentences in the past decade.

One of the greatest drivers of the increase in the prison population has been the increased population of people who have been sentenced for sexual and violent crimes. I make no apology for that; I am pleased to see serious sentences for serious crimes. In the face of those facts, it is simply not credible to suggest that our justice system is anything other than robust in dealing with serious criminality.

I am determined to deliver a sustainable approach to the management of Scotland’s prison population and a prison estate that is safe and fit for purpose, with prevention at its heart and a clear focus on reducing offending and reoffending behaviour. That is how we serve justice and create a safer community. I therefore ask members to support us in consulting to bring about change in order to deliver a sustainable prison population, safer communities and a strong justice system.

I recognise Pauline McNeill’s long-standing commitment to looking at community alternatives to custody. Does she welcome what I am setting out to do in providing an expansion in GPS technology for bail management and home detention curfew, in order to give reassurance around the community management of offenders?

The sustained level of overcrowding in our prisons is posing an unacceptable level of risk and impacts on the ability to deliver rehabilitative work. I very much welcome that speech from Joe Fagan. Our prison population today stands at 8,459, against a design capacity of 7,800, which speaks to the challenge that we are facing. That increases the risk of reoffending and creates a vicious circle in which the impact is felt across the criminal justice system as a whole. Again, I thank the dedicated front-line staff for their hard work. I hope that that is the level of humility that Stephen Kerr has been looking for from me. I am saying that there is a challenge, I am pointing to the challenge and I will point out the steps that I want to take to address it.

I outlined the range of actions that the Government has taken with partners already and I assure Parliament that I will continue to engage regularly with justice partners and members to progress any action that helps to alleviate the pressure faced by the system.

I was really pleased with—and pleasantly surprised by—the debate today: there has been a recognition of the scale of the challenge that we face. I am keen that we learn lessons from countries that have had successes in reducing their prison population. I do not ask whether we can spend millions on exporting prisoners from Scotland to Estonia; I ask how Estonia has achieved a two-thirds reduction in its prison population over the past 20 years, and what steps it has taken to achieve 50 per cent capacity in its new jails.

I have listened carefully to the speeches this afternoon. As I said, I found the debate incredibly constructive. Kate Campbell summed it up incredibly well when she said that we are looking for the same thing—fewer crimes, fewer victims, fewer people in prison, less crowded prisons and less money spent on incarceration. There was a significant reflection on the problem and a refreshing willingness to engage in the proposals that I have set out.

I will now turn to some of the other contributions. I very much appreciated Pauline McNeill’s clarity on the challenges that we face. In the opening stages of the debate, she raised a point about public perception and the transparency of sentences. I understand that issue, and it is part of what we need to consult on. She will be aware that the system in England and Wales is moving to a sentencing model of three parts, in which a third of the sentence is spent in custody, a third of it involves monitoring and a third is spent at liberty. That puts into context the situation that we are looking to set out in the consultation that I have discussed. I also absolutely accept her point and the point raised by Stephen Kerr about deaths in custody. That is something that I will be engaging with. I will take that away, and we will discuss it further.

I absolutely recognise what Amanda Bland was saying about the escalation of the prosecution of serious sexual and organised crime. She will know from her background that that provides significant additional complexity for our prison system to manage, not least in the segregation of organised criminal gangs. With the prison population at its current level, that is incredibly challenging. She spoke about capacity, but we cannot just build our way out of this situation. We need to take steps around capacity, but I am also proposing consideration of how we reduce the population.

Maggie Chapman was absolutely right to set out that crime is not out of control. Indeed, she and Fulton MacGregor pointed to the fact that recorded crime rates are on a downward trend. Howevr, incarceration is up and is higher than the European average. That speaks to the challenge that we must grapple with as well as contradicting another point that has been made today, which is that the system prioritises criminals over victims. We are incarcerating more people per head of population than most of the countries in western Europe. We have seen an increase of more than 600 in the number of long-term prisoners over the past two years, and we have seen an increase of 37 per cent in the average length of sentences.

I disagree with those who say that we do not need any additional capacity. To be frank, I believe that we do. Maggie Chapman is right to point to the Netherlands, Estonia and other international examples and to how they have moved forward.

I welcome James Adams to the chamber. I congratulate him on arriving in the Scottish Parliament and I offer, through him, my congratulations to Douglas Lumsden on his success. James Adams hails from Fraserburgh and my father is a Torry loon and has links to Aberdeenshire, so I was heartened to hear about James Adams’s family heritage and what drives him in politics. I am sure that, based on his opening speech today, he will make a significant contribution to the Parliament.

Stephen Kerr is correct. We have discussed that matter before, and I believe that the work that has been done on summary case management, which has sped up the process for summary cases, can and should be extended. We are working on that and, based on my discussions with the Lord President, the Lord Advocate and others, I am confident that we will get through the High Court backlog.

However, reducing the remand population presents an additional challenge, of which Stephen Kerr is aware, because a significant proportion of those currently on remand for serious offences can be expected to become part of the sentenced population. Therefore, regardless of whether individuals are on remand or otherwise, we must take action now.

Scotland has taken a number of steps to alleviate the pressures. A reconfiguration of the estate realised about 400 additional places, and two new prisons will deliver 460 spaces. I expect HMP Highland to be completed in spring 2027—which is later than planned, due to construction issues—and HMP Glasgow, which I visited last week, is due to be completed in 2028.

We have extended the eligibility for home detention curfew and have expanded the use of alternatives to remand, with bail supervision numbers in 2024 at the highest they have been in 10 years.

We implemented the emergency early release scheme between November 2025 and April this year, which saw 614 individuals released early, 60 per cent of whom were released within three months of their original release date.

We also incrementally changed the point of a sentence that certain short-term prisoners are required to serve in custody to 30 per cent, which resulted in an estimated sustained reduction of about 550 prisoners. That is equivalent to the total design capacity of HMP Grampian.

I am engaging directly across the justice system to identify areas where action can be taken quickly to help reduce the pressure further. We are embedding multidisciplinary teams in courts to ensure that critical and relevant information is available to judges ahead of decisions on custody, which is helping to reduce avoidable periods of short remand that are necessitated for further information.

We are undertaking analysis to understand the complex reasons why individuals fail to comply with community payback orders and bail conditions. CPOs are delivering strong outcomes, with 71 per cent successfully completed—most of them without breaches—during 2024-25. I believe that we can do better to address the reasons for breaches and improve that success rate, and I am working to identify what interventions and support will drive improvements in compliance and thus reduce avoidable, short-term custodial sentences.

Despite those measures, today’s prison population stands at 8,549, having recently peaked at 8,603, which is about 800 places above the estate’s designed capacity. That poses an unacceptable level of risk to those living and working in Scottish prisons and to the wider justice system.

Additionally, reasonable worst-case long-term projections indicate that without action demand for prison places will rise to about 9,500 within the next decade. Therefore, further action is necessary now to put our prisons on a sustainable footing and ensure that our justice system can focus on rehabilitation and reducing reoffending without compromising public safety.

Will the member take an intervention?

I should correct the statistic that I gave. It is 8,459 not 8,549. There was a typo in the speech.