Chamber and committees

Pauline McNeill, I think that you wanted to come in on that.

Our next item of business is the conclusion of our evidence taking on pre-budget scrutiny of the Scottish Government’s forthcoming budget for 2023-24. I refer members to papers 1 and 2.

I welcome to the meeting the Cabinet Secretary for Justice and Veterans, Keith Brown; Neil Rennick, the Scottish Government’s director of justice; and Donald McGillivray, the director of safer communities.

To get us under way, I invite the cabinet secretary to make a short opening statement, and we will then move to questions.

Leading on from that, in addition to moving and adjusting figures, I am interested in opportunities for efficiency savings and new ways of working. Can you expand a little on what opportunities there are, within the constraints of a very difficult budget, for that to be very much part of individual portfolios’ thinking with regard to their budgets?

Will the member take an intervention?

Will the member take an intervention?

Despite UK Government austerity, the Scottish Government has invested more than £10 billion in policing since the creation of Police Scotland in 2013.

Does the cabinet secretary agree that the UK Government must no longer impose renewed austerity, thereby worsening the extreme pressures that are already faced, but instead must make additional funding available so that we can provide our vital public services, including policing, with the required funding?

I, too, congratulate my colleague Emma Roddick on securing the debate, and thank her for raising the profile of such an important issue.

On 7 July 1988, I was a young officer who was looking forward to a long weekend off duty when I learned of the horror of the night before: the Piper Alpha oil platform disaster. A phone call that followed recalled me to duty and within a couple of hours, I was deployed, along with colleagues, to Aberdeen airport to await the arrival of the first of the personnel who had been lost in the explosion and recovered in the early stages of the emergency response. Our duties took us into an environment where those personnel had been taken to await their final journey back to their loved ones. I put on my oversized white paper suit and disposable gloves, and was given a clipboard and deployed into the area. I took a deep breath: the sense of dread and emotion was overwhelming, but I had to be brave—I just had to be.

Nothing, and no one, prepared me for what was to come in the days ahead. I considered myself to be a strong and resilient woman, but the psychological trauma for many—myself included—and the stigma that was associated with seeking help was profound. However, that attitude was of its day. I was lucky that I was able to access specialist support from an eminent psychiatrist, whose pioneering work on PTSD in police populations at that time was in its early stages. Since then, policing research has consistently shown that those who are most impacted by poor mental health are less likely to receive services, and that stigma and attitudes about treatment are factors in that.

Recently, the Criminal Justice Committee has been considering police mental wellbeing. We have taken evidence from stakeholders and police officers and have heard about the challenges and organisational factors that officers face, such as long hours, workload, organisational culture and the fact that, often, the removal of stigma relies on the values and attitudes of individual supervisors. We heard about the slow burn of deteriorating mental health and the failure of supervisors to recognise change and act on it to help officers to access the right support at the right time. The lack of clear pathways into specialist care was also concerning.

However, we also heard about very positive experiences of a supportive culture, attitudes and stigma being tackled in one policing division, and informal sessions being run to offer officers a space in which to talk about their mental health. Police Scotland is working incredibly hard to respond to mental wellbeing issues and, within that, to tackle stigma and negative attitudes and beliefs about those who have mental illness. It has strong partnerships with many organisations that work to tackle mental health stigma, including SAMH, See Me and many more.

However, there is much to do. The committee has written to Police Scotland and the Scottish Police Authority to highlight our findings and suggest follow-up work, particularly on training and robust data collection. We are keen to support the work that is required to improve awareness, create pathways to support, and address stigma in the workplace—which still impacts on so many and, ultimately, can result in people leaving the career that they love. I am determined to continue that work and to support tangible progress, with the tackling of stigma sitting at the heart of our efforts.

I thank Emma Roddick for providing me with the opportunity to contribute, and I wish her well in her efforts to eliminate workplace stigma once and for all.

We will come back to questions about private prisons.

Maybe we should wait until later, if it is on a separate issue.

Our next item of business is to discuss recent correspondence that the committee has received. I refer members to paper 5, in which the clerks have suggested some ideas on how we might take forward the various issues that are highlighted. If members have specific comments on or suggestions in regard to either pieces of correspondence, please come in.

I will take each letter in turn, starting with the one from the Cabinet Secretary for Justice and Veterans on facilitating peaceful assemblies in Scotland and the work that the short-life working group has done on that. Do members want to make any points, or is the committee happy to note the letter’s content?