Chamber and committees

In your written submission, you say that there is

“relatively little analysis on the outlook for social security within the MTFS.”

Is the MTFS enough for us, or should we be taking a more frequent and active monitoring role? If so, how do we do that, particularly considering current volatility?

Thank you. We now move to questions from Marie McNair.

Thank you. Those are great questions. We need to have the witnesses’ answers to them.

Who is that directed to first?

Who are you directing your question to?

Thank you for that, minister. I see that from the chat function that Simon Coote would like to respond.

There seems to be a delay in the sound. Go ahead, Simon.

We still cannot hear you, Simon. I will go to a question from Miles Briggs and then come back to Mr Coote.

Thank you very much for those questions.

I thank the witnesses for coming in. We look forward to receiving your written responses to those final questions. Your answers will really help us in our role.

I suspend the meeting briefly to allow for a changeover of witnesses.

I live beside a church that has a very old cemetery, which contains several covenanter graves. Despite the sterling efforts of the church and local authority, there are times when the cemetery needs extra attention to ensure its upkeep and preservation.

Last year, as I walked past on the way to the shops, I could hear chattering voices, accompanied by the sound of power tools and lots of activity. I keeked in the side gate and saw a group of folk hard at work tending the cemetery and engaging in jovial conversation. “Great to see”, I thought.

On my way back from the shops a wee while later, I found myself on the lane behind a woman who was carrying a shovel over her shoulder and singing to herself as she made her way to the workers’ vehicle. She blushed when she saw me and said, “I was having such a good day that I just had to sing.” She went on to say that she was doing community service. She was almost apologetic about it. The stigma that she felt was writ large across her face. She had gone from being so happy that she was singing to being embarrassed about why she was there that day.

I responded positively. I said thank you to the entire crew for making such a wonderful job of the cemetery. I said that she should be proud of what she had achieved that day and that she should never let anybody stop her singing.

I walked home thinking about how it is the small things that make all the difference to an individual’s feeling of self-worth and about just how much stigma impacts on a person’s ability to enter and sustain recovery and avoid repeated interactions with criminal justice services.

Later that evening, I posted photos and a thank you on social media. The posts were positively received by the wider community and I hope went a wee way towards breaking down the layers of stigma.

I worked for many years supporting people who face addiction, homelessness, grinding poverty, mental health issues and multiple and complex trauma, so I fully understand that someone’s self-worth all but disappears when they face a world full of chaos and repeated periods of incarceration that make any chance of entering and maintaining recovery seem almost impossible. I saw that time and time again.

There is no doubt that trauma and poverty, exacerbated by stigma, can lead someone to self-medicate as they seek to blot out things that they are unable to work through. Those can be the people who enter the revolving door of incarceration, liberation, problem drug use and homelessness.

Although not everyone who experiences trauma ends up in that situation, just about everyone in that situation has experienced trauma. That is why the issue must be seen as a public health emergency and a national mission.

We must move away from a justice system that retraumatises people, which is why I fully support the Scottish Government’s new vision for justice, which has at its heart a trauma framework, in which staff are given the knowledge and skills that they need if they are to embed trauma-informed practices.

Recognition of the prevalence of the trauma and adversity that people who interact with the criminal justice system have experienced will help us, as a nation, to tackle repeat offending and—importantly—our drug deaths. Those deaths are a national loss. The enormity of that loss is felt keenly by the families who are affected, but we need to recognise that, as a country, we have lost far too many people and, with them, all their hopes, dreams and talents.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to this, but a combination of access to same-day treatment by embedding the MAT standards, widening access to rehab, diversion from prosecution, the navigator programme, a nationwide naloxone roll-out, meaningful and funded community justice options and funding facilities such as the River Garden centre in my constituency, which Sue Webber mentioned, gives us the best chance of preventing the worst outcomes. Members should make no mistake: community justice and diversion from prosecution are not soft justice; they are smart justice.

I pass over to my colleague Marie McNair, who is joining us remotely and who has a question on this theme.

Jeremy Balfour will be followed by Emma Roddick, who is participating remotely.