Chamber and committees

That is very interesting. I am conscious of the time—I would like to ask questions of everybody, but I cannot do that. My final question is to Mr Dalling of the Law Society of Scotland. The thorny issue of legal services regulation has been with us for many years, and Covid appears to have put on ice Esther Roberton’s recommendations that a new single body should be established with the clear remit of dealing with such regulation. Most of you will not have read her review, but page 8 is worth a look, on which there is a diagram of the current regulatory framework, which serves no purpose for members of the public. From the Law Society’s perspective, given all the other massive challenges, will Covid get in the way of that long-overdue reform to the regulatory system?

Thank you. My next questions, which are for Police Scotland, are on unanswered 101 calls. I do not whether I should address them to ACC MacDonald or Chief Superintendent Blair.

We know from what was said at a Scottish Police Authority meeting that, in June, 71,000 calls—or around 40 per cent of all 101 calls that month—were abandoned. Given yesterday’s historic admissions with regard to the M9 tragedy, it seems that the problem of unanswered calls or calls not being acted on has not been addressed. In fact, the situation might even have worsened during the Covid pandemic. Is that the case? Why have we still not got a grip of the problem? What needs to happen to fix it and give the public confidence that calls will be answered?

So violent offences were not excluded but domestic violence was excluded.

Are you aware, or was your predecessor aware, of the decision to effectively use prisons as stand-alone places to put particular groups?

My question is not necessarily on that area. It is on a more general point, so perhaps Pauline McNeill should come in before me.

But individual victims do not know. Given that we are talking about extraordinary powers under the coronavirus legislation, is it not important that those powers are no longer in the hands of politicians and are given back to the courts, so that, when people see a sentence being given, they can have confidence that that is what will happen?

I will touch quickly on one more subject. Statistics show that take-up of the voluntary victim notification scheme has gone down year on year. Why is that the case? I declare an interest in that I have joined up to the scheme, so I am familiar with its work.

I know that we are slightly short for time, but in relation to drugs in prisons, I heard a candid account last week from a prison officer at Saughton prison. He said that most of the drugs come into the prison smuggled in paper letters or items of clothing that are then dissolved into a solution and turned into dangerous psychoactive substances. During the Covid lockdown, letters were being stopped and photocopied to prevent the spread of Covid and the prison had a dramatic reduction in the number of cases of prisoners under the influence of drugs. As soon as those restrictions ended and the letters continued on their merry way into the prison, there was a huge and immediate increase in drug use. On one day, seven ambulances were called to Saughton prison.

Keith Brown talked about radical ideas. This might sound simplistic, but if that is the case in prisons, could it not be looked at as a matter of urgency to reinstate as a matter of routine letters—other than legally privileged letters—being photocopied, rather than handing over the originals?

I am not entirely sure if I need to declare an interest, but I will do so to err on the side caution: I am married to a serving police officer.

There are so many questions but not nearly enough time, so I will try to focus my questions. The first issue is the effects of Covid on the courts and justice system. Some very creative work is being done to ease the backlog, which we saw first hand last week. What has perhaps been overlooked is the decision to write off large numbers of hours of community service that had been imposed by the courts. Last week, 262,000 hours was discovered to have been in effect written off. To put that in context, if my calculations are correct, that is more hours than 129 MSPs working full-time for a year would work. It should be noted that those are often serious violent offenders and that such sentences are being used increasingly due to the presumption against shorter sentences of 12 months or less. Is there not a risk that politicians taking such big decisions on sentencing risks undermining the independence of the judicial process and sentencing?

Right—okay.

My second question is about the victims who saw perpetrators—their attackers or whatever it may be—sentenced to community service and who, I presume, felt some sense of relief and justice about that. Was notification given to any victims about the decision in respect of their cases?