Chamber and committees

That is helpful.

I turn to budgetary issues. We know that organised crime is heavily involved in both the supply of drugs and prostitution. In relation to Crown Office priorities, will you outline how we can better focus resource on tackling organised crime, specifically in those spheres, but also more generally?

I want to ask about drugs policy and the budgetary implications.

Lord Advocate, you recently made a statement to the chamber on class A drugs, and last week the committee heard representations from a range of campaigners on issues such as drug consumption rooms. Do you agree with the repeated representations to us that there are no legal problems with drug consumption rooms in the current legislative framework? Perhaps you could outline the policy in relation to that. Are there any budgetary implications as a result of some of the shifts in drug policy that we are seeing? I will then go on to the wider issues in relation to organised crime.

Drugs are obviously a massive problem in the prison system. Will you outline what you are doing to tackle that problem in the current situation? A number of measures that were brought in around mail during Covid have been referred to. Did that have a positive impact on the drug situation or are you currently undertaking any other initiatives that are helping to address that massive challenge?

I thank the minister for advance sight of her statement and for agreeing to give a statement today. The Scottish Labour Party supports the campaign by criminal defence lawyers for an improvement in the criminal legal aid rates, which have faced real-term cuts over many years. The minister will be aware of the anger in the profession.

The Criminal Justice Committee has been hearing evidence about the crisis in the criminal defence sector, with more experienced criminal defence agents moving to other parts of the profession at a time of a huge increase in the number of criminal cases because of the backlog created by the pandemic.

There are more than 25 per cent fewer firms registered for criminal legal aid now than there were 10 years ago. During the pandemic, a further 10 per cent fewer firms claimed legal aid fees, although I appreciate what the minister has said about the unusual circumstances, and that that decrease might be partly because of cases not proceeding. However, the minister will be aware that there has been a cut of almost £0.5 billion in the legal aid budget since 2007. Although she is correct to say that there have been some recent announcements of increases, they do not in any way compensate.

Does the minister accept that we need to recruit more lawyers to do criminal legal aid work, given the thousands of outstanding trials? Will she come forward with a plan that recognises that we need immediate long-term increases in the payments for some types of criminal legal aid case?

The debate is about how public money is spent, but it is also about the kind of world that we want to live in.

The fair work first guidelines describe themselves as a

“flagship policy for driving high quality and fair work across the labour market”.

In those guidelines, the Scottish Government asks employers to adopt fair working practices. One of the issues is to what extent those guidelines are mandatory, to what extent they are voluntary and to what extent they are criteria that have to be taken into account when decisions are made.

For example, one of the principles that is laid out is about having

“appropriate channels for an effective voice, such as trade union recognition”.

However, trade union recognition is not a requirement in the tendering process. In the recent past, the Scottish Government awarded Amazon a £4.7 million contract for web services. That was last year. The year before, Amazon was awarded £45,272 in a contract. In 2018-19, it was awarded £2.5 million in a contract. Amazon was also awarded £15 million through a tender for web services. That is despite the fact that not a single Amazon warehouse in the whole of the UK is unionised. Even Amnesty International has commented that Amazon has repeatedly issued legal notices to trade union organisers who even attempt to talk to Amazon workers outside Amazon facilities in the UK.

When I was a constituency member of Parliament, I was repeatedly approached by workers who lived in Ayrshire and travelled to the Amazon warehouse in Inverclyde and who, when they got there, were told that, even though they had a contract, there was no work or that hours were very limited. Amazon has said that it does not operate zero-hours contracts. However, according to Amazon workers— and indeed to a fairly recent ITV documentary on the subject—the reality is that the contracts operate as zero-hours contracts. Another provision in the guidelines is that there should be

“no inappropriate use of zero hours contracts”.

Therefore, in relation to the fair work guidelines and the business pledge through which the Scottish Government asks contractors to commit to incorporating those principles, I ask the minister to clarify how many successful contractors have signed the business pledge.

The minister indicated that companies will be mandated to pay the living wage. To what extent does the Government accept that it is only when a company is mandated to adhere to certain principles that those are actually effective? At the moment, companies such as Serco have ended up running asylum accommodation, and PricewaterhouseCoopers was only very recently awarded the £100,000 contract to design the new national care service.

I ask the Scottish Government to outline how it believes that that is consistent with the principles that are being set before Parliament today.

Taxpayers have the right to expect that the public purse is used to support green jobs that are well paid. I welcome today’s debate, what the Scottish Government has said and—indeed—the contributions from the different political parties across the chamber.

Our role in this Parliament is to ensure that those warm words become a reality. I hope that the Parliament will commit itself to doing that over the coming weeks.

It is my great pleasure to congratulate Mercedes Villalba on securing what is a very timely debate, now that COP26 delegates are arriving in Scotland for what will be vital negotiations for all of us who live on this planet.

It is my particular pleasure to add my name to the call for offshore training passports. One of the key points about this demand is that the proposal has come from both climate change activists and trade unionists representing offshore workers. That model of working together is one that we should be endorsing; indeed, we should not only support it but push for it to happen in what we do as we move forward. We need to work together and bring together those with key interests.

As has already been said, there has never been a more important time for us to have a green new deal. Since this Parliament declared a climate emergency, North Sea production has increased by 15 per cent. In reality, very few green jobs have been created over that period, and there have been other debates in which some of those statistics have been cited. However, that is not because there is no potential for green jobs. The Scottish Trades Union Congress, for example, has estimated that up to 350,000 new green jobs could be created in Scotland, with the right policies on renewable energy, hydrogen storage, building and retrofitting social housing and upgrading and expanding public transport. There is therefore massive capacity for job creation with just transition and a green economy. However, as working-class communities know from what has happened in the past, it is ordinary working people who usually pay the price for economic change. The reality is that there has never been a just transition.

A recent survey of offshore oil and gas workers that was published earlier this year revealed that over 90 per cent of them are concerned about training costs in the UK offshore energy industry and the fact that they are paying in the region of £1,800 a year each in training. It says much about workers’ rights in this country that nearly two thirds of those workers are receiving no financial contribution to that training from their employers. The insecure nature of the work in the sector is exacerbating the problem; 75 per cent of the workforce are hired as contractors on an ad hoc basis and 60 per cent of those who get a new job are required by employers to duplicate training and get qualifications that they already possess.

That is a central issue for the sector, and the Scottish Government needs to act, particularly because of the way in which this demand has come about. The UK and Scottish Governments have failed to deliver the strategic training bodies that would agree common industry standards, or to push for the creation of an offshore training passport. The Scottish Government’s programme for government failed to provide any detail on how its proposed skills guarantee will work in practice and what funding it will receive. As we have heard, the green jobs workforce academy has done little more than create a website. Moreover, the UK Government’s offshore wind sector deal and recently published net zero strategy offers only warm words on the need for a skills transition.

With COP26 about to start and a Green MSP in the ministerial seat, I hope that the Scottish Government will start to look at whether the energy skills alliance can be tasked with creating an offshore training passport. It is already undertaking a programme of work to develop energy apprenticeships that standardise training for new entrants into the industry—

I urge the minister to come forward with a proposal for standardisation to assist all workers in this sector.

My question might also be one that the witnesses feel that they are not best placed to answer. We have heard that there has been a significant increase in deferral of prosecution; indeed, as you probably know, the Lord Advocate came to Parliament fairly recently to announce a significant policy shift in relation to class A possession. Is there evidence that the resource is being put in place to ensure that we can adequately deal with that change in policy? Is there any information about the increases that we are likely to see in deferral of prosecution as a result of that policy shift, which has obviously been happening over a long period of time?

I direct those questions to the Crown Office witness. It might be that Mr McGeehan can make some comments, but will feel that the Crown Office is not best placed to give a definitive answer.

I put the same question to Police Scotland. I take on board the point that local authorities might be better placed to answer this but, in Police Scotland’s experience, is the resource being put in place, given that this is a significant shift in policy?

I have a question about legislation, but I am not sure whether it is appropriate to ask it at this point.