Chamber and committees

The Government has already disgracefully cut 1,000 police officers from Scotland’s streets. Police Scotland asked for £104 million simply to stand still and stop numbers falling further, yet the SNP budget delivers far less than that. How does the finance secretary justify choosing a budget that means fewer police numbers, overstretched officers, slower response times and compromised public safety?

On part 1 of the bill, Police Scotland has stated that it is

“not of the opinion that the significant investment of budget and resources needed to meet its requirements are proportionate to the potential benefit.”

In addition, the memorandum from the Scottish Government states that

“the Bill does not seem to reach the right balance in what its outcomes would be paired with the costs to public bodies and charities”.

What are your views on those statements?

Thank you. Convener, I have a question on the financial memorandum. Do you want me to come in with that at the end of the meeting?

Finally, when you attended the Criminal Justice Committee on 25 June to give evidence on the bill, you stated that your bill would cost, at most, £23 million but would result in savings of

“£7 billion over a three-year average period of abuse.”—[Official Report, Criminal Justice Committee, 25 June 2025; c 4.]

Given the views that you have heard from stakeholders and the response that we have had from the Finance and Public Administration Committee on the cost of the bill—specifically, the cost of setting up and maintaining the register—have your predicted costs changed in any way?

Good morning. Could you set out specifically how the provisions in part 1 of the bill will interact with the existing multi-agency arrangements for domestic abuse in Scotland—for example, the multi-agency risk assessment conference, or MARAC, multi-agency tasking and co-ordination, or MATAC, and the multi-agency public protection arrangements, or MAPPA? Could you set out why the current system, in which some domestic abuse offenders can already be managed under MAPPA, is not sufficient?

The committee has more questions on the data gap, but I believe that my colleague Pauline McNeill will ask those.

We also heard concerns—the convener mentioned this in her questioning—that introducing a statutory register has the potential to divert funding from existing multi-agency work or front-line services. Could you respond to that concern? Would it be possible to balance new funding for the proposed register and the maintaining of funds for the non-legislative multi-agency work?

Yes, thank you.

Evidence to the Criminal Justice Committee shows that drug misuse in prisons disrupts family visits and support services. The serious organised crime task force has noted concerns from the Council of Europe’s anti-torture committee—the Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment—about the impact of drugs on staff and inmates in Scotland’s prisons. Many families do not believe that the situation is improving.

With that in mind, will the cabinet secretary consider publishing those findings in full?

We now know from this committee report and from speeches by members from around the chamber that the system for legal aid in Scotland is in deep crisis. That should not be news to any of us. It is what we have been told over many years by legal teams that are in charge of implementing the system and by the many people across Scotland who face significant struggles in accessing legal aid, despite being entitled to it.

It should not be news to the Scottish Government, either, which, knowing the problems across the legal system, undertook a review of legal aid in 2018. The review produced clear results and a number of recommendations. Indeed, in the Government’s 2021 programme for government, ministers promised action on this very topic. They said:

“We will engage with both legal professionals and victim support organisations to review the Legal Aid system”.

However, here we are, almost eight years on from the original review publication, debating the same issues.

Understandably, there is huge frustration in both legal and political circles that, irrespective of what the committee’s report recommends, nothing is likely to change any time soon. The clock has run out, and all that the committee can do is hope that whoever makes up the next Scottish Government will revisit the issue and decide to implement the suggestions.

None of this is to say that we do not recognise that this is a highly complex matter. Civil legal aid costs significant sums of money, with spending on the rise, and the types of cases in which it is involved are sensitive and complicated. All the same, it is hard to see how the Scottish Government can ignore the warnings for much longer. Fewer and fewer lawyers are willing to put themselves forward to provide legal aid services, because it simply does not make any business sense. When I asked the Minister for Victims and Community Safety in October 2024 about the chaos engulfing legal aid, she told me:

“the Scottish Government cannot compel private solicitors to undertake work.”—[Official Report, 9 October 2024; c 18.]

That is obvious, but it should then be obvious to the Government that lawyers have no duty to work in legal aid to their own deficit. Therefore, it falls squarely on the Government to fund the service adequately to ensure that legal aid becomes work worth doing.

It should also ring alarm bells for ministers that many of the lawyers who still sign up for legal aid work, often out of a sense of duty rather than for reward, are due to retire. They are unlikely to be replaced, as younger lawyers coming through the system can pursue far more lucrative disciplines. In short, it is a failure of management and planning on the Scottish Government’s behalf.

As it stands, nobody is happy with how the system operates. The legal firms are under stress and cannot manage the workload, the courts are in crisis of their own and struggling to process demand, and the people who need access to civil legal aid for some of the most desperate situations that they will ever face are being failed. Despite that, those who are in charge have simply not done enough to sort the situation out.

In response to the Government’s 2025 legal aid discussion paper, the co-convener of the Law Society of Scotland’s legal aid committee, Ian Moir, said:

“at a time when legal aid is burning to the ground, the Scottish Government has put in an order for a bucket rather than calling the fire brigade. The measures outlined are nowhere near good enough, in either scale or timeline. Additional financial support is needed now”.

We need an urgent review of the whole legal aid system, and that needs to be matched by definitive action. It is time to listen to the experts and those worst affected. There may not be time in this parliamentary window, but it should be a major priority for the next Scottish Government, or the system risks collapsing altogether.