Chamber and committees

:I am not surprised that the convener of the Economy and Fair Work Committee is asking that question. It is clear to me, as justice secretary, that cybercrime is a threat not only to our national security but to our economy. We are going to have to consider the risk profile of threats to Scotland and the UK as a whole and in the round. My focus is obviously on national security, although it is reserved, and combatting crime. Crime is used for economic advantage, and that has a huge cost to taxpayers and business.

There is also the issue of how businesses are supported to upskill and uptool, and I contend that that has to be a cross-Government consideration.

With the STP40 programme, which, for clarity, was under the Prisoners (Early Release) (Scotland) Act 2025, the anticipation was that it would reduce the population by up to 5 per cent but in a sustained manner. We know from work done by justice analytical services that, between February and November last year, the short-term prison population reduced by 8 per cent. Obviously, there was an additional decrease as a result of the current emergency early release programme. If we had not taken the action that we did with STP40, it is estimated that the prison population would be higher by between 260 and 390 prisoners. It has had an impact, but we always said that it would have an impact in relation to what the population would otherwise be.

When I gave the original statement, I made a political commitment in response to a question from the convener that we would, in due course, review STP30 if the Parliament agrees to it, in the same fashion that we have a legislative commitment to review STP40. I stand by that commitment.

The return to custody rate—which is different from the reoffending rate—for the first early emergency release programme was 13 per cent of 477 releases. I think that the exact figure was 57—is that correct, Linda Pollock?

For which group?

When we embarked on the emergency early release programme, the cohort of people who were eligible to be assessed for home detention curfew fell. Although we have been using home detention curfew increasingly over the past few years, the numbers of people being granted HDC fall when we are doing emergency early release. They would also remain comparatively low if we were doing STP30, because that would involve a similar cohort. Forgive me; I do not like talking about focused cohorts but I will use that word for the sake of simplicity.

You asked for a figure for the projected sustained decrease in the prison population under the regulations. That figure is up to 312, and the baseline figure is 239 to 312.

Absolutely, I accept that.

There is a general point about people not understanding how sentencing works now—that is evidenced by work that has been done by the sentencing and penal policy commission and the Scottish Sentencing Council. Many people are surprised by the fact that people are eligible for release on parole or non-parole licence, or about the proportion of their sentence that a short-term prisoner will spend in custody. There is an issue that needs to be addressed in terms of public discourse. As I said, there will certainly be fewer people going out on home detention curfew—the number is down to around 40 per cent today.

I am happy to do that, Ms McNeill. It is also worth remembering that folk who are released on home detention curfew are tagged and are subject to a licence and recall.

Again, that is crucially important work. I will not rehearse previous debates and arguments about the need to simplify the victim notification schemes. That was a big focus of some of the work that we all did together on the Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Act 2025.

Currently, 3,237 people are registered with the VNS. I concede that on-going efforts are required to increase awareness of the victim notification scheme and to encourage and facilitate registration. For the majority of registered victims, the perpetrators are serving a long-term sentence. There are 472 registered victims in relation to perpetrators who are serving a short-term sentence. Those figures will be a few weeks old, by the way—I got them because I was answering a parliamentary question.

We can give an assurance that, if someone is a registered victim and the release date of the perpetrator is changed, they will be notified. The point is that we need to continue to increase efforts to ensure that people know how to register. The Government is doing that work collectively with victim support organisations and the Scottish Prison Service.

It is also fair to say that a lot of work has gone into that over the years.

We currently have a system that people have to opt into. I do not want to incur the wrath of the convener, but there has been a live debate about how we recalibrate that with regard to the victim information team, the work on having a central point of contact and the work around more facilitated conversations. Ultimately, we are reliant on people registering, but there is a bigger debate about how we recalibrate that.