Chamber and committees

Good morning, Dr Plastow. The key highlight of your report was well trailed in the press. It was really useful, and, to be honest, people were quite shocked that this was not happening. Do you think that it should have occurred to somebody in Police Scotland that, from what you are saying, not having that procedure in place is quite detrimental when it comes to solving crime?

You will not force that on everyone.

It is easy to delete an email, as I sometimes do.

My final question is for Craig Naylor at HMICS. You were the first person to raise the issue of mental health and policing with the committee, and credit is due to you and your organisation for bringing it to our attention, because there has now been considerable focus on it. Mental health is now the biggest reason why police officers are tied up, not court duty.

I do not know whether you had a chance to hear the evidence that was recently presented to the committee by the NHS and the chief psychiatrist. If you did not, it is worth having a look at. My interpretation of what they said is that there is still a gap that they are trying to fill, which is disappointing.

It was pointed out to the committee that the police still attend calls for people who are in deep and acute emotional distress. There were phrases such as, “Well, it is a societal problem.” We all know that that is true, but it should not fall to the police and only the police. Has enough progress been made in relation to your initial report? We could also invite you at some point to bring the issue back to the committee—I hope that you will do so—following the evidence that we received a few weeks ago.

I presume that there will be an opportunity for you to write to a future committee, as you wrote to us, to make sure that the issue does not disappear.

Good morning. I want to ask about the on-going issue of overcrowding in prisons and the conditions that some prisoners are experiencing. Some have worse experiences than others. You spoke about Barlinnie, which is the obvious place to start. It might be beyond your remit, but I will ask you anyway. Do you have concerns about prisoners who are serving their sentences in a place such as Barlinnie, which is extremely overcrowded—it is doubling up—compared to the experience of a prisoner who is serving a similar sentence in another jail? Is there a human rights issue in that regard? You would think that all prisoners should have broadly similar conditions and access to rehabilitation while they are serving their sentence. Do you want to say anything on that?

So, the £90.3 million does not include the £30.4 million?

So, you will have fewer than 600 of those officers under the budget arrangement.

I guess that communities want to have a connection with the local police officer. To what extent, in your model, do you think that there might be more connection with local communities, with a named police officer, for instance? One of my criticisms of the centralisation is that Police Scotland feels like such a big organisation. When someone calls the police to find out what has happened following a crime that has been committed, the officer concerned will often not be on duty for ages. There is a disconnect there: that is where people feel a lack of confidence. Will the model bring some connection or some identity back?

Good morning. I am clear about the reasons why you are taking this approach, so I will not go into that.

In response to Liam Kerr, you mentioned a reduction in the prison population due to the change to people having to serve only 40 per cent of their sentence. If you had the projected figure for what would happen if there were a further reduction to 30 per cent, that would be useful.

You said that there would be no supervision of people who were subject to early release. Could those prisoners be released even earlier on home detention curfew? Apologies if you have answered that before, but I just want to be clear. Will they still serve that 30 per cent of their sentence in prison, or are there any circumstances in which they could be in prison for even less time than that?

It would be, because, as I have said in the chamber before, the public will find the proposal very difficult to accept and understand. I am not starting a different conversation about alternatives to custody in the longer term, because I support that notion. What we are talking about is trying to get the public’s head around someone who has been given a four-year sentence serving only whatever 30 per cent of that would be—maybe you could do the maths for me on that; it would be easier if I had said three years.

We need to be clear about how much of their sentence people are going to spend in jail. However, I think that the answer to my question is that some people might not even serve 30 per cent of their sentence in jail, if they meet the criteria. Would you agree that that is the difficult bit for the public to accept? Under the proposals, we are just not clear how much time people will spend in jail in every case.