Chamber and committees

Will the cabinet secretary take an intervention?

It dumbfounds me at times. I have been taking part in debates on this issue for two decades now—indeed I have—and we know that the answers lie in throughcare and supporting prisoners. However, we are nowhere near doing that. A budget line that demonstrated the Government’s commitment to throughcare would definitely be appropriate.

I want to set out why we are not convinced by the policy review.

Our prisons are bursting at the seams and we are being forced to release prisoners early, causing deep public concern. We have some of the highest levels of incarceration in Europe, so it is clear that one of the answers to this situation is to focus on sentencing.

It is also obvious that, to do so, we have to give the courts serious alternatives to imprisonment. I do not know how many times that that has been said in the chamber, but it is a failure of SNP justice management that we have not made progress in that area. For example, the number of community payback orders has slumped over the past decade. In 2014-15, there were more than 19,000 orders, but nearly 10 years later, that figure is just over 15,000. To me, it seems extraordinary that we are going backwards.

If we want to send fewer people to prison, where that is appropriate, and relieve our bulging prison estate, it is important that we run our prisons better from within. The point about the importance of being able to work with offenders has been rehearsed many times. It is all about the work that we do with them, about their conditions in prison and about staff being given an opportunity to do the job that they were employed to do inside the prison.

Research suggests that community sentencing can have a positive effect on both the chances of the perpetrator reoffending and the public purse. What is crucial in those cases is that it makes sense to use it and that it has the confidence of the public and the judiciary—we all know that. It is not an easy fix, and it requires a serious focus to make it work. To that extent, I agree with the cabinet secretary and assure her that Scottish Labour thinks that this is a matter on which there should be cross-party working.

I have heard this many times, but one reason for community payback orders not being used as much as they should be is that judges do not seem to have the confidence in some of the programmes or in the ability of the convicted person to complete them. We need to improve the suitability of community payback orders, particularly for those with addictions and those who lead chaotic lives. The Criminal Justice Committee heard as much fairly recently, when Karyn McCluskey, the chief executive of Community Justice Scotland, pointed out that

“We must imprison those whom we are afraid of, and not those we are mad at. People enter our justice system with mental health issues, addiction problems, homeless, from the care system and many who’ve been victimised as children.”

However, for those who receive a jail term, we need to improve access to throughcare services. Such services involve trying to get people who are coming out of prison back into their homes and communities, something that many third sector organisations such as the Wise Group are, as we all know, brilliant at.

The throughcare budget is around £5 million, but it has been estimated that providing throughcare for everyone who comes out of prison will cost nearly £19 million. Given that the majority of sentences are short term, and that many people with addiction issues cycle through the system time and again, it is a false economy not to invest more in those systems.

I have had many letters from constituents who have written to me from prison, frustrated that they cannot get on to the courses that they are willing to go on to demonstrate that they have been rehabilitated. I confess that I do not have the data, so this is somewhat anecdotal, but the suggestion is that there are long waiting lists in prison for people who want to go on rehabilitation courses, and it has also been suggested that someone could be waiting on the list, but someone else could go above them. It seems a bit unfortunate that there are issues inside prisons with trying to do that kind of work, and it would be helpful to get more data on that.

At the moment, the Scottish Labour position is that we are not in favour of a sentencing policy review. I have to say that this is the first time that I have heard the cabinet secretary’s intentions. I will reconsider, but that is our position at the moment.

I absolutely do welcome it, but the two points are not mutually exclusive. I would like it to be visible, but of course I welcome the commitment. What I have been demonstrating is that a lot of the answers to the problems are already known.

There was confusion over the sentencing policy for under-25s, partly because the Scottish Sentencing Council did not seem to take any soundings from the Parliament before it arrived at it. However, there has not been a lot of discussion in the Parliament about that. There is lengthy guidance, as Liam Kerr has already said, which has been quite controversial, and there is a case to be made for the Criminal Justice Committee to look at sentencing, too.

The point that I want to make to the cabinet secretary is that there must be transparency around this important debate. One of my concerns about another review on sentencing is that it will put it behind closed doors, but the Parliament needs more transparency in the discussion. I do not fully understand what approach the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service is taking, for example, although it seems to be using its discretion more often not to take young offenders to court. I am not commenting on the rights and wrongs of that, but there should be more up-front openness about what is happening.

If the Government wants cross-party support on sentencing, it follows that we need to know exactly where the Government is heading on that, and we need to discuss what the alternatives will be. We believe that the job of the Government is to get on with it and not kick it into the long grass with a review.

In many debates, we have noted that 2,000 people are on remand in Scotland, which is a problem that needs to be discussed. We need answers on how to deal with remand prisoners in overcrowded jails, where, for obvious reasons, there are no programmes, and we need to think more about the conditions in which we hold remand prisoners.

People on remand suffer some of the same issues as convicted prisoners. I am sure that the cabinet secretary is aware of this, but the Wise Group has told me that one of the things that happens when someone goes to prison is that, along with losing their home and job, they are removed from the register of their general practitioner’s surgery—and that seems to be the case even when someone is in prison on remand. One small change that could be made would be not to do that. Indeed, the Criminal Justice Committee has successfully argued for prescriptions in the prison system to make that more joined up; small things can be done that will make a difference to prisoners, and that is one that the Government should look at.

I will listen carefully to what the Government has to say. However, at the moment, our position is this: let us get on with the job. We know where the answers lie. The Government will get our full co-operation. However, we do not want to see this happen behind closed doors.

I move amendment S6M-16532.2, to leave out from “recognises” to end and insert:

“acknowledges that prisons remain severely overcrowded, with prisons operating above capacity even after the Scottish National Party (SNP) administration’s emergency early release of prisoners, impacting on the ability to rehabilitate offenders; is concerned by the high numbers of women in prisons; condemns the SNP administration’s failure to tackle high reoffending rates, which result in offenders returning to custody due to the lack of robust alternatives; agrees that the third sector can play a significant role in the effective delivery of justice services that reduce reoffending, and support reintegration into society; calls on the Scottish Government to urgently increase the availability of robust community payback orders, and invest in safe and secure GPS electronic monitoring to drive down the remand population and give more public confidence to non-custodial sentencing; further calls on the Scottish Government to expand access to throughcare services, which are essential in assisting offenders to reintegrate into society and to stop offending; believes that a review of sentencing and penal policy will not address the urgent crisis in Scotland’s justice system, and resolves that the SNP administration should take immediate action based on parameters set by the Parliament to address these concerns, rather than focus on a review that will not take the prompt action needed to fix the justice system and keep Scotland’s communities safe.”

Certain cannabis medicines have been legal since 2018, but Bedrolite is not yet licensed. Bedrolite has been a lifesaver, particularly for children with severe types of epilepsy, but if it is not licensed, the NHS will not fund it. A small number of exceptions have been made in England and Northern Ireland for children with conditions for which Bedrolite has been made available. In view of that, why is it impossible to organise cannabis medicine for complex epilepsy through the NHS in Scotland, when it is clear that that has happened in other parts of the UK?

To ask the Scottish Government how it plans to encourage the prescription of medicinal cannabis on the national health service for the relief of chronic pain. (S6O-04323)

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. My device would not connect at all. I would have voted no.

I have no difficulty agreeing with Alex Cole-Hamilton’s point.

It is unbelievable how many people who would never have dreamed of using private healthcare are now being forced to use their life savings to put their health first. However, many other people cannot do that. For basic operations such as hip operations and knee replacements, people are now anxious about calling their GP for a simple appointment. When people are ill, they have to go through the 8.30 phone queue and they have deep anxiety when the countdown starts.

That must change. Scottish Labour would openly say that it is something on which we will work with the Government, but it must change and there must be reform. Although support for the NHS remains unwaveringly high, satisfaction levels with NHS performance are at a record low.

GPs themselves are crying out for reform. They have asked the Government to help them to reform the system. They are willing to do more to broaden out the primary care services that are the cornerstone of our NHS. If they are given the power and resources to do it, they will. GPs are natural problem-solvers. A study in the British Journal of General Practice shows that GPs can reduce mortality by up to 30 per cent if people get to see their own GP regularly. That speaks for itself.

However, reform seems stagnant. There is really no excuse for not planning a decade ago for some of this. We might not have predicted a pandemic—albeit that some people did—but we knew that there was an ageing population and a mental health crisis. The short-term and piecemeal approach to investment and workforce planning has meant that NHS Scotland has paid a heavy price, and it will take more than money to turn things around. In a fresh report, Audit Scotland has said that the Government has

“No clear plan”

for NHS reform, while

“commitments to reducing waiting times have not been met”

and

“the number of people remaining in hospital because their discharge has been delayed is the highest on record”.

I emphasise that point. The chairman of the BMA, Dr Iain Kennedy, said:

“At this stage, we still lack the detail and comprehensive vision needed to make any plan a reality.”

The Government needs to convince the general public not only that it has a plan but that people can have confidence in the detail of that plan and in the 800 GPs that it says that it will deliver to transfer the NHS that people love so dearly.

We have heard that the Scottish Government is going to overhaul NHS waiting times and improve access to GPs, but it has already been criticised widely for recycling old pledges. That announcement is an admission that we cannot go on like this: it is the same old promises from a tired Government, with no detail. It is not a detailed plan for progress or reform.

We have heard other members talk about how, every day, patients are failed at every level of care, because the Government did not plan effectively for known challenges. In its 17 years in power, it has known about a lot of them. People now worry about the times when they might be ill and need acute care, an ambulance or a life-changing operation, because, all the time, in their own communities, they witness ambulances that cannot get patients into hospitals when they have rushed to get there.

Public confidence in our NHS is diminishing. It is not the fault of the dedicated workforce who have worked tirelessly in the hardest of circumstances.

Will the cabinet secretary clarify the capacity of the new HMP Glasgow? The Criminal Justice Committee was told that it is 1,344.

His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons for Scotland’s most recent annual report stated that, although the rising prison population remains a concern across the Scottish Prison Service estate, it has a particular impact on HMP Barlinnie, which has a capacity of 1,400. Is it planned that the new HMP Glasgow will have surge capacity built into its design? What will that look like?