Chamber and committees

Despite tens of millions of pounds having been blown on this already. Has it been completely wasted? Is that the case?

I am rereading the evidence from Will Linden of the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit and Emily Beever of No Knives, Better Lives, at column 15 in the Official Report of our 21 February session.

Will Linden and Emily Beever both referred to the value of schemes such as cashback for communities and schemes provided by grass-roots organisations. Emily Beever said that the cashback programme has recently changed and shifted money away from some of the smaller grass-roots organisations and that there is uncertainty about the longevity of funding across the third sector generally—funding is from year to year rather than longer. Will Linden echoed and supported Emily Beever, stressing the difficulty for third-sector and community organisations. I know that this is a difficult area. It is not always clear who is ultimately responsible for ensuring the survival of such schemes.

Along with the evidence that Mr Torrance has quite rightly sought, can we ask the Minister for Victims and Community Safety to set out what is being done to ensure that the work of those voluntary and third-sector organisations is better funded on a long-term basis and valued? From my recollection of my time in that ministerial role—admittedly, it was a considerable time ago—much of the work that those organisations do helps to turn around young people who otherwise are on the cusp of more serious offending.

I was thinking that the specific action that the petitioner seeks from us is not one that can readily be accommodated. Nonetheless, general questions are raised about the circumstances in which an events body that seeks to hire land gets a blank refusal from local authorities. Why is that? What is the rationale behind it? More information, therefore, would be useful. I appreciate that we do not wish to trespass on the Verity house agreement and local authorities’ responsibilities, but I think that reasonable questions have been asked by the petitioner. I would be reluctant at this fairly early stage to close the petition without at least doing justice to the petitioner by trying to pursue the queries.

Therefore, we should write to the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, the Association for Public Service Excellence and EventScotland—the VisitScotland directorate that supports Scotland’s events industry—seeking their views on the petition and the action that it calls for, including any guidance that they provide to local authorities about developing policies for the hire of public land. In addition to that, it would be useful to see whether there are any private sector tourism bodies that could assist us in providing useful information—I am not quite sure from whom we might obtain that, but possibly the Scottish Tourism Alliance.

We all want events to be displayed on public land. Local authorities are under a lot of pressure in various ways with funding and so on, but the petitioner raises a reasonable question. Therefore, I would be reluctant to just close down the petition without making some effort to get closer to understanding whether there is a problem with reasonable requests routinely being turned down peremptorily by local authorities.

Longer-term funding is needed, because year-to-year funding is the death knell of schemes given that, by definition, it takes longer than a year to do anything worth while, by and large.

I do not know whether Inspector Watters wants to answer the question about what the police role is or should be. What more could the police do, if anything, on diversionary activity?

Out of fairness, I will follow suit and play devil’s advocate. One mother provided quite harrowing evidence of an assault on her young girl. I will not mention names, but the mother said:

“Doing my homework afterwards, I learnt this girl had attacked no less than 20 children and was well known with the police and in fact I still continue to get videos or stories of attacks weekly.”

I mention that because, over the years, I have quite often heard it said that the police knew well that an individual had been involved in many other crimes and had carried out many other assaults. I appreciate that that is just a general claim with no particular evidence behind it, but I mention that case because it is probably not an isolated experience. Many people, perhaps those living in areas of extreme poverty, find that a young hoodlum is causing endless mayhem but that nobody ever seems to do anything about it.

That is extremely unfair to the police. Even if the police do their job, there is the question of what happens when the case goes to the justice system. I am aware that some argue that not much happens.

Inspector Watters, what would you say to this mother whose daughter was attacked by another female in a horrific way that left her almost unrecognisable as a result of her facial injuries? She is now scared to go out at all. Can the police or any other authorities do anything more to identify youngsters who plainly cause serious injury and harm to other young people in Scotland?

We might close the petition under rule 15.7 of standing orders on the basis that the Scottish Government’s position on the ask of the petition remains unchanged, that the scope of the home report survey is set out at the beginning of the report and that members of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors who carry out home reports must have a complaints handling procedure in place. They must offer independent third-party recourse to complaints, including alternative dispute resolution by the Property Ombudsman, and they must carry professional indemnity insurance. In light of all that, I wonder whether members consider that we can close the petition.

I want to make one suggestion and to put one point on the record. The suggestion is that, because drones are fairly widely used for various purposes, many of them legitimate, we could also ask NatureScot—I accept Mr Torrance’s recommendations—whether it would involve disproportionate costs to introduce such a licensing scheme. I am concerned that such a scheme may be difficult to operate in practice on grounds of cost, not least because NatureScot’s budget is, apparently, to be slashed. Therefore, will it even be able to carry out the workload that it has? Franky, I think that it might not be able to.

The point that I want to put on record, convener, is that these stories have another side. I have a constituent who was extremely concerned that drones were used, apparently at the insistence of a wealthy voluntary body—in fact, the wealthiest in Europe—with an interest in birds to carry out surveillance of locals who live near an area where that organisation felt that wildlife crime may be going on. The person felt that drones were being used to invade their privacy. I have raised the case with the Lord Advocate.

I make no judgment about the merits of that case or of any other—it is not for me to do that. However, it is for me to say that this story has two sides; it is not all one-sided. People in the countryside are quite concerned about the inappropriate use of drones by pressure groups with particular campaigning interests.

I do not think that they are extremely profitable businesses.

Some years ago, from 2007 to 2011, I was community safety minister and, along with the Cabinet Secretary for Justice at that time, Kenny MacAskill, we worked very closely with John Carnochan and Karyn McCluskey. I was struck by their passion but also by their practical approach.

In talking about preventing youth violence, we have heard from Inspector Watters about diversionary activity. It seems that one of the key ways—Inspector Watters has confirmed it this morning—to take young people on to a different path of life and thinking and away from mindless violence is to provide diversionary activity. At that time, we introduced the idea of cashback, investing money that was taken from criminals—drugs money, for example, or other property seized—in diversionary activity. Is that still one of the main corrective approaches? If so, is it being supported sufficiently?

I am not just talking about taxpayers’ money or resources, as people tend to call it, as if it were a type of mineral. It is not; it is money, but it is not just money. It is also a will and a purpose among Government agencies to get things done and not pass them to somebody else’s desk. I do not know the answer to this question, but I want to hear from each of the witnesses. Are we doing enough? Should we do more and, if so, how do we go about that? What do we need to do more of or do better that could help to divert some of these young people away from some of the acts of mindless violence that we have heard about in what were extremely harrowing cases, as the convener has pointed out?

I am sure that you do a lot of good work. As you say, sadly, much of it is invisible, which is a shame.

In the distant days when I had an executive function, we sometimes used the Army and Army facilities such as barracks as well as outdoor activity establishments to take youngsters from Glasgow who, as I think John Carnochan said, had been identified as about to go into serious crime. They had started on criminal activity and John’s view was that, if things took their course, it was just a matter of time until they got involved in more criminality, went to Glenochil, ended up in Barlinnie and so on.

John’s idea was to get them in a room and give them one of his typical talks, which I imagine would make most people’s hair curl. However, he also wanted to take them out of their habitat and the place that they were happy with, which was maybe out in the schemes somewhere, and go somewhere entirely different such as the Cairngorms. The Army was very good at that, because that is what it does. It takes young men—they are mostly men, although there are women as well nowadays—and turns them into stronger and better team-playing people. That is what Army training is all about, and it is very good at that.

Maybe that sounds old-fashioned to some people, but I think that that strand—although it is not the sole answer—would help young people, particularly boys in their teens, from becoming hardened criminals. The minute investment that is involved would repay itself in spades, by avoiding all the misery that such criminality would cause throughout their lifetimes, for other people and themselves.

Is that happening now, or has it been dropped?