Chamber and committees

The point that I have tried to make to Parliament is that I had no alternative but to interact with the inquiry secretariat, because I was the sponsoring minister who was responsible for the conduct of the Government’s participation in that inquiry. It would simply be an impossibility for the inquiry to operate and communicate with Government if it had not had a minister who was a ministerial sponsor. Public expenditure could not have been allocated without the agreement of a relevant minister, and that minister, as was openly shared with Parliament, was me.

Those arrangements were put in place to make sure that the inquiry could function and take the necessary decisions that it took. As I have said to Parliament, I had no knowledge of the contents of the proceedings of the inquiry until I saw Mr Hamilton’s report on 22 March 2021.

Yes, I can confirm that point.

I am absolutely crystal clear with Parliament. Let me just read to Parliament an extract from the minute of the meeting of 13 March 2023, paragraph 7:

“DFM decided that the Commissioner’s Decision should be appealed to the Court of Session.”

I am owning that decision. It was my decision—nobody else’s. I took the decision, which was narrated on 13 March, because I was advised that I had a legal basis for exercising that judgment. That is a matter of public record.

Some of those issues will be affected by the decisions taken by the independent commissioners to determine how an inquiry should be proceeded with.

Given the fact that I set out in my statement to Parliament in September that I want the commissioners to be able to exercise that judgment independently of ministers, it would feel to me to be inconsistent for ministers to specify the basis on which commissioners should act. I want to keep that as open as possible in order to give commissioners the judgment, but I will reflect further on the point that Mr Whitfield has put to me.

Mr Rennie has his dates muddled up, because I was not warned by legal advisers or civil servants about the arrangements for supporting the inquiry prior to it being established. All that came after the event, so we are in the area of hindsight. At the time, I was given no advice that indicated that we were proceeding in a fashion that was not the normal approach to take.

Mr Rennie raises a significant point, which I am mindful of and which I am giving consideration to in my revisions to the ministerial code that I announced in the programme for government statement in September. I want to make sure that ministers are held to the highest standards of probity and that we have the strongest and most robust arrangements in place for handling these matters. I might reflect on the issues that Mr Rennie raises with me, because I recognise them to be substantial issues that have to be assured and command public confidence on an on-going basis.

To go back to the parliamentary inquiry—I will put this as delicately as possible—I took some time to be persuaded about disclosing legally privileged information, because of the principle that Jackie Baillie and I put into statute in 2002 that protects the legal professional privilege of the Government. I wanted to protect that position, and that was the issue that I had difficulties with, as I made clear. I reluctantly agreed to the release of those documents.

In trying to help the committee in its deliberations, the Lord Advocate at the time went to the committee and briefed its members, one of whom was Jackie Baillie, about the substance of the legal advice that was put forward. The Lord Advocate gave that advice in good candour.

When the legal advice was published, it demonstrated that what the Lord Advocate had told the committee was absolutely what was in the legal advice, so it is beyond me to understand why Jackie Baillie has to sully people’s character and reputation on an on-going basis.

Yesterday, her leader criticised my public reputation. Where is he today to say to my face what he was prepared to say to cameras? He will not come here and say it to my face. That is appalling.

That is patently untrue. Over the past decade, the average length of prison sentences has increased by 32 per cent. That statistic alone demonstrates that Russell Findlay is putting complete nonsense to me at First Minister’s question time. Ninety-eight per cent of all those who were convicted of rape and attempted rape between 2019 and 2022 received a custodial sentence. That is another fact that refutes what Russell Findlay has put to me today.

We have an obligation to ensure that we run a stable and safe prison system. Given the level of the prison population that we have just now, it is a challenge for ministers to fulfil our obligations in that respect, so ministers must act. The Cabinet Secretary for Justice and Home Affairs will give full and transparent information to Parliament in her statement this afternoon, and the Government will take the steps that have to be taken, but it will require the consent of Parliament to do so.

I acknowledge the challenges that Mr Sarwar puts to me. He knows from our exchanges in previous weeks that the issue of delayed discharge occupies a significant proportion of my time and the attention of the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care, because it is at too high a level and is too high for the start of winter. I am deeply concerned about that issue.

We are working with individual partnerships to reduce the level of delayed discharge in different parts of the country. There is significant variation around the country: some parts of the country have very low numbers of patients who are in hospital but who could be in other care settings or at home, whereas those numbers are too high in other parts of the country.

I assure Mr Sarwar that deep and intense work is going on with individual partnerships to reduce levels of delayed discharge and to ensure that the objective that he puts to me, which is one that I want to deliver, can be achieved as we approach winter.

If we were to follow the logic of what Mr Findlay said in his question to me and the Conservative position that he articulated from 2015, it would result in a much higher prison population than we have today: it would result in prisoners serving longer than is the case, and we would have an even more congested and, I would say, unsafe prison estate.

We must take the appropriate measures to ensure the sustainability of our prison system. The reality that we face in the prison system today is not one that we are alone in facing, because it has been faced in other parts of the United Kingdom. Significant action was taken by Mr Findlay’s colleagues in Government before the general election—and has been taken by the new Labour Government after the general election—to address the fact that there is significant pressure on prison populations throughout the United Kingdom.

We will take a responsible approach, which will be subject to parliamentary scrutiny, and we will always take into account the perspectives and views of victims and address the concerns that they legitimately have about these difficult issues.

We welcome the new legal framework, which will ensure that tipping practices are fair, transparent and for the benefit of hospitality, leisure and service workers, who do a great job, every day, in serving our communities across Scotland. The legislation is a step in the right direction for improving pay and conditions for workers.

The Scottish Government is committed to fair work as a key driver for achieving sustainable and inclusive economic growth and a wellbeing economy. Through our fair work first policy, we are using the Scottish Government’s financial powers to drive fair work practice and enable Scotland to be a fair work nation by 2025. We will continue to work in partnership with business to ensure that the measures enhance those important economic sectors.