Chamber and committees

No, 22 is the gap between Redress Scotland determinations and acceptances; it is the number of people considering offers that have been made to them. There have been 19 review cases: four of those remain in progress and have not yet had an outcome; three have resulted in the initial determination being upheld; and 12 have had the initial determination varied—which means that the offer of financial redress was increased.

The process is about looking again at the information; I am not sure that it involves new information.

It is difficult for me to give a specific answer to that, because the applications are so individual and come in at such different stages of development. Some applications come in with quite a lot of information and evidence, and they can be processed and passed to Redress Scotland quite quickly. Once an application goes to Redress Scotland, the process time for determination is something of the order of 21 days.

It is difficult to give a figure for the stages prior to that, because the evidence base and the quality of the applications vary significantly and caseworkers might well be actively involved with an applicant in trying to source additional information. An individual might submit an application and be allocated a caseworker, and the caseworker might have to work with them to develop a sufficient evidence base to make the application as strong as possible. That will influence the amount of time that is deployed and the turnaround time on individual applications.

Twenty-three.

I do not know the answer to whether the review process will involve the ability to gather new information. That is an issue for Redress Scotland, and is not on the Government’s side of things because Redress Scotland is making determinations at arm’s length from Government.

We are prioritising applications from people who have a terminal illness or who are over the age of 68. We utilised those two criteria in the advance payment scheme that we put in place in advance of establishing Redress Scotland, when we used the general powers that were available to the Government to put in place a temporary scheme, and we continue to apply them.

Although they might not have been allocated a caseworker, we have started a process of calling individuals to tell them that we have their application and it is being looked at. We are contacting individuals in a way that was not done in the beginning, as we recognise that there was a gap. People submitted their application and then there was a bit of a vacuum.

We put in that call to people within six weeks of the application being submitted so that they know that it has been recognised and is going through the process but that it might be some time before we get to it. As I say, I believe that we now have more momentum within the system, but we are yet to see the fruits of the recruitment of the additional caseworkers.

The level of contribution by external organisations is broadly positive. I said in my opening remarks—

We will keep that under review, but I am confident. The number of applications that I shared in response to Mr Dey’s question were the numbers for November, when none of the new caseworkers were contributing, because some were still being recruited and some were in training. A lot of that training was also going on in December. We will only now, in January, begin to feel the benefit of the 23 caseworkers, so I expect the numbers that I put on the record in response to Mr Dey—the number of applications going from 26 to 66 a month—to increase in the coming months.

I am grateful to Mr Marra for raising that question, because it offers a timely opportunity to reflect on the case. I will address his question—if you will forgive me, convener, this may well take some time—in two parts. The first concerns the situation that we face today; the second concerns my thinking in the light of the Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee’s letter to me.

I will outline the current situation. I have listened carefully to the group that has made representations to me, all the members of which are Fornethy survivors and are part of the wider group. I do not believe that, as things stand, there is an inherent impediment to applications to the redress scheme coming forward from people who spent time at Fornethy. I acknowledge that the nature of the environment in which individuals were spending time at Fornethy could be considered to fall within the ambit of the scheme, so I do not think that there is an inherent impediment to applications coming forward and being considered. To put it slightly more bluntly, I reject the idea that the scheme is not for Fornethy survivors; I think that it is possible for Fornethy survivors to be successful in applying under the scheme.

That brings me to my second point, which concerns where I stand in relation to the Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee’s letter—as Mr Marra correctly said, I received the letter from the committee’s convener, Jackson Carlaw, just this week.

In that letter, Jackson Carlaw made a key point to me. He said:

“The Committee heard that parental responsibilities were transferred to local authorities, such as the then Glasgow Corporation, temporarily and in these cases the local authority could be considered to be acting ‘in loco parentis’ when providing short-term respite and holiday care.”

That is the key point: the scheme for which Parliament legislated provides redress because of the obligation of the state to ensure that proper care was provided to individuals when they were in an in-care situation as the responsibility of the state.

If a young person was at a holiday camp and was dropped off and picked up by their parents, it would be difficult to substantiate the view that the state was exercising responsibility. However, I do not think that the situation at Fornethy ticks that rather neat middle-class box—if I may say so—that I have just outlined to the committee. The more I understand about the situation at Fornethy, the more I find it difficult to reconcile it with the idea of some form of voluntary endeavour, and I think that the matter hinges on that point.

That is a long way—forgive me for the length of time that I have taken, convener—of saying that I am going to reflect carefully on the letter that I have had from the Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee. I gave the ladies who came to see me an assurance that I would look carefully at the issue, and I have said publicly that I do not think that there is an impediment to their cases being considered under the redress scheme. With regard to whether I need to do something more explicit, I am certainly considering whether there is a case for doing so based on what is, it would be fair to say, an emerging picture of the circumstances in which people found themselves at Fornethy.

I am now in mental arithmetic mode, and I am looking at percentages.