Chamber and committees

—and I am answering—

First, of course, the fire service has to comply with the stringency of the requirements on it, and there is no suggestion from the SFRS that the equipment is unsafe. I hate to correct the member, but I think that the backlog that he talked about was £492 million, rather than £482 million, according to the SFRS. However, we acknowledge the challenges.

The desperate attempt to pretend that this has nothing to do with settlements from the UK Government does not register with people out there. They know what the situation is, and what austerity has meant over the past 12 years—both in resource and in capital backlog. There is a backlog not in maintenance but in investment in the estate structure. That has been reviewed previously, and it is being reviewed again.

It is also true to say that many of the fire stations were built in a previous era, to provide fire cover for industries and housing that, in some cases, are no longer there. That is an opportunity to review the estate and to make savings through its rationalisation. In turn, that should allow additional investment in the remaining fire stations.

As you might have heard in evidence from the SFRS, it has developed a detailed community risk index model, which identifies the risks in individual communities across Scotland. That enables it to base on evidence its decisions on resources. We will continue to work through those issues with the SFRS, not least through the budgetary process that I mentioned previously.

I do not want to go back to the previous back-and-forward about budgets, but we need to acknowledge that we are in a different budget environment from last year.

Last year, in that different context, we awarded an additional £15 million for the reasons that you mentioned. We are aware that courts across the country do not all have the same level of confidence in community disposals. That additional £15 million, which was in addition to, I think, £119 million of continuing funding, was intended to effect change so that the courts would have confidence, wherever they were in Scotland, that a community disposal would be effective and properly monitored.

That gives our intention—our direction of travel—but you are right to say that we are now looking at a different budget environment and we have to consider it against other options. The Bail and Release from Custody (Scotland) Bill is a fundamental part of our approach. It will not work if we do not have proper community justice disposals.

That is our intention. We have budget pressures to consider as we go forward, and we hear what the sector said. We have had discussions with it. A new national plan for community justice, which seeks to do what we intend, has just come out as well.

The additional moneys that we provided in the current year were provided sensitively such that the local authorities that had been well served by their community justice infrastructure were not punished by money just going to authorities that had not, because that would be like punishing success. We managed to provide money to authorities that really need to invest more and to produce more money for other authorities.

That is the intention, but the matter will have to be decided as a priority in the budget process.

I will not go into the detail of the discussions that I have had with the DFM up to this week and in the period before the budget, but those points are being made.

I very much agree with Pauline McNeill. The way in which Police Scotland dealt with Covid, COP26 and operation unicorn is an extraordinary record of achievement. Not many other police forces could have achieved that. That has registered with other police forces around the world. Policing by consent and the model that we have compared with other models, such as those in some parts of the United States, have registered. There is a lot of interest in how Police Scotland conducted itself during those very pressured times.

Covid is the key example in relation to the point that you have raised, because the police moved into a space that is often to do with health. That the police were seen as the first point of contact is a symbol of the trust that people in Scotland have in the police. I think that you are right. That has meant that they now have an expanded role, which the chief constable has always wanted, in relation to wellbeing and safety for the environment rather than only law enforcement for the population.

Crucially, when there is a health-related issue, we have to get better at the hand-off to health authorities. I mentioned some of the further iterations of reform that might come about in call handling and more liaison between the blue-light services.

You are right that the police have absorbed an additional pressure. I am involved in discussions about how we can better manage that. The classic example involves a person who is in severe mental heath distress. The police will often have to attend. It is fair enough that they attend, but they should ensure that a professional is put in place as quickly as possible rather than a police officer being there for an extended period of time. I concede that that is a challenge that we have to meet, and it features in the discussions within the Cabinet. It will do in the run-up to the budget, as well.

That will depend on future capital allocations. There are issues with the age of the institution at Greenock, so in the meantime we have carried out works to ensure that it is in a proper habitable condition. The possibility of replacements will depend on future capital allocations, which, as I have said, are currently as constrained as I can ever remember them being.

That relates more to Addiewell prison than to Kilmarnock prison, because the Addiewell contract has an indexation feature. To be perfectly blunt, I would not have signed that contract. In a different context, the local authority in my area, which is small, is now buckling under the pressure of its private finance initiative contracts for schools. As you said, when inflation is at a 41-year high, the impact that that can have is very serious—it is potentially about £4 million per year in this case. We are involved in discussions, but room for manoeuvre is extremely limited.

To go back to my point about schools, my local authority has tried very hard during the past number of years to renegotiate some of those contracts, but that has proven to be extremely difficult. Get-outs from such contracts can be very expensive in their own right.

To be fair to the people who signed the contract, they did it with indexing in mind, and perhaps they would argue that they did not expect to have a long period of low inflation. They managed the process during that time, and they would expect the cost of inflation to be covered in the payments that are made to them, because their overheads will also be rising.

There is limited scope, but the SPS has been looking at it.

My understanding is that the tax liabilities are termed a reserved UK income tax. I am not sure whether that applies personally to the employees. There is no current plan to have employees based in this country; they will be visiting employees. As I understand it, the IIC has no offices in Scotland or the UK.

To check that I have those facts right, I ask my officials whether they want to comment.

First of all, we said that inflation is at 10 per cent and rising. The budget that we have for this year is worth around £1.7 billion less than it was when it was announced in December. At that time, as you know, inflation was around 4 per cent.

Over and above that, the extra budget pressures for the higher-rate pay settlements that reflect that cost inflation are at around £700 million so far, and deals have yet to be done with the Prison Service, teachers and nurses. According to my figures, that has reduced the value of our budget by 2.6 per cent, which goes up to 5.2 or 5.3 per cent, when inflation is taken into account.

Those figures are very real. We cannot strip out from our budget the effects of inflation. I do not know anyone who seriously contests the tightening of the budget. The Welsh Government and UK Government departments have referred to the pressures of inflation. More worryingly, we now seem to be embarking on a further phase of austerity, given the budgets that have been announced. The pressures are very real. The public accounts can be checked; however, those are my budget figures.

To respond to your first point, I did not actually say that we blamed the UK Government for all the problems in Scotland, but I will put the matter in context. It is not just Scotland or the Scottish Government that is saying this. The Welsh Government is also saying it, and UK Government departments are saying it. It is impossible to meet increasing demands and the huge rise in inflation due to the economic incompetence of the Government that you support. We cannot wish away those costs and try to pretend. You argued for honesty, so let us be honest about the source of the pressure. Everybody else knows where the main pressure comes from. Let us have that honesty, at least. Let us also have the honesty that says that, against that background, arguing for increases in budgets in virtually every activity of government is not honest. I think that we all know that.

Returning to the point about Kilmarnock, we stood on a manifesto in 2007 saying that we believed that it was fundamentally the case that prisons, given their nature and the service that they provide, should be within the public sector. Decisions on Kilmarnock and Addiewell were taken before this Government came into office. It is no surprise, and we have made it clear, that we intend to take Kilmarnock back into the public sector, which is where we believe it should be.

We have no intention of having a situation in which the SPS sees it as necessary to resort to such restrictions. I am delighted to put on record my thanks to prison staff who managed during the pandemic when those restrictions were in place. There was always the potential for substantial unrest because of those restrictions, and yet the requirements were met successfully by prison staff, who did a tremendous job. We have no intention of needing to apply such restrictions.

I imagine that we might get into the issue of mobile phones for prisoners, but that and a number of other innovations were designed to ensure that that pressure was not felt and that, where restrictions were put in place, prisoners could still communicate with their families. Our whole approach is to avoid that sort of restriction, which would unnecessarily exacerbate the situation in prisons.

I will give the committee one anecdote. Part of the prior experience of a colleague who has recently joined the Scottish Government was visiting prisons in the south-east of England and the midlands. He said that there is a marked contrast between those prisons and prisons here. He commented on the calmness that he observed when he visited Perth prison in particular. That is a testament to both the Scottish Prison Service and the way that we have tried to organise things.

We would not want to do what has been suggested, and I acknowledge that it is our responsibility to ensure that the SPS does not feel that it has to do that. However, we do not want to do that, because the consequences of substantial unrest in prisons would be, apart from anything else, substantially more expensive than some of the things that we are doing. I know that there is that pressure but, for that reason, we do not intend to see those restrictions being introduced.