Chamber and committees

After I have made a couple of comments, I will ask Donald McGillivray to come in. This project is a bit like high-speed rail—it has been going on for many years. As I said, I was involved in a joint police board on the roll-out of Airwave, which was complicated. I have many concerns over this project, which I have registered with the UK Government, and the Welsh Government has also registered concerns. The budget changes over time, and the spend does not match the profile as we would expect. That is the basic underlying situation, but Don is very heavily involved in that, which I am sure he enjoys.

As the committee will know, earlier this month, the Deputy First Minister, in his statement on the emergency budget review, set out clearly the nature of the financial challenge that we face. The drivers of that challenge are well known; they include Brexit, the on-going impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, rising energy prices and high rates of inflation, which is, I think, currently at a 41-year high. Those pressures are impacting on households and on our vital public services.

Many of those pressures were evident when the resource spending review and the update to the capital spending review were published in May, and they have become even more pronounced in the subsequent months. Inflation means that our budget has already fallen by 10 per cent in real terms between this year and last year, and the announcements in the United Kingdom autumn statement do very little to address the damage that that has done to the Scottish budget.

Despite those pressures, and the necessary realignment of our spending plans, we have, this year, worked to continue to support front-line justice services. That includes support for the on-going process of recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic, with the number of outstanding trials reduced by more than 10,000 between January and September this year. In fact, the number has been reduced even further since then, by around 12,000, to around 31,000.

We are building on the success of the new digital approaches that were developed during the pandemic. For example, the new digital evidence-sharing capability will enable evidence to be shared more efficiently and swiftly, thereby helping cases to resolve earlier. We have continued to modernise the prison estate, with the opening of two new innovative community custody units for women in Glasgow and Dundee, which reflects our commitment to trauma-informed approaches to rehabilitation.

Crucially, in the context of the cost crisis, we are supporting justice organisations to offer pay settlements that are well above the levels that were projected when our budgets were set at the start of the year. That is significant and challenging for the justice portfolio in particular, given the high proportion of our portfolio spending—over 70 per cent—that is committed to staffing costs.

The resource spending review numbers for next year are not final budget allocations; those will be set out by the Deputy First Minister next month. However, it would not be honest or beneficial to our justice services to pretend that exceptionally difficult choices will not have to be made across all portfolios, including justice, in the final budget allocations.

The funding that the UK Government has outlined over the coming two years falls well short of the combined impact of Covid recovery, energy costs and inflation, so we will inevitably need to match our plans with the available resources. However, as far as possible, my aims for the budget process remain those that were set out in “The Vision for Justice in Scotland” document, which was published earlier this year.

Those aims are as follows. We will continue the progress of Covid recovery in our courts, in particular for the most serious cases in our solemn courts. We will ensure that there are trauma-informed approaches for victims and witnesses, drawing on innovative recommendations such as those that Lady Dorrian set out. We will support our police and fire services to continue to deliver vital public services as they modernise and adapt to changing demands. We will support the work of our legal professional and third sector services. We will invest in our prisons to support rehabilitation as well as effective community justice services, including alternatives to custodial sentences and remand.

Members of the committee will recognise, however, that we will need to respond to those priorities within an increasingly tight financial context that is likely to last for an extended period.

With that, I am happy to answer any questions that the committee has as part of its pre-budget scrutiny, and to consider those issues in the on-going budget process.

It will be different in different parts of the portfolio. I mentioned in my opening statement some of the digital innovations that we have developed and are looking to expand on. However, we will necessarily have to look to further public sector reform in order to try to fit in with those financial constraints that I have mentioned. I have had discussions with the chief constable of Police Scotland as recently as yesterday, and with other services, and I know that they are actively considering things that may help with public sector reform. Those things would be necessary anyway.

The experience of fire and police in particular is an excellent example of public sector reform. That was a difficult decision to take, around 10 years ago, and there were difficult periods afterwards; I am thinking about the establishment of the joint police and fire boards. In my view, however, having served on a joint police committee in a local authority, the level of scrutiny of the police is now far greater than ever before. Those services have already established substantial public sector reform, but there will be more to come, and they are actively considering that, perhaps in relation to how the three blue-light services can work more closely together, not least given the findings of the Grenfell inquiry. That will be happening.

We have seen that there have been delays on large-scale capital projects right across the UK. Brexit features prominently in the reasons for those. The pressures that it has caused for supply chains and costs are substantial.

Our intention is to complete the project on schedule, but of course that will depend on a number of factors. There have been delays before now. Pauline McNeill has previously asked me questions about delays caused by the change in the prospective site that was to be used and the choice of a new site. We must acknowledge that. As I have said from the start in relation to HMP Highland, we are to some extent at the mercy of external influences such as Brexit, supply chain issues and labour shortages. We are trying our best to withstand those very real pressures and keep to programme, but I cannot deny that they are there.

Work is progressing towards a Scottish Government consultation. Development of the consultation will be informed by an initial phase of expert research, which is currently under way. The research will ensure a detailed baseline understanding of the many distinct roles and functions of the law officers and will provide information on how the functions of law officers operate in other countries.

I will first correct Murdo Fraser, as the consultation was mentioned in the programme for government, but it was not for completion in this year. It is a commitment that we will undertake throughout this parliamentary session. We have around 20 bills to take through in this session, and one of them will be on that issue, as we have stated.

Murdo Fraser gave the example of England and Wales. Of course, in the past, we had the Lord Chancellor, who was head of the judiciary and was part of the Executive and the legislature. That is not a clearly resolved situation in England and Wales.

It is right that we learn the lessons and take forward some of the indications that we get from the research. Surprisingly little research has been done on the role of the Scottish law officers. I am sure that the member would agree that it is right to proceed on the best foundations and to have the research to inform the consultation that we then undertake. That seems to me to be the responsible way to proceed.

Measures to combat motorcycle theft are operational matters for Police Scotland. Since 2012-13, crimes of dishonesty, which include motorcycle theft, have reduced by 32 per cent. However, that should not detract from the serious nature of such incidents.

Supporting Police Scotland to keep our communities safe remains a priority for the Scottish Government. Policing services have been maintained and improved and, as we have heard, we have invested more than £10 billion in policing since 2013. We will continue to support the vital work of Police Scotland in delivering effective and responsive policing across Scotland.

We remain fully committed to using the resources that are available to us to support the vital work of the Scottish Police Authority and Police Scotland.

We will continue to invest across the justice system in 2022 and 2023-24 to support the continued operation of vital front-line services, provide support for victims and witnesses and tackle the underlying drivers of offending.

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. I was unable to access the app. I would have voted no.

We have a situation in which the police in Scotland are better paid than any other police force in the UK, including in Wales. In fact, a starting constable starts on £5,000 a year more in Scotland—but I have never heard a word of commendation for that. We also have more police than anywhere else in the UK has, which is quite an important point that has led to our having some of the lowest crime and homicide figures ever recorded.

There is no question but that there are challenges in relation to budgets, but surely the member must see that the causes of those are the cuts to our budget and the Brexit fiasco that we have seen down south. One would think that the Labour Party would, once in a while, draw attention to the real problem here, which is underfunding from Westminster.