Chamber and committees

The safe treatment of mental health issues for all people in custody is a priority for our prisons, and the Prison Service takes the issue very seriously. We know that people in custody present with higher levels of risk and vulnerability than the general population as a whole, for reasons that I have mentioned—they often have complex mental health needs.

A cross-portfolio ministerial working group has been formed to identify issues that the justice system currently faces in relation to mental health and to consider ways to bring forward urgent and creative solutions.

The SPS has reissued revised “Talk to Me” guidance to all staff, to make clearer the circumstances in which a risk assessment and/or healthcare assessment should be carried out. The guidance remains in place and was in place throughout the pandemic.

First, I mentioned the additional financing that is being provided to the SPA. That involves both a series of tranches of additional funds in terms of resources and additional capital expenditure. It is true, of course, that the estimates for how many cases there are likely to be were formulated by Police Scotland, the SPA and the Crown Office—people who are much more expert in this than me. I cannot do an estimate of how many cases there are likely to be. It is also true that the police, the SPA and the Crown Office will say that it has been an underestimate—there have been nearly double the number of tests done and people coming forward with positive tests. Those organisations are the experts; they do that. They are also independent—I do not know whether Russell Findlay accepts that fact. We will do the two things that are required of us. The first was to bring forward the legislative tools that they need to do that and to make Scotland a safer place, which they have done.

This is of course a serious error; the SPA has said that. It has a full meeting on Thursday to go over it in more detail. It has had the legislative tools to allow the police to make these stops and get people tested for drugs, which has made Scotland’s roads safer. However, they have to correct this, so we have also seen the commitment from the SPA to get HMICS to investigate what more can be done to make sure that this can be fixed now and into the future. That is the right thing to do.

In terms of the resources, the budget cut that Mr Findlay should have mentioned is the 5.2 per cent budget cut that we have had from his colleagues, the Tories at Westminster. Last year, the police had their resources budget protected and I am pretty sure that there were no amendments from the Tories seeking further budget for the police. We will see what happens this year.

Overall, £1.9 million has been provided to the SPA since 2018-19 to assist it in delivering testing for the offence. That funding has been in addition to the core budget that the SPA has received to ensure the delivery of policing in Scotland.

The new offence required new forensic testing machines to be purchased by the SPA, and we provided capital funding totalling £572,000 for the machines. We have also provided more than £1.3 million in resource funding for outsourcing through three tranches of funding, including the £370,000 that I agreed to issue earlier this month.

I was first notified of potential capacity issues last year and, in October last year, I authorised urgent additional funding of £325,000. In late April this year, the Government was alerted to a significant number of cases that had not been processed in time for the Crown to take further action. I instructed my officials to urgently work with the Scottish Police Authority, Police Scotland and the Crown to assess the scale of the issue and determine what immediate and longer-term mitigations were needed. Further exceptional funding of £370,000 was released earlier this month and I fully support a commission from the SPA for Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland to undertake a formal review.

I note Russell Findlay’s point about incompetence. I do not have the full details of the three cases that he mentioned because that information is held by the Crown Office, but I know that, in one of the cases—and possibly the other two—the injury was self-inflicted and did not involve a collision with another vehicle. I am happy to provide more information about the figures—it has taken some time to get the definitive figures that I have already stated—as and when we get that from the SPA and the Crown Office. They are the only ones who will have information on the stage of the prosecution process that they are at, for reasons that I am sure that Russell Findlay is aware of. As I said, I am happy to provide that information when it comes forward.

There is no creative accounting: there has been a 5.2 per cent cut to this Government’s budget. However, despite that happening, we protected the police resource budget last year. In fact, in the past two or three years, we have given more to the police than was even asked for by the Conservatives, and we have more police officers per capita in this country and they are paid a higher salary than police officers in the rest of the UK.

The initial intention was to have an in-house service. I should have mentioned that part of the problem is that the in-house lab that Police Scotland uses suffered a flooding incident during the course of the pandemic, which has caused problems. The outsourcing that took place was in deliberate response to that, to ensure that we had the capacity in relation to that. Part of the investigation by HMICS and the work that we will do with the SPA will be to ensure that we plot out the way forward. The main objective will be to drive out the risk that such things happen again in the future.

As for Katy Clark’s question on other crimes, that is for the procurator fiscal’s office to answer.

I am not sure that there is a question for me to answer there, but I—of course—regret any instance where the opportunity to prosecute a case of drug driving has been lost as a result of the issues that have arisen with SPA forensics.

The whole point is to build on success, which is undoubtedly there, because more than 5,000 people have been stopped who would not have been stopped under the previous legislation. We want to ensure that every case that needs to be prosecuted is prosecuted.

This is not passing the buck, but the SPA, Police Scotland and the Crown Office are independent—I know that the Tories have a hard time getting their heads around that—and we want to ensure that they have all the tools that are necessary to prosecute every case that they have to.

This is perhaps the most substantial of the amendments and, unfortunately, it is also the most contentious and divisive. I had hoped that we would be able to reach a common position so that we could move forward on achieving what we all want. I regret that that has not been possible.

The Scott inquiry did not propose a compensation scheme, for very good—

Will the member give way?

Had Alexander Stewart done his homework, he would have found out that the reason for the reduction in police force numbers is to do with the 26th UN climate change conference of the parties—COP26—and with Covid, both of which have limited the police’s ability to undertake training of new officers at Tulliallan, because it was being used for other purposes. The police will tell him that.

Alexander Stewart asked what else we are doing. We are going to pay our police officers more than the Tories pay the police officers whom they have control over; we are going to have more police officers per head of population than there are in England and Wales; and we are going to oppose the Tories’ imposition of a 5.2 per cent cut in our budget this year, which limits how much we can do.

We are doing the things that help police officers—unlike the Tories, who have undermined and underresourced the police in England and Wales.