Chamber and committees

I completely agree with that point. We cannot say that we are going to put victims at the centre of justice policy if we are not even considering all the impacts that it has on various victims as set out in equalities legislation.

On risks associated with transforming the criminal justice system, you state on page 30 that one risk involves

“staffing capacity across the criminal justice sector”

and the demands that there are on staff, and you say that that is a significant risk for High Court cases. On page 31, you specifically mention that

“Some stakeholders remain concerned about the recruitment and retention of defence solicitors.”

To what extent are those concerns an issue? What is the balance here? I do not doubt that either of those are issues, but what is the balance of risk in that regard? Did you find evidence of court cases being delayed because of a lack of defence representation, for example?

I appreciate that we need to look at the ecosystem.

I have one final question. There have been some examples of the Scottish Government not engaging with the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service until late in the process—or not at all—when developing regulations and Scottish statutory instruments that impact on the criminal courts and justice partners.

Did the Scottish Government give any reason for the occasions when it engaged late—or not at all—with the SCTS when developing regulations that impacted on it?

Yes.

Just this week, we have learned that the number of domestic abuse cases has risen by 14 per cent, and almost all those cases are ones in which women will have been the victims. Does that statistic not further indicate why it is essential that equality impact assessments are carried out on any changes to the court system and done in a timely way?

As I read the report, it looked as though the reason that the equality impact assessments had not been carried out adequately was that there were not enough resources. Is that reason enough not to have completed the assessments? Did you get an indication of precisely what resources would have been needed to complete the assessments on time?

We know that the number of High Court cases has risen, which is creating more pressure and more of a backlog. The justice of the peace courts and sheriff courts have less of a backlog, but to what extent is that down to their having fewer cases to deal with anyway, rather than efficiencies in the system?

On data and waiting times, you talked earlier about the importance of people knowing how long they can expect to wait to go through the justice system. I completely agree with you on that, and it is important for us parliamentarians to know whether the data and the waiting times are improving.

The Scottish Government published data on the length of an accused person’s journey time in 2023. The publication of quarterly data stopped in March 2025, although you just mentioned to Mr Brown the waiting times statistics from July 2026, which suggests that those are being published again. That revised data has been published, and you have talked about improvements in data publishing. Is it your understanding that the waiting times data will now continue to be published every quarter?

The purpose of agenda item 2, on future business, is to allow us to highlight our plans for the consideration of recent reports by the Auditor General for Scotland. On 17 September, we will take evidence from the Auditor General on his “Post-school education and skills reform” report. On 24 September, we will take evidence from Audit Scotland on “The National Fraud Initiative in Scotland 2026” report and then from the Auditor General on his “Scotland’s colleges 2026” report, which was published earlier this morning.

Before we move on to item 3, I invite the Auditor General to say a few words about his new report on Scotland’s college sector.

Thank you, Auditor General. I welcome any progress that has been made to reduce the court backlogs, but I recognise that there are many challenges that still need to be addressed.

I want to try to understand the overall picture. In your report, you focus on the number of outstanding trials. Exhibit 1 helpfully shows the case volumes for 2024-25, including the cases that remain in the backlog. That is broken down by High Court, sheriff solemn, sheriff summary and justice of the peace trials. If we consider the backlog in each area as a proportion of the number of cases that were heard in that year, we find that the figures are 43.5 per cent for the High Court, 14.5 per cent for sheriff solemn, 24.5 per cent for sheriff summary and 20.3 per cent for justice of the peace courts.

Did you look at those figures over time? You have acknowledged the increase in the number of High Court and complex cases, but did you examine the backlog as a proportion of the overall caseload in order to understand its effect on the different courts?

That would be helpful.