Chamber and committees

Thank you very much for that.

Joanne, I get the impression from what has been said that it is not necessarily that the wrong people are being held on remand for the wrong reasons; it is simply that there are too many people on remand because the trials are taking too long to come to fruition, which has the knock-on effect of more people being on remand. Dealing with the backlog and getting those—[Inaudible]—to pass more quickly would, by default, bring down those numbers quite quickly. We should maybe consider that. Have you any views on what has already been said?

One of the problems with legislating to change the parameters of the grounds on which bail can be permitted or refused is that it is quite an all-encompassing approach. I do not know that it necessarily accounts for the nuances of courts. It applies to summary and solemn cases. It does not differentiate between domestic and non-domestic cases, nor does it take into account the nuances of specialist courts that deal with sexual abuse or drugs, or youth or female courts, for example. It is a one-size-fits-all approach to the changes.

My worry about that is whether it is the right approach. I wonder whether you might comment on that. Should a more nuanced approach be taken to legislating when we make changes to refusing grounds for bail, as the bill proposes to do? That is quite an open question, after which I might zoom in on some specific scenarios.

Thank you for allowing me to ask those questions, convener. I appreciate that, as I am conscious of time.

That is a nice summary. The evidence that we have taken from survivors is quite horrific on the way that perpetrators are flouting and abusing the system, even while they are on bail, to further traumatise their victims. That is not being dealt with.

Convener, for the benefit of time, rather than my asking lots of questions on part 2, would it be more suitable for us to write to the witnesses? I feel like we are eliciting a lot more information than we would get in written submissions.

Do you see my point, though? The bill seeks to address the problem from the other end, through the parameters on which the judge can base the decision whether to grant bail. However, if the primary source of the numbers of people who go through the bail decision system rests initially with the Crown and its opposition to bail—or not, as the case may be—is the better way not perhaps to see first whether there is a problem before restricting judges’ discretion?

I will try to be brief. I welcome the cabinet secretary’s opening position where he says that

“a greater evidence base should be developed before they were made a permanent feature of Scotland’s justice system.”

By “they”, he means fully virtual trials. He goes on to say:

“I continue to agree with that approach.”

I agree with his agreement, but I also share the concern that was raised by a colleague that we are being passed back to the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service for data on something that has been taking place for three years. It seems unusual for the Government not to have kept a watching brief on that or to have the data that we have asked it for. Nonetheless, if the SCTS has that data, we should ask for it and for a report on the use of virtuality in trials and of fully virtual trials, because we are living off the back of other legislation, not legislation that deals with fully virtual trials.

There will be a lot of interest in the issue from many stakeholders, not just from victims organisations that are proponents of the further use of virtual trials in certain cases but from those who have reservations about it. I do not know what the end goal is here. Does the Government have a plan to move to a form of permanence in law or otherwise, or does it plan to say that such matters are for the courts and not for it to intervene on? I feel that we are in limbo on that. Although I look forward to the consultation responses being published, I do not think that they will necessarily answer the question of what the Government’s plans are.

The issue of transcripts is perennial. We seem to go round in circles: we ask for a resolution, but the Government pushes back and just keeps saying that

“there are several matters that we would need to consider”.

We know that there are—we have been talking about the issue for a year now.

I would like to hope that 2023 will be the year of resolution, and one resolution might be that we get to the bottom of the court transcript issue. As Russell Findlay rightly said, we managed to transcribe 22 hours of robust chamber debate in a matter of 48 hours. If that can be done in the Parliament, I am sure that it can be done in courts.

In essence, what we are doing is ditching the item from today’s agenda, because we are out of time, but that does not mean that it should go completely offline. The action plan is one of the few documents that we share quite widely with the public and stakeholders on the progress that we are making as a committee, so we should revisit it—probably in great detail—but we need to afford it proper time. I would rather do that than it simply become a paper trail of correspondence between members and the clerks. For the purpose of updating people, we should have an open public session on it so that people can follow what we are saying.

Before I bring Emma Bryson in, reading between the lines, I think that you are saying that it is not simply the case that too many people are being chucked into prison on remand; rather, it is the case that the profile of those who are being remanded has changed drastically—in part due to the presumption against short sentences and also due to the nature of the crimes and certain types of crimes increasing—that those people really should be on remand, and that those decisions are best made by judges under the current system. Of course, part 1 of the bill goes to great lengths to narrow the parameters within which judges can make those decisions, so I might ask you both about your concerns about that.

Equally, part 1, as far as I can see, does not do the second part of what you are asking for, which is that, if more people are let out, that must be countered by strengthening bail conditions, enforcing them and communicating with victims about them. The element of public safety is so wide in scope that it does not necessarily take into account some of the secondary types of crime and abusive behaviour that might result from someone being bailed.

I cannot see anything in the bill that addresses any of that or strengthens any victims’ rights. Have you spotted anything? For all intents and purposes, we have to amend the bill where possible, so what should be going into it? I will throw that question out there and bring Emma in, but feel free to come back in, Kate.

Perhaps there is a view that the judiciary are already quite well placed to make those sorts of decisions, based on the information that is available to them—the view that, “Why on earth are politicians tinkering with that independence?” Is that the case?

I will come back to you now, Kate, because I asked quite a lot of questions.