Chamber and committees

I realise that we are slightly steering away from the budget to a deep philosophical conversation about how we manage the rising levels of crimes of this nature. There is no disagreement that we want to have a more trauma-led approach to supporting victims of such crimes, but are you saying that the political solution to this issue needs to change, simply because of the scale of the backlog and the lack of available resource to process it? Would we be making these changes to the way in which we prosecute and try people just because of the situation that we find ourselves in as a result of years of increasing activity in cases? Surely that is not the right way or the right reason to make changes to how we try people, given the effect on the rights of the accused and so on.

I have two strands of questions. The first is purely on the budget, and the other is on the prison estate. My first question is perhaps best addressed to Mr O’Donnell.

Looking at the past three financial years, why are the planned budgets and the outturn figures so starkly different? There seems to be an underspend of around £51 million across three years. Is it the case that less has been spent than forecast, or less than is available to you as a budget? If so, what is the reason for any underspend, and what happens to it? Is it simply not drawn down, or do you have to return it to the Government?

Thank you for that explanation.

My next question is for Ms Medhurst. The committee is undertaking budget scrutiny, and we have had a number of written submissions about the SPS budget. The Howard League Scotland states that it

“does not believe that the Scottish Government is providing enough budget for the work expected of the SPS.”

The Howard League is obviously a third sector organisation, but Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons for Scotland has stated that it has

“seen no evidence to suggest that the SPS is sufficiently resourced to make adequate progress with ... capital projects and strategic initiatives ... and important but routine maintenance”.

To what extent do you agree or disagree with those written submissions?

How long does it take to build a new prison?

I will save my other questions for later, if we have time.

You might need a pen and paper for this question, which is a question about the prison population that we should have perhaps covered at the beginning. I am keen to hear how you forecast the model for that and what the forecasts look like. I appreciate that you are a demand-led service. The reason that you might need a pen and paper is that the statistics are quite stark; there is a backlog in the courts of more than 50,000 cases and we have heard evidence this morning that there will be a 50 per cent increase in indictments over the next two years. We know that 70 per cent of High Court cases relate to serious sexual crimes, and it is natural to assume that non-custodial sentences might not be the outcome for such cases. Against that backdrop, do you expect that the prison population in Scotland is likely to massively increase over the next five years and, if so, by how much?

Presumably, that is capital underspend on new-build projects that are going beyond their expected timescales, but we know that those projects are also going over budget—HMP Inverness, for example—so that does not quite tally. Surely that relates only to the capital budget on new build? We know that there is quite heavy underinvestment in the area of prison estates, and I will come on to that with some specifics. Why are you, in effect, saying to the Government “We will be spending less than we forecast this year”, given that we know that so many projects will still require spending?

I am sorry to push on this, but it is really important from a budget point of view.

Surely, as a service, you must have numbers. I appreciate that there are lots of moving parts and lots of known unknowns, but there are also the knowns, some of which have been expressed today. We know the reoffending statistics, for example; we know how many people end up back in custody within one, two, three or four years of leaving it. There are trends and statistics that you can draw on.

You have limited capacity—a limited amount of space and a limited number of people who you can hold in the system—so surely some modelling must have been done in order to know whether you will reach that capacity at some point and, when you do, what happens then. That is so important, because we know that we are 10 or 15 years away from having new prisons in some parts of Scotland. That is why I am pushing for the forecasting.

Are we going to hit record highs in the prison population, and is there physically enough space to accommodate all the people you are asked to keep under your care?

That sort of does not answer the question, but I appreciate the reasons why you cannot.