Chamber and committees

I will touch on the issue of financial sustainability as part of your medium and long-term plans, which is linked to the budget. I refer specifically to your second submission to the committee. There is a lot of wording in there. Earlier, I asked more about the numbers, but my questions now are more about strategy. I have some cause for concern that I hope you can alleviate.

You talk about your current five-year financial plan and how you will maintain sustainability. You indicate that the plan will maintain current levels of policing but that that is dependent on four key factors. That strikes me as a key point. One of the factors is

“receiving funding increases in line with the commitment to real terms protection”.

What do you mean by “real terms protection”?

You also refer to “managing the workforce size”. What do you mean by that? Surely an increase means higher expenditure. You mention “managing non-pay pressures” and

“receiving compensatory funding to support lost income as a result of COVID-19.”

Those are big issues. What is the risk in relation to those four key determining factors that will allow you to maintain current levels of policing? How has the Government responded to those asks?

We are running out of time, so I will be brief. Do you see your organisation’s role as facilitating the administration of public money that goes to the legal profession, or are you more consumer facing? Many thousands of people are going to Citizens Advice Scotland, and we know that many of its services are being cut or have been lost recently. Is that a warning that people will no longer have an idea about where to go to seek advice and help? Could you play a better role by being more consumer focused, so that people would know who you are and where to go for direct advice from the body that administers the finance, rather than going to the third sector?

It sounds as if the legal aid payment review panel, which reported to Government earlier this year, has not gone down well with you either. You say that it

“has failed to produce any meaningful results.”

I note that there was a Government-initated question in Parliament today, and the Minister for Community Safety said that the Government accepts that more consultation and research into reform needs to be done. I am sure that we will come on to talk about reform later.

I have a separate question about moving forward. We all accept that we are where we are at the moment. I think it was Mr Moir who said that courts that were set up are being mothballed. We know that there is a backlog of almost 50,000 cases to get through, and that is a concern to everyone we have spoken to at the Crown Office and in the legal profession. How do we address the backlog in the short term if there simply are not enough people to do it? I will direct that question at the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service because you obviously have an ambitious drive to clear that backlog as soon as you can. We can do it if we have the buildings and the Crown resources, but we cannot do it if there are no defence lawyers. How do we plug that gap? That is quite worrying.

Why did so many defence lawyers boycott the holiday courts? Is that constructive?

Thank you.

Good morning—it is almost the afternoon—and thank you for coming. You will note that the committee briefly debated the instrument at a previous meeting.

I have comments and questions on two distinct areas: one concerns the process of deliberation for the instrument and the other concerns its substance. On the latter, I have sympathy with the need to extend some of the powers, for the reasons that you outlined. However, on the former, I have less sympathy with the Government on the way in which we are having to process the instrument. I will start with that.

The current powers expire tomorrow, which leaves the committee in the invidious position of having to either agree or disagree with their extension. Why, cabinet secretary, did the rules come to us only last week, given the likelihood of controversy—questions and concerns have been raised by numerous members across the political spectrum—around the content, nature and extent of some of the powers and the effect that they will have on the prison population?

Your offer and undertaking are very welcome. When we granted the Government the emergency Covid powers, we all accepted from the very beginning that they would not be in force for a moment longer than was necessary—indeed, I think that the Government itself used those same words—but despite the welcome commitment that you have just made, reservations remain that that might not happen, even with the virus’s lowering prevalence.

On that point, have you done any analysis of the Covid cases that are currently in the prison estate? Where are they? Do they involve staff or inmates? How is Covid coming into the estate? Are the numbers on the rise, levelling out or dropping? I would like to get some context.

Thank you for that helpful update. I was trying to make the link with the blunt tool that we are talking about. I presume that the assumption is that if we increase legal aid fees, that will somehow magic cash into your businesses, because that is the nature of the majority of your work. Therefore, either the amount of work has to increase, or the fee per job has to increase—one of those must be true.

Is it the nature of defence work that makes it so much more reliant on a subsidy? Effectively, legal aid is a subsidy to the profession rather than to the consumer.

Right. That raises a fundamental philosophical question as to whether the public purse should be subsidising private defence solicitors, but that is a whole other conversation.

I am sure that the Government is listening carefully to this exchange. Thank you for your comments.