I have to ask because it has certainly been in the news in the past few months. My question is directed to the chief constable. Do you believe that serving police officers or staff of Police Scotland should be obliged to declare all and any interests, including memberships of clubs and societies, as has happened in the Metropolitan Police?

How many were seized at the weekend?

I will try to keep my questions technical. I know that we have a lot of ground to cover, so this might be quickfire.

Would it be better if old firm games were never held in either of the clubs’ stadiums? Should they be held only in a third-party stadium?

When a mob turns up outside an asylum hotel, for example, the police have a duty to turn up and keep the peace if there are factions with different views—I understand that.

The general point that the Audit Scotland report makes is that 16,500 seems to be an arbitrary number. We would like to have a more evidence-based analysis of how many police officers and back-office staff you need and what the mix of officers and skill sets should look like, given the changes in crime and in the world. Perhaps I will re-read the Official Report after the meeting to see whether I can take any comfort from the answers, but it is an important point.

An issue that is linked directly to that is the changing nature of crime itself. Of course, we have some good news in that regard. I know that we have a habit of pointing only towards the negatives, but I believe that ministers are keen to make the point that there has been an overall reduction in crime rates in Scotland. However, there have been significant increases in some areas in the past five years that should be a massive cause of concern to us all. Sexual crimes, crimes of dishonesty, crimes against society and non-sexual crimes of violence have all risen year on year and over a five-year period. Some of those increases have been significant—for example, cases of rape and attempted rape have risen by as much as 26 per cent.

That points to a picture of a wider public who may feel safer because there has been a reduction in areas such as murder and homicide, but there has been a massive increase in other types of crime. What confidence do you have that the public can be reassured that, despite those hikes, policing is still doing its job?

I appreciate that. I made a plug for my local police station, which I had to do in our final evidence session.

That might be part of it, but it is not solely related to that.

Yes, we are quite short on time. That £40 million increase in capital is fascinating. In that exact period when it was £45 million per year, I was jumping up and down asking for a new police station in Greenock, but the answer from Police Scotland was, “If we get more money from the Government, we will do it.” Four years later, Police Scotland has more money from the Government, but is not doing it—I could go through the paper trail on that for another hour.

It seems that, even when capital is made available to Police Scotland, officers are still working in 50 or 70-year-old crumbling buildings that do not, for example, have custody capacity. That has an operational impact on their day-to-day jobs. I do not see how what the Government is saying about there being huge amounts of capital cash matches up with the £300 million backlog in estate maintenance and crumbling buildings. Why is there such a mismatch?

That is very welcome. It talks to the wider point about resource planning, which was the premise of my original question, and the sorts of activities that Police Scotland is required to undertake.

At the beginning of the meeting, we talked about police officers linked arm in arm in a football stadium, dealing with thugs. On the other hand, we are talking about intercepting major international serious criminal gangs, using technology, which, I imagine, uses a very different skill set. That goes back to my original question, about your workforce planning, which, unfortunately, was criticised in the Audit Scotland report. When will we see your workforce plan? When will Audit Scotland and the future committees of this Parliament get some comfort that Police Scotland knows exactly what sort of people it needs, how many and when?

There is a perfect storm. You are losing people at the end of their careers who have been around a long time and have a lot of knowledge and expertise; some are retiring early; a large number are retiring due to ill health, which we have some statistics on; and a younger generation is coming in and are working for only five or 10 years, so they are not getting the cross-discipline experience that they would have got years ago. An officer might have served for two or three years in one unit, before moving to another unit. They would have continued to move around for 25 or 30 years. That is not happening at the same rate at the moment. Surely the inexperience has an operational impact on what policing looks and feels like.

I am interested in the intelligence work that you undertake, although I do not expect you to go into any operational details. Some points have been made about the types of organisations and groups that are infiltrating football matches. I find it difficult to believe that these are not premeditated and pre-planned activities. What work is Police Scotland doing ahead of games to monitor Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups and other closed networks, where such activities are clearly being co-ordinated en masse in advance of matches?