Chamber and committees

Okay—good.

There is also the estate issue. I was a little surprised to hear you say, in response to an initial question, that you had confidence that progress has been made. I cannot seem to match up how the force will ever deal with the huge maintenance backlog.

The capital backlog is sitting at more than a quarter of a billion pounds. If you lump it on top of that of the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service backlog at more than £820 million, that is more than £1 billion of cash, which I do not believe the Government has this year, next year or in any year. There has to come a point at which you accept that we will never get through the backlog.

What do we do now? How do we move forward from this when there are crumbling buildings? You mentioned Rothesay. I went to that station on a visit a couple of years ago, and it was a disgrace, but it is no different to Greenock, which was promised a new station years ago. Having conversations there is interesting—the local divisional commander said, “We will build a new one if the Government gives us the money.” The Government replied, “We gave them the money. It is up to them how they spend it.”

Given that, how on earth do we make the estate fit for purpose? How do we modernise Police Scotland in such a way that people on the street see visible improvements, while also ensuring that it handles the back-office stuff, such as IT investment and cybersecurity, that the public will never see?

The Government’s first role is arguably to protect its citizens, so you could make the point that, although government is about choices and how it spends its money on capital and resource, it just has to do certain things, and this is surely one of them.

Auditor General, you have talked in the past about the need for reform in other parts of the public sector. In one session, without going into detail, you commented that the NHS does things now that it might not be able to—or should not be able to—do in the future. Could the same be said about Police Scotland? In other parts of the UK, some forces have said, “Look, we spend too much time doing things that we are not supposed to be doing, whether it is dealing with mental health, dealing with people wandering out of care homes, spending huge amounts of time in hospitals, sitting around monitoring people or waiting on people.” Are we at a stage when Police Scotland might also have to make such tough decisions to survive?

It sure is. I sat on the Criminal Justice Committee nearly four years ago, and we had that conversation. Things have got much worse, not better, in any way, shape or form. They are good examples—but we are out of time.

No, I am happy to finish there, convener.

Thank you, convener—that is appreciated. Good morning to the Auditor General and other guests. Mr Naylor, I will follow on from the line of questioning that you just responded to, on institutional criticisms of the force. Please correct me if I am wrong, but your response seemed to suggest that dealing with those well-documented and well-publicised issues is a work in progress—that we are getting there but are not there yet. That is fine; I understand it. However, does that suggest that Police Scotland still has issues with institutional discrimination, racism, misogyny and/or homophobia?

I am concerned because either those still exist in the force, which should be a cause for concern to most people, or they do not exist, in which case the entire force has been tarnished by those labels over the past few years, which is surely to the detriment of the workforce. I cannot quite work out which it is. Surely this must be evidence based.

This is what I cannot get my head around. There are 22,500 staff across the police force in front-line and back-office functions. Policing says that it needs another 1,200 staff—a mix of officers and support staff—over the next two years. However, we have just had a lengthy conversation about redundancies.

Given that your report is reasonably critical of the long-term workforce planning issue, how on earth can we have any confidence that what policing is aiming for with those numbers is matched by adequate planning, and by an adequate understanding of current and future needs and funding restrictions, which we have spoken a lot about already? Is it just plucking numbers out of thin air? How on earth will we ever know what the optimum number of officers or back-office staff will be?

Good luck negotiating the contract changes with the union—we will see how that goes.

There is a wider issue here that is another point of concern. The numbers are one thing, and the Scottish Government is keen to stress the ratio of police officers per 100,000 people in Scotland relative to the ratios in England or Northern Ireland. In fact, relative to Northern Ireland, the overall number is about three times, so it is considerably more. However, if public perception is not feeling it, there is still a mismatch. The Auditor General mentioned that in his report.

I am concerned that, over the past decade, the level of confidence in front-line local policing has dropped considerably. In fact, the proportion of those who perceive local policing to be “excellent” or “good” has dropped from 61 per cent 10 years ago to 46 per cent. The proportion of those who think it is “fair”, “poor” or even “very poor” has gone up massively, from 37 per cent to 49 per cent; that is half of the population who do not think that local policing is good or excellent. That must be a massive concern for Police Scotland.

My wider point is that you should not only look at the situation through the prism of metrics such as the ratio of police officers per capita, overall crime levels in statistics from the Office for National Statistics, or crime survey statistics; looking at it through the prism of public confidence, public safety and people feeling safe is surely just as important as the recorded metrics.

Thank you. I will leave it there.

Given that the police are getting thin on the ground and that people are leaving through natural attrition or redundancy—I do not mean ill-health redundancy, which is unplanned—I do not understand why we are in a situation in which nearly 100,000 rest days are cancelled each year in Police Scotland and a similar amount of days are lost due to psychological illness. That has doubled in the past couple of years. If the police are thin on the ground, why are people being drafted in when they should be having a day off? It sounds like those are much-needed days off, given the trauma that many of them face. Surely that is a recipe for disaster down the line.

In addition, around 1,000 police officers will be eligible for retirement soon. As you know, we have just had many officers taking early retirement due to changes in the pension rules over the past few years. It sounds like we are heading into a perfect storm, where there will be a major loss of experienced people in the force and a lot of younger, sometimes vulnerable, officers will be on the front line dealing with a very changed world. What risk does that pose to the public?