Justice Committee

Meeting date: Tuesday, October 23, 2018

Official Report 859KB pdf

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Police and Fire Reform (Scotland) Act 2012 (Post-legislative Scrutiny)

Agenda item 2 is an evidence-taking session on post-legislative scrutiny of the Police and Fire Reform (Scotland) Act 2012. This morning, we will focus on the views of the unions and staff associations representing the police and fire services. I refer members to paper 1, which is a note by the clerk, and paper 2, which is a private paper.

I welcome to the meeting Chief Superintendent Ivor Marshall, president, Association of Scottish Police Superintendents; Chris McGlone, executive council member, Fire Brigades Union; Stuart Aitken, Fire and Rescue Services Association; Calum Steele, general secretary, Scottish Police Federation; and Derek Jackson, branch secretary, Scottish Fire and Rescue Service branch, Unison Scotland.

I thank everyone for their written submissions, which are always helpful to the committee before the witnesses appear to give evidence. I also know that some of you had train problems, and I thank you for negotiating them and managing to get here on time.

We will go straight to questions from members, starting with Rona Mackay.

Did you think that the Scottish Government’s initial case for reform of both services was sound, or did you have any concerns about it at the time? If so, do those concerns persist?

We need to look at the realities of the public sector landscape when the case for reform was being developed. We had the onset of austerity, at least from a Scottish perspective, but the effect of diminishing budgets had started to be felt a number of years before.

It was probably unfortunate that austerity and what it meant for public sector finances were not front and centre in the arguments for reform. Much was made of the argument that it would improve services and so on, but if that had been the case, reform would have happened many years earlier than it did. From a policing perspective, the former Cabinet Secretary for Justice Kenny MacAskill is on record as saying—more times than he would care to remember, I suspect—that if it had not been for austerity, he would not have pursued the creation of a single police service. That is an important context when it comes to the police and, indeed, the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service.

As for whether reform has delivered a better and more effective police service, I think that it has to some extent, compared with what we would have been facing had we not done it. However, is policing better now than it was a number of years ago, certainly before the creation of the single service? I think that if you look at it, absent the reality of finance, you will find that it is, by any measure, much better in some areas but not in others.

Might that be due to the changing nature of policing?

No, I do not believe so. Policing is a profession that changes dynamically on a daily basis, and the service has always been adept at dealing with that. There has certainly been a change in the demand on the police service—I do not think that anyone will pretend otherwise. Some of the challenges that prevail today are undoubtedly a consequence of our business case, which did not take due cognisance of the realities that we were facing. I am sure that my Unison colleagues have argued at a previous session or will argue at a session following this one that the outline business case was seriously flawed in terms of the financial savings that were contained within it.

Those savings were also drawn up against the background of what you might call a routine policing environment—whatever routine might mean—and took no cognisance of the demands that would be placed on the police service by the terrorist threat, which did not exist to the same extent as it does now. It certainly did not take into consideration what the service uncovered when it looked under the bonnet of the former police forces and the state of much of what they had left for others to deal with.

Speaking on behalf of support staff this morning, I have to say now that we are into year 6 of the new service that we have faced some hard and trying conditions. A lot of change has been thrown at staff but, through the sheer dedication and loyalty of those staff, the services have come through better. There was a strategic intent behind, for example, the closure of many buildings, but people now have to travel for a considerable amount of time to get to their workplaces, and the work-life balance side of things has changed a bit as a result.

In general, there have been benefits, compared with the approach that was taken when we had the eight forces. Certainly as far as Unison is concerned, one benefit is the recognition that we are now getting in the service. We now sit on a lot of forums and boards and at a lot of tables and meetings.

Over the past five years, we have gone through significant change, mainly with regard to terms and conditions, which were agreed in 2015. We went through a job evaluation process, which was to the detriment of a considerable amount of people, and we have had people leaving the service because they cannot afford to work for it. As a result, we have lost a lot of corporate knowledge and expertise over the past five or six years; there are specific jobs that we are struggling to fill from outside, but we have introduced a marketplace supplement to encourage people from the private sector to come in. However, although there are some negatives, we as a union recognise that we have a lot more involvement on forums and boards, at tables and in meetings.

At the moment, the service is conducting a staff survey that closes on Sunday, and it will be interesting to see the outcome. We have been trying our best to encourage members to take part in it, because if the service does not know that it is not working, how can it fix things? A lot of people are just sitting back, thinking, “It’s the same old same old.” After what has happened over the past five years, trust has been lost on the support staff side, but I hope that the morale of the staff will come through in this survey, which concludes on the 28th.

It is encouraging to hear that you have more of a voice at board meetings and so on.

On your question whether we thought the initial case for reform was sound, it is important to remember the context at the time, because it is easy to look back with rose-tinted spectacles and forget some of what was going on. There were significant operational drivers for change such as the need to build capability and capacity across policing, and the evidence that we have seen over the past five and a half years suggests that the move has been successful in creating the ability to respond to major and changing threats to national security and to counterterrorism and other strategic issues.

There were definitely financial drivers at the time; indeed, Mr Steele has already referred to the austerity measures that were starting to affect the public sector in Scotland. That felt like a significant driver of the actual change process. As for the financial business case, I personally think that it has not stood up to the test of time, because the projected savings have not been realised. The service has had to operate with a structural deficit in its budget for the past five or six years, with the transformation budget that was intended to make the changes used to patch the shortfall. Certain constraints that arose from the fixed costs of having 17,234 officers made it extremely difficult to achieve some savings; concerns in that respect have persisted, but thankfully it looks as though the service is starting to address the issue to ensure that we are operating on a sustainable budget footing. However, we still need investment in order to move from integration to transformation—that is an on-going piece of work.

There were and continue to be concerns about the scale, complexity and scope of the change and the pace at which it was conducted initially. The timescale from the introduction of the bill to its going live was very short, given the scale of a change that we are still living with the consequences of five or six years later.

Those are my key points. There was definitely a focus on the structural and procedural elements, as I think has been recognised and conceded, but for a business that is about people—in other words, people delivering services to the citizens of Scotland—there was not really a focus on officers and staff. Thankfully, the service has now recognised and started to address the issue. The readiness for change in the hearts and minds of the officers and staff was probably overlooked in the first three to four years.

Broadly, the move to a single fire service was welcomed, but the benefits that could have come from it—more resources, standardisation of practices and so on—have not emerged. We are still talking about harmonisation and transformation—those issues have not been sorted in the fire service.

As for the retained service, it has unique and real problems with recruitment and retention, but those issues go way back before the move to a single fire service. Indeed, there were parliamentary reviews on the matter as far back as 2003. We hoped that the issue would be fixed with the single fire service, but because of the financial restraints, I do not think that that will be possible. In fact, it has been shown that it is not possible. We still suffer from a lack of training and equipment, and those things have just not materialised. As for the whole picture, I think that it can be done, but it has not been done so far.

From the fire service point of view, the Christie commission sounded the initial alarm and set the context for the organisations. They agreed with the contents of the Christie commission report and the issues that it raised, but what the commission said—which was, “You have to innovate, collaborate and transform or you will not survive in your current form”—set the hares running. It set the pace of the initial reform and the movement to the consultation on where the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service went.

Certainly, the initial case was fairly sound, and it was supported initially by the Fire Brigades Union. As for whether we think now that it was the best option, it appeared to us to be the best one at the time. Now that we are five or six years down the line, would we look at things differently? Possibly. Would we consider a three-service structure instead of a single-service structure? Possibly, given the massive size of our country—its 50,000-odd square miles—and the amount of diversity from the central belt to remote rural areas. Am I convinced that the single service completely serves those diverse communities? Possibly not at the moment, but it is looking at those aspects where it might not be doing so, one of which is clearly the retained duty service.

As for your second question, I would probably refer to the three main policy intentions for the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service that are set out in the legislation. We have provided a significant amount of evidence in our submission, and I am quite sure that the panel members will be interested in exploring that during the session.

10:15  

Would the issues that you have just raised not have been there had the legacy forces remained and the single force not come into being? Would you not be facing some of the same problems?

The creation of a single service has clearly thrown up its own unique set of problems and issues. I do not really think that we had a choice; indeed, Calum Steele has painted the context of the fiscal and financial background at the time and the difficulties that the whole country was facing with financing our public services and public sector. Some of the antecedent services would have been in real trouble by now and, in fact, were in the process of being bailed out by others. If I am being absolutely honest, I do not think some of those original brigades would have existed in their previous format. The one thing that the creation of the single service did was to enable us to pool resources and probably to protect ourselves against things being lost as a result of the fiscal background of austerity at that time.

Again, speaking from the front line, I would say that some of the issues have been addressed, but a lot of the main issues have not. That puts pressure on our members. It is hard to explain briefly, but we are talking about people who already have a lot of commitments in their own personal lives and their own main jobs. It is fine to broaden someone’s role if it is their main occupation, but if people do this for only two hours a week, they cannot be competent if their role keeps getting broader and broader as a result of transformation. There have been benefits—the ability to pool resources from other areas and the sharing of specialist resources are very good—but the continual broadening of the role is just not sustainable.

Are you talking about training?

Yes. Initially, you had training in breathing apparatus and road traffic accident equipment, but the role has been broadened to include water rescue, line rescue and soon medical rescue. It keeps going like that, and it is just not sustainable in a retained service where people have only two hours a week for training. We welcome new roles, but we think that certain roles have to be withdrawn or put into one area, or perhaps the roles should be split at the station. You cannot expect people to be competent in every role; it is just not possible, and anyone who says that it is does not understand.

With regard to the people side of things, the change process and internal communications, I think that, if we still had the eight forces, things might still be quite people-centric. However, we have to set the parochialism of that approach against the risk and threats that we face now and which have changed over the last five or six years and the ability of the service to stand up and deal with them. I think that we would be sitting here dealing with different consequences of a different nature, but it is hard to speculate on some of that.

Yes, lessons need to be learned, and it is important that we look back, but for me, the important thing is that we are now one service and that we move forward. Now that we have put the structural and technical elements in place, we need to secure the right sustainable budget and focus on engaging and empowering all the people who work for Police Scotland to the fullness of their capability. Instead of asking, “What if we had had something else?”, we can improve things, and we can deliver all that was intended under the reform process. I think that, if we had stayed as we were, we would have been dealing with a whole series of different questions about a lack of capability, capacity, sustainability and ability to respond to significant threats in the United Kingdom.

I would echo what the rest have said about whether we are in a better place. I think so, but at the same time there are still lessons that have to be and which should have been learned. As Calum Steele has said about the business case and the financial side of things, it was fine for a bog-standard service, but now that we are into year 6 of the new services, we can see how things have developed and diversified, with the need for specialist skills to deal with terrorism and so on, with different work locations and with money being spent on new facilities. Had it not been for the dedication and loyalty of support staff, we would have been a far worse place than what we are dealing with. These people just want to be valued by the organisation, because they feel loyal to the service and are proud to be a part of it. Overall, things are in a better place, but we still have lessons to learn and a long way to go yet.

A short answer to your question whether the problems would still have been there is yes, and they would arguably have been compounded.

I want to ask Stuart Aitken for a brief clarification. You are saying that the expansion of the role of firefighters could mean that they are overstretched. Expansion is fundamental to the transformation programme and the consultation that the fire service has set out. Are you saying that firefighters would be overstretched by the addition of anti-terrorism and first responder roles, or, if we are looking at additional competencies beyond those, would they be overstretched by them? I would be interested if Chris McGlone would reflect on that, as well.

I would say that just adding those two alone is overstretching. We are in favour of expansion—do not get me wrong—especially emergency medical response. That should be rolled out as soon as possible, as it is only going to benefit the community. If that is held back any longer, it is the community that will suffer.

It has long been known that the problem with the retained service is that people have very limited time. They are committed to a full-time job elsewhere and they have family life. Think about it: we are asked to do the same role as a whole-time firefighter. When we turn up at an incident, we do the same thing. We have two hours a week to do all the training to keep our skills up. The information technology systems in the station are not up to the job of dealing with the amount of paperwork that we have to do now—what we call tick-box exercises. We have 12 bodies and two computers. If someone takes five to 10 minutes to input—well, you can work it out for yourself. It is an hour to two hours just to input your paperwork. We are getting people coming in outwith their working hours and doing that off their own back. That is not sustainable.

I will expand briefly. We have made a compelling argument and provided a lot of evidence for job role expansion over the next few years and beyond, so it is certainly not something that we are opposed to—exactly the opposite. But there are concerns about the organisation’s capacity to take on these additional roles.

I have consistently made the case—we have previously submitted evidence on this to this committee—that we just do not believe that there is enough additional standing capacity in a firefighter’s role and in the retained duty system to take on all these additional specialist roles that require specialist qualifications, skills and training.

To put it into context, there are roughly only 300 hours in a whole-time firefighter’s year to train for core competence in the role. It takes approximately 222 hours to train for that core competence in the basic role of a firefighter and approximately another 80 hours to train for and maintain competence in another specialist skill. There clearly is a difficulty with taking on these additional skills in the whole-time service, and the difficulty is exacerbated in the retained service, for the reasons that Stuart Aitken has highlighted.

This is more for Mr Jackson, and I do not know whether it is a question or just a request for clarification. I appreciate that you have stepped in at short notice due to a colleague’s illness. However, the responses that you gave to Rona Mackay’s questions did not quite chime with what Unison Scotland suggested in its written submission. It stated that

“police staffs have borne the brunt of a process of centralisation, budget cuts”,

and what it sees as “politically driven targets” that have

“significantly compromised the ability of Police Scotland and the Scottish Police Authority to develop a modern and sustainable police service.”

Some of those may be legacy issues that we are working through, but it is important for the committee to get that on the record as it was set out to us in the written submission. Do you have any observations on that? I appreciate that it would have been your colleague who drafted that, rather than you.

It was a contact at Unison Scotland. Unison police staff Scotland had its say as well, and both written submissions were submitted to the committee some time back. Personally, I am commenting purely on the SFRS, not on the police side of things

Calum Steele, I would like to pick up on a point that you raised in your written submission. You say:

“It is our strong view ... that policing and its associated structures have never been subject to the intense ... media ... scrutiny that they are now.”

You also say:

“political opportunity has been considered ahead of allowing the structures that exist to discharge their responsibilities.”

I would welcome other panel members’ views on that point. Calum, will you expand upon the impact that that has had on staff morale?

Police officers, by their nature, tend to be fairly resilient individuals. Listening to the realities of expanding roles in the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, it strikes me that police officers undertake activities that extend to being carers, psychologists, psychiatrists, parking wardens, dog wardens, counsellors, social workers, nurses, doctors—Superman and Wonder Woman. We tend to be fairly robust, but the reality is that when the new service was created it became something that policing in Scotland had not been before. It became a totem of Government policy and it became a totem of targeted criticism against Government because of the environment that was prevailing in Scotland at that time.

The service was not provided the time or the space to be able to reflect on the realities of working in the territorial land mass of Scotland rather than within the artificial boundaries that existed before the single service. Many of the difficulties in the early days of Police Scotland were reported salaciously as failures or crises. They were the kind of things that happened periodically—I am not going to say “routinely”—in the former forces, but because the reports were confined to local press and largely to local radio stations, they did not get anything like the salacious headlines we have seen since then. Those issues certainly never got the attention in Parliament that difficulties faced by the single police service did. That was the reality of the media perspective, both print and broadcast.

The continual effect of that reporting was a sense of frustration among officers that it was not reflective of the reality of the service that they were delivering. Police officers were metaphorically busting their balls every single day to deliver the police service that Scotland’s communities were used to. I have heard journalists say that it is not their job to write “Postman delivers letters” stories. Doing their job is exactly what they are meant to do, which of course was true until His Royal Highness was flying helicopters in the rescue service in Wales, and “Postman delivers letters” seemed to be an appropriate headline at that point in time.

In terms of the continual downward impact on officers delivering services, such reporting did not impact on officers’ day-to-day activities, but when they encountered members of the public, they would say, “My experience with you has been first class. My local experience has been first class. But, my God, is policing not in a terrible state?” It created a pernicious effect among the opinions of many that the service was failing. The reality was that it was functioning—although it could have been functioning better; let us not pretend that it did not have its challenges—but that reporting set a public narrative that did not reflect the reality. Officers and staff found that more difficult to deal with than anything else.

I would be interested in any of the other panel members’ thoughts on that point.

10:30  

The police and fire services sit on both sides of that justice coin and we attract very different types of attention. Broadly, our experience is that the media attention that we get in the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service is positive and supportive. The perception that we get on our side of the justice coin is exactly the opposite of what the police side gets: they come in for a lot of criticism and a lot of stick. That must create difficulties within the organisation with regards to staff morale. Both our organisations are trying to cope with the big structural changes that have taken place over the past five years, and it is difficult to do that even without getting outside criticism for trying to do your job.

As a service, we have always been scrutinised—quite rightly—through lots of channels. The media has always been a part of that, and they are the lens through which a lot of the public garner their views. There is a real issue about reality versus perception across all of that.

Over the past five to six years, undoubtedly the level of reporting on certain aspects has been of exponential interest in terms of selling newspapers or getting website hits, whatever it happens to be, and there is a risk that that has provided a skewed sense of what the situation looks like.

I concur with Mr Steele’s view that the real experience of citizens’ engagement with officers and members of staff delivering a service has been generally positive. That trust and confidence has always been there. The reaction as we have experienced it first hand or through surveys of customer satisfaction has shown us that the service is doing a really good job.

A lot of the stories and salacious headlines were not reflective of what the reality was. Admittedly, there were some tensions in the new organisation, regarding certain big personalities and a perhaps immature police authority that still had to establish itself. All of that fed into a news cycle that has persisted for some considerable time.

I am hopeful now that we have moved on to a more stable footing and there might be more fair and equitable reporting, particularly if we focus on the tangible day-to-day delivery of what policing services look like, because there are some fantastic stories that happen day in, day out. If there was a focus on that more than on the political wrangling around some aspects, the public would get a fair reflection of what the situation is really like.

On that point, Ivor Marshall, I note that in your submission you highlight

“National access to specialist resources”

and

“stopping duplication of support services eight times over.”

Knowledge is now shared nationally in a way that it was not before. Obviously, Police Scotland has solved every murder since 2013, which is a good news story, so reform has had its benefits. I would be interested to hear the panel’s views on the opportunities and benefits that reform has led to, which might challenge the negative culture that has grown in the media.

There is a list of benefits that have happened as a consequence of reform, some of which you have alluded to. They also include the service’s approach to domestic violence, its capability around firearms and public order, its capability to deal with fraud and cybercrime, its ability to move resources around the country, its ability to respond to major events and civil emergencies—the list goes on and on.

The problem is that—Calum Steele alluded to this—good news does not sell newspapers or get hits on websites. Perhaps the issue is that all of us around this table should be advocating much more about the good news that happens in policing. The service certainly can step up to that. We have a role in that, as do the members around the table. There is definitely something about creating an honest, fair narrative about what policing delivers for the people of Scotland. I am not speaking for Calum Steele, but I think that that is the point that he raised in his written submission.

We have inadvertently moved on to an issue that we are going to cover with John Finnie. Before we do, Liam has a supplementary.

We heard from Calum Steele that the justice secretary at the time had claimed that reform was about improving policing, which he has now said was not the case. It is generally accepted that a lot of the concerns and complaints were raised by staff and officers, and they were not about reform making the police service worse, but about the way in which policing was delivered.

If you centralise policing, is it not a corollary that issues that previously would have been aired at a local or regional level through the media and locally elected representatives now have to be raised at a national level? Given the nature of the concerns that were raised, the only challenge function was at a national level. Was that not inevitable as a result of creating a single structure?

I will let Mr Steele respond, seeing as you referred to him. However, as part of that on-going conversation, I say again that at first there was a lack of maturity about where scrutiny happened. Everything became a national issue, with the somewhat immature police authority being set up, the mechanics of how that operated and how it discharged its functions.

Likewise, at local scrutiny board level, it took some time for things to mature, but in my experience the relationships with local area commanders and divisional commanders have been consistently positive, because a lot of them are the same people who were there in the legacy forces.

Those things happened quite quickly. Conversations were still happening in local news stories, and lots of parts of the country remained generally positive about local engagement, but I think that that was trumped by some of the national debates that were happening. In terms of scrutiny and conversation and how that plays out, perhaps there is a difference between what happens in local newspapers and what is reported nationally.

In terms of that question of information flow and the ability to air issues, certainly the nationalisation of the service made it more difficult for local voices—either internal voices or voices from regions of the country—to be heard at the national level. I remember that in Professor Nick Fyfe’s submissions to the committee he alluded to the fact that sometimes the voice of localism was lost in the national agenda.

That is an unintended consequence, perhaps, of centralisation. I spoke about there having been a focus on structural and technical things perhaps at the expense of relationships and the human interface that we had under eight forces. Again, I would say that thankfully it seems that we and other services have recognised that, and we have made moves to repair a lot of the damage that was done.

We have five witnesses and we want to make sure that you all get a decent hearing today in a limited time. Could you be as succinct as possible with your answers? Could members be as succinct as possible with their supplementaries and questions?

To respond to the question, I do not think that it was inevitable. In some ways I am taken back in time to an evidence session that we had—probably in this very room—about four or five years ago, when representatives from the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities and others were talking about the local scrutiny arrangements that were going to be put in place.

It is worth reminding ourselves that the previous scrutiny arrangements were not in legislation. The arrangements for police boards developed organically across local authorities. They ended up largely mirroring each other, but there was no central legislation to determine how local scrutiny arrangements should take place. I certainly expected—naively, as it turned out—and it appeared to have been Parliament’s intention that there was no requirement to legislate for local scrutiny, and that local authorities had demonstrated in the early 1970s that they were capable of putting their own house in order and putting things in place.

The reality was that when the new single service was created, to a large degree many of the former local authorities that had involvement in scrutiny effectively gave up. Much of the pathway projects that were developed in the run-up to the creation of the single service were abandoned or allowed to wither on the vine. Local scrutiny became something of an inconvenience to routine council business and what was once a dedicated committee of a local authority—or local authorities working together, in the case of joint police boards or unitary authorities—became 20 minutes at the end of some other meeting.

No, I do not believe that what Liam McArthur described was inevitable. I also do not believe that it is the responsibility of the police service to fix the problem. As I said in my written submission, there is probably something to be done between the Scottish Police Authority and local authorities on improving—even now—the relationship that is needed to ensure that local scrutiny exists, but it is definitely not something for the police service. We had no role for it in the early 1970s. We should have no responsibility for it now, because you can understand the whole host of difficulties and headlines that would be created if we were to direct local communities as to how they should be scrutinising.

We have moved on to your area of questioning a bit, Liam, so do you want to continue with that?

Both Mr Marshall and Mr Steele have touched on issues of concern about a loss of localism at the time of centralisation. I would be interested in your views about the extent to which communities can hold policing to account. I take your point, Mr Steele, about where that responsibility ought to lie, but it would seem from what you were suggesting that the issue is in the gift of local authorities to resolve. If that is the case, how might they go about doing that? If not, are we in the territory of directing local authorities to act in particular ways? Certainly, the concern has been raised that local authorities’ access—not necessarily to the area commander but to those in the SPA and higher up in Police Scotland where budget decisions are taken—is not as good as it might be. Therefore, what they are dealing with is the consequences of decisions that are taken somewhere else within Police Scotland or somewhere else within the SPA. How can that be rectified?

The extent to which local communities can hold police to account has taken some time to mature. There are good relationships between local elected members and local area commanders, chief inspectors, superintendents, chief superintendents and divisional commanders. As far as influencing what local policing services look like, obviously the local scrutiny boards have, subject to Calum Steele’s earlier comments, started to mature. The development of local outcome improvement plans and locality plans puts that in writing in some ways.

My frustration around some of that—I say this as a former commander of a division—is that sometimes you do not have the autonomy to be able to commit to joint working and collaborations, as per Christie principles, because of the centralisation of budgets in the service, which has been driven by the cuts. Budgets get sucked into the centre. There is also a frustration on the part of local commanders that at times the desire to deliver those gold standard specialist national resources in services inevitably has a drain on local services.

There are frustrations around that and the ability to influence communities. Absolutely, I think that the local police managers are cognisant of local views and do their best to deliver initiatives, plans and day-to-day services that respond to local needs. The frustrations would be that they do not necessarily have the full autonomy and full commitment of resources that are needed to be able to work on a partnership basis.

Does that mean that the scrutiny structure that was set up by legislation, as Calum Steele said, is overseeing a smaller area of responsibility because of the way in which decisions are now taken within a centralised force? Again, I would be interested on the fire and rescue side of things as well, in terms of area discretion for local chiefs. Would that be a fair characterisation?

It is a fundamental consequence that at times you are balancing making strategic decisions about national issues, which might be on capability around firearms as a consequence of national threats and so on, and putting in enough resources to deal with the day-to-day routine policing matters. It is always a balancing act. At times over the last piece, it has certainly felt like there has been more of a focus on setting up national structures and making sure that they are robust, which has perhaps been at the cost of local resources. Inevitably, if you have to take officers away to do a historical sex abuse case, that will create vacancies on the operational uniform front line.

10:45  

I am mindful of the fact that you have asked your question in two parts, and the second part is obviously about how we improve the situation. Regardless of the desire as to what should have taken place, I am not naive enough to think that it did place. Therefore, the question as to how we fix it is a pertinent one. To me, it comes down to how we make sure that local authorities and locally elected members are seen to have skin in the game. Given the change to the funding arrangements, which means that half the money does not come from local authorities anymore, there is no longer direct influence over finance.

Of course, financial decisions have a direct impact on policing that is delivered in local communities. That distils down to the number of officers and staff who are available and the type and number of buildings that they work from. The speech given by the chair of the Scottish Police Federation at our conference last year, which I suspect will be front and centre in any Liberal Democrat library, contained some suggestions as to what could be done to improve the situation.

Although I believe that the general principle of the Scottish Police Authority is fundamentally sound, I believe that it could be improved to the point at which COSLA, as the umbrella body for local authorities, was able to identify people for appointment to the Scottish Police Authority. That would enhance the Scottish Police Authority and it would absolutely bring direct buy-in from local authorities. They would recognise that they do have skin in the game, because they would be there at the very centre of the governance body, with the ability to influence financial decisions that impact on communities the length and breadth of Scotland.

Speaking as somebody who has obviously worked for a long time in the service and as the head of Fire Brigades Union, I think that both the Fire (Scotland) Act 2005 and the structure of the organisation are conducive to good local, devolved decision making and relationships with the local community. Things like the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 hand a significant degree of autonomy to those local communities to engage with their local fire and rescue service. There is a clear pathway up to the local senior officer who, for all intents and purposes, is the accountable officer in that local area. I cannot say whether the decisions and the decision-making autonomy that that local senior officer has are fully supported by devolved budgets in the fire and rescue service, but I am sure that the chief officer could answer that for you.

I want to ask Mr Marshall and Mr Steele about a possible misunderstanding that the Police and Fire Reform (Scotland) Act 2012 introduced centralised services that did not exist previously.

Before Police Scotland existed, there were centralised services. The police officers will be aware that we had the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency, for example, which meant that there was training, recruitment and some specialist services that had no local input. Is there not more scrutiny of such resource now? In any case, the former police boards had no one with a sufficient level of clearance who could scrutinise issues such as counterterrorism and that is no longer the case. There is now better scrutiny of such important elements and significant resource. Am I right?

I am taking my steer from the convener on short answers: yes.

There is absolutely better scrutiny and better line of sight. We also have the opportunity to bid for that type of resource and other specialist resources to be deployed around the whole of Scotland as opposed to being deployed in a more parochial way as they were previously.

A lot of the questions that I was going to ask have already been answered, but I will focus on the next phase of delivering a coherent and consistent approach. We have talked about the improvements that have been made in specialist services, and about some of the improvements that have been made in scrutiny, delivery of services and structure. Where is the next phase of improving that consistency?

One area that springs to mind is IT infrastructure. What is next for maturing organisations in terms of improving IT infrastructure and delivering consistency? Where are there still gaps?

We have to return to first principles. It is all very well talking about national and specialist services, but to a large extent they have been delivered to the detriment of local services or services that would traditionally have been considered to be local policing activities.

That is not to take away from the reality that we need to invest exponentially in our IT infrastructure. We need to invest considerable sums of money in our estate. The reality is that local policing and response policing have suffered. Yes, the type of policing has changed, but policing has always changed. Whereas once upon a time police officers would deal with volume by dealing with call after call after call, we are now dealing with complexity, which takes time in a way that police officers largely did not have to face in the not-too-distant past.

If we are to continue to take people away from their roles in what is probably the most specialist area of policing because they deal with all manner of complexities every day, and put them in siloed roles where they have a very clear, defined area of responsibility, whether it be the investigation of serious and organised crime, historical sex abuse, or fraud, it is important to support those services. Undoubtedly the service is much more adept at that than it ever was in the past, but its price has been local policing. The price of that has been human. Police officers in all areas of the service are working ridiculously long hours. We have stripped out ranks and supervision, which introduces its own risks. Those will turn out to be realised in years to come when lack of supervision will show what lack of supervision has always shown: eventually you get to critical mass and you end up being criticised for it.

There needs to be a return to first principles. Stop talking about the big picture and just look at the practicalities of the here and now.

Where does the balance lie between making sure that local policing is delivered consistently across Scotland and the ability to be responsive locally? Where does that balance lie so that quality is consistent wherever you are delivering policing across Scotland but there is still the ability for local decision making?

In truth, you are never going to get consistency in an absolute sense, in much the same way as you do not get access to a heart surgeon if you live in Barra. The reality is that policing will be tailored to the resources that are available to deliver it and the needs of the community.

This is what I think is important. When something big happens, the consistency of the service is pretty much guaranteed because large numbers of officers are flown in, ferried in or driven in, they deal with the issue, and then they go away. That ignores the importance of community relationships and the fact that police officers have to continue to deliver services after those individuals have gone. It also ignores the fact that, if the police resources had been there in the first place, they might have had more of an impact and prevented the big thing happening in the first place.

To some extent, that comes back to the priorities that Parliament sets. If Parliament thinks that it is important that we concentrate on historical child sex abuse and terrorism to the detriment of local policing, Parliament can make that clear by how much money it gives those priorities. The police service does not have the funding to pay for all the police officers that it currently has, and that goes right back to Parliament. If you do not want to fund the police officers that you have in your communities, do not give us the budget for it. It is very simple.

I agree with Calum Steele about revisiting first principles. What does demand look like now and, projecting forward, what will be the real demand, the perceived demand, and the failure demand that the service will have to cope with? What sustainable operating model can deliver that? How do we know that the right resources are in the right place and that they are equipped to deal with that demand?

Shona Robison mentioned IT. That is an enabler that can help people to do their jobs more effectively and more productively, but it is not the panacea. It is not the answer to all the demands that we face.

In terms of the next steps that we need to take, I have talked about valuing our people a bit more and demonstrating that through proper investment in professional development conversations, in training and development, and in empowerment. That will feed into how the organisational culture is developed through the style of leadership that is necessary to create a learning organisation.

The consequence of that is the answer to Shona Robison’s second question about balancing consistency with quality. You rely on the people who are there dealing with it at that time. They can provide the consistent approach, which is the framework within which the service operates, but tailored to the local context.

The next phase is very risky. We are trying to consolidate what we have now and what we have inherited from the previous services, and we are also trying to meet the aspirations of the Government and the service with regards to expansion and transformation.

We have continually made the case for doing that through some kind of national standards. That is one of the areas where we have gone backwards in the fire and rescue service. We lost response and attendance times so we have no way of measuring them, for example. We lost section 19 of the Fire Services Act 1947, which dealt with establishment levels of the organisation, and meant that changes to establishment had to go back to the Scottish secretary for permission. We lost the joint council for design and development, which ensured consistency in standards, equipment and appliances, which obviously then fed into delivery. We moved from ranks to roles and lost layers of management within the structure of the organisation, which I do not think has been particularly helpful.

There has to be a proper method of audit and assessment against meaningful performance indicators. The service makes broad and sweeping statements such as, “We always have the right resources in the right place at the right time”. I have no idea how we can make that statement if we have no meaningful way of measuring it. If we had response standards and response times, we would be able to do that.

The evidence shows that it is not true all the time. In the recent evidence in Aberdeen, for example, the service clearly did not have the right resources in the right place at the right time more than 300 times within a 10-month period.

Do Mr Aitken or Mr Jackson, who have not commented on the next phase, have any comments?

I echo what has been said and add that there really needs to be a coherent and credible plan going forward to address the retained service and recruitment and retention. That must be at the forefront of any plan. It is a valuable resource, with highly motivated people and people who really care about their community, but they are just overworked and underfunded.

I would say much the same. Services are overstretched because the strategic side of things means that workplaces have been closed and people have had to move. Within the past few years, certain directorates and departments have been restructured just to try to make sure that the service is focused and going forward.

I would like unions to be more involved in restructuring, to get an insight into what is happening and even to give our opinion on things.

Recruitment and retention of staff is also key. There are specific key jobs that we always struggle to fill. A lot of people were in the job and have stayed in it on a lower salary simply because they value the role that they play. They are proud to be part of the service and we would like our staff to be valued. If the service has core values, we would like to stick to them and honour them. That would encourage staff to keep going and stay in the service.

Mr McGlone, your submission talks about the fire service board having insufficient operational knowledge to do the necessary scrutiny. You suggest that “independent, objective advice” should be provided. Scrutiny is clearly important, but was it not ever thus? Do you see an enhanced role for the inspectorate in providing that independence?

The inspectorate has been extremely helpful and some of its reporting in the first five years has been very useful. We have had positive, useful and productive dialogue with the inspectorate when it has been carrying out inspections, especially local area inspections.

The inspectorate is also a good critical friend to the organisation, although it might not look like that sometimes. It was recently in the city of Glasgow, for example, and it highlighted the fact that, despite a lot of good work, there still are some issues with the age and availability of appliances, with appliances being off the runs and with some of the personal protective equipment and so on.

11:00  

The service needs that critical inspectorate role, and it is quite clear that that role has been performed, by and large and certainly in my 30 years, by an ex-chief officer. That individual brings a vast wealth of knowledge and experience within the operational environment, and that informs the product that ultimately comes out of the inspectorate.

The board could also do with similar input from an operational head. As an example, Jimmy Campbell, one of the previous ex-chiefs at Lothian and Borders, left the board fairly recently and was not replaced by somebody with equivalent knowledge. We think that the board in its scrutiny role, especially within the operational environment—which, let us face it, is the most important environment for the fire and rescue service, I think—is weaker as a result of not having an operational head on the board.

The Scottish Government is supportive of some kind of employee representation on public boards but that is lacking on the fire and rescue board at the moment. There are examples where the chief is obviously speaking on operational matters. Fairly recently, there was a discussion about the service’s ability to respond to a Grenfell-type incident, for example, and the chief referred to “operational discretion”. I do not think there is anybody sitting on that board that would have any idea or clue about what “operational discretion” means in relation to dealing with an incident in a dynamic, risky, hazardous environment.

I will pick up on the previous line of questioning and on something that Derek Jackson has mentioned a couple of times. You spoke about individual firefighters and police officers and other members of staff being able to impact positively on decisions at a strategic level. Does that happen? How does it happen and at what level? What can be done to improve it further, perhaps picking up from Chris McGlone’s comment?

We did have a strategic involvement in the executive board, but there is a lot more to that than just being part of it. Although you are getting your say, is it being listened to and acted upon? That is the difference. Recently, we have been through a soft facilities management thing that means that 95 jobs will be lost to the service. From day one we condemned that and said that it was against the public sector policy on privatisation. Those are 95 jobs that we will never ever get back in the service. We were able to go and we still go to the board meetings, but that is an indication of what happens. We are involved, but is our opinion being taken on board? That decision was made strategically, before we even went along to a meeting. We have had a seat at the table. We even have seats on the Newbridge training project board and the new west area asset resource centre—or west area ARC—project. We get seats and we get a say, but the biggest thing for us is whether our say is listened to and acted upon.

What could be done to demonstrate that your views and concerns are heard and are acted on? How could that be fed back to you?

Last year, from day 1 of the soft FM project, regional organisers of the trade unions Unison and Unite wrote to the board on behalf of the support staff, saying that we were dead against the project, but the board approved it and that was pretty much that.

We wrote another joint letter to the then minister for fire services, Annabelle Ewing, requesting a meeting, but it was the same again. The question of the 95 roles is more prominent now that more contracts are coming back in-house as opposed to going out, because it has been proved that contracting out did not work well in the first place. We were highlighting that. Going to Annabelle Ewing was the same again, though. We never got an opportunity to sit down and explain and put our point across. It was a case of, “The board has approved it, that is the decision that has been made.” We do get a chance to speak, but many times the decision has already been made and that is it.

Does anybody else want to come in on that?

Yes, I would like to follow up on that, along the same lines. Our views are often canvassed. I have lost count of the many times over the years that people have come out, recognised that there is a problem with recruitment and retention and that we need to look at that. They go away. Two or three years later we get another visit at the station. We have problems. They go away and nothing is ever done. We get no feedback on the visits either. It leaves you feeling isolated. It leaves the members feeling as though their opinions are not valued. As I say, for 20 years that has been the case. The problem has been recognised but no credible plan or alternative has ever been proposed or put forward or trialled.

We have a pretty good, strong voice within the organisation that is recognised by the service and is reflected in the actions and the decisions that are made. We have various forums within which we can raise concerns and have input. We have an employee advisory group that we can go to for dispute resolution, for example. We do have a working together framework that is based upon our own good industrial relations protocols within our own terms and conditions. I think our voice, certainly from the FBU’s point of view, is well heard. I am certainly in regular contact, as is my Scottish regional secretary, with the chief officer, the deputy chief officer and officers within the organisation as well.

The only thing that I would say, is that I encourage the service to invite us along to the sub-committees of the board a wee bit more often. There are four or five sub-committees that sit and deal with more of the board work than is dealt with on the table at public meetings, and we have not attended those sub-committees too often over the last few years.

I will try to be brief. There is a body of evidence from the Scottish Institute for Policing Research under Nick Fyfe, and from our own internal staff surveys that tends to indicate that, over the lifespan of Police Scotland of the last five years or so, internal communications have perhaps not been what they should have been—certainly not a two-way process. Quite often there was a lot of what and how being pushed out, but no engagement in terms of why certain decisions were taken and certainly not in terms of any strategic decisions.

Again, I would say that that is down to leadership. It is down to the style of leadership and the organisational culture. Perhaps there was a degree of fear and compliance in people doing what they were told as opposed to offering a view. I would like to think that things have changed somewhat around that. Again, with maturity, I think that the new members of the Scottish Police Authority are much more open to conversation and being engaged in the force executive. Certainly, the members that I speak to regularly are very open to that. The key challenge is about making that possible throughout the organisation.

We all have a responsibility to engender that culture of ensuring that everyone’s voice is listened to and that innovation is valued throughout the organisation. Not all the brains are at the top of the organisation: there are some really good ideas at all levels and they need to be embraced. The things that people say in staff surveys or through representatives like me or Mr Steele need to be transferred and listened to and there must be tangible cognisance of that and perhaps even, at times, a decision to change strategic direction. Feeding that back would encourage people to say, “Do you know what, my voice has some kind of impact and I will be listened to, not simply patted on the head; my view is of value.” There is still something to do to create that learning organisation culture. I know, from the Association of Scottish Police Superintendents and from other staff associations, that we do have forums to speak in and we certainly take that as far as we possibly can.

John Finnie can come in very briefly, because we are running behind.

I will be very brief. Mr Aitken, I sense your frustrations, but I wonder whether you are selling yourself a bit short with regard to one thing. I represent the Highlands and Islands, and your representations in respect of training in the Highland areas have been responded to with significant investment in facilities in the Northern and Western Isles. Would you recognise that and take some credit for that?

First, our organisation submitted in evidence that we are not really recognised. We have asked for one post similar to the FBU’s, so that we can have someone full time. Any communications that come out—for example, the last email that came out on harmonisation and standardisation—are always a joint statement from the fire service and the FBU. We are never mentioned in those statements. Tristan Ashby, who has been part of the negotiations, did not even get that update. It is as though we do not exist. The email that came out this week—

They exist, Mr Aitken.

Pardon?

The excellent training facilities in Orkney and the Western Isles exist.

I cannot comment on them because I am not part of them. What I can say is that we have 50 per cent of the training staff that we should have for the stations in our local area. There should be four training staff; there are two. One is temporary. There is no plan to sort that for at least six months.

Forgive me, I thought you were here to speak on behalf of the whole organisation.

No.

I will leave it there then. Thank you.

Okay, that has been cleared up. Before we leave this subject, I will ask about the formal complaints process. You have said that views are not listened to, and Unison’s submission in particular focused on that. Is the complaints process working well, in the panel’s view?

I do not want to have to ask questions of the convener, but complaints is a very wide subject area.

I mean the more formal complaints, because it is unclear whether formal complaints are being brushed aside or just views that express concern. It is really from the Unison submission. I am sorry—you have been brought in at the last minute and here we are asking more questions about it. The submission says:

“It is our view that challenges and criticism of the service has been stifled and there are limited pathways to pursue complaints and concerns about the operation of the service for police staff.”

Is that just a form of wording? Have you really expressed what the issue is, Mr Jackson?

As I said, I am from the SFRS. The Unison representative who should have been here is from Police Scotland; she might have been able to—

I understand that. We will get clarification on the matter from the person who wrote it.

Some of what I wanted to ask about has been covered by Shona Robison.

I will begin by asking a question of Calum Steele. What is your understanding of what the phrase “capacity creation” means, and do you think that it is a useful phrase?

Politeness prevents me from telling you exactly what I think it means. It is probably the smoke that accompanies the mirror that then feeds the spin about how Police Scotland has a tremendous amount of ability to do an awful lot more with a damned sight fewer people. As I said a few moments ago, the service does not have the budget now to pay for the officers that it currently has. Any talk about “capacity creation” is a ruse: it means “cuts”.

I led with that question because I think that “Policing 2026” is an incredibly important bit of work, but one of my concerns is that it has focused on where you might be able to reduce numbers—in particular, in elements at local level. Given what both you and Ivor Marshall have been saying, is there a need to refocus effort in strategic work on the balance between local divisions and what you both described as gold-plated national units and resources?

I would not say that there is a need to refocus; rather, that has to be done in conjunction with what is currently taking place. The reality is that any talk about capacity has to acknowledge that we are currently delivering a service that struggles to meet all the demands that are placed on it. It can be argued that any increase in capacity would provide the ability to respond to more of that demand.

11:15  

Large numbers of officers—in fact, people throughout the service—do not get breaks during their working day, or during their working week. They largely suffer tremendous disruption to their rest periods and they work hours far beyond the normal maximum working week, and that situation is getting worse. I am sure that Ivor Marshall will talk about that from his members’ perspective: further up the rank structure, overtime tends not to be paid, which has to be recognised.

I will steal a part of the question in order to respond to what was asked previously about engagement. The way to engage the workforce is to provide them with time to be consulted and to be engaged. However, from the moment they come in until the moment they leave they are run ragged—they cannot catch their breath or come in for a pee, never mind to have a sandwich or a cup of tea or coffee. We must look at the complexity of the problems that demand creates. I do not think that that should be done instead of national priorities, which continue to be important, but as well as them.

Is there sufficient focus on that in the “Policing 2026” plan?

My view on the plan in that document is that it is like many such strategic documents: it is so wide and woolly that you could take it in any direction that you wanted—which I would say, if I am being honest, tends to be the purpose of such documents. I am not sure that enough attention is paid to policing and police response. There are a load of aspirational beliefs and philosophies about other services stepping up and delivering their end of the bargain, but I do not see any evidence that that will happen.

I mentioned a few moments ago that the reason why police are being psychologists; counsellors and social workers is that other services are stepping away. The police exist, for a wide variety of reasons, as the service for every other service. It is about time that people started to recognise that and to put the money in to make sure that we are able to deliver that. If we are not there to pick up the pieces when, for example, social workers are not able to pick up the pieces, you are just left with pieces.

I will not repeat those questions, but will ask Ivor Marshall whether it is correct to say that we have very different levels of policing in different local divisions, and that those levels are in some ways a legacy of policing patterns before the Police Service of Scotland existed. To what extent does that hangover feed in in terms of availability of sufficient resource at local level?

It is fair to say that the staffing profile in the territorial divisions varies, which is based largely on what was there previously, and is driven by the resources and the demands that existed.

It is not necessarily a question of balancing that out; we must look at the bigger picture. As Daniel Johnson alluded to, the matter is not as binary as “specialist versus local”. We need to take a step back and ask where real demand and perceived demand are, and where we fail to meet demand right across the organisation. We need to understand what that looks like in terms of the type and number of resources that it would take to meet that demand, so that we strike the balance between national specialist resources and a robust, capable and competent front-line service delivery—which, as Calum Steele has suggested, is overstressed at this point. We need to ask that fundamental question and design a sustainable operating model that has the appropriate resources being put into it.

We might also add to that a look at distribution in local policing to see whether there is disparity in the ability of local divisions to respond to demand. The situation has to be multilayered: there is local policing, but aspects of regional, national and even international policing impact on local communities. We have to look at it as a three-dimensional map and understand that.

The phrase the ASPS has used with me in direct communication is that there is a need for a “demand-led review”. Would you repeat that here, and what would a demand-led review look like?

As I said, point zero is to go back and ask what demand is. Demand has changed and will continue to change; we need to project that forward. I think that the service has certainly listened about that, and there is a project on it under the 2026 workstreams that Daniel Johnson referred to.

My reservation goes back to a point that was raised earlier, which was that the professional services-led approach, as opposed to the policing-led approach, can get wrapped up in a lot of project management language. We need to understand demand, and there is a lot of professional judgment around that. We have a lot of data and we need to make informed decisions about it, rather than waiting three or four years for a fancy project with lots of detailed analysis. The service has listened to that and, as far as I understand it, is expediting that approach of understanding demand and making informed decisions.

On that point in terms of “fancy projects”—

Mr McGlone wants to get in. Is the question on the same point?

Yes—it relates directly to what has just been said. When something needs to be done, a specialist unit or project is created at the centre. To what extent could things be done or led by local divisions instead of specialist resources being created at the centre? Do such ideas need to be explored?

There are mechanisms for strategic, tactical and operational decision making for boards that enable decisions to be taken across those three levels about which part of the organisation might have primacy or take the lead. The interconnectedness of elements of a particular issue might be such that all elements across specialist and local resources will have parts to play. There is always a balance to be struck. It is not a binary question about whether it should be local officers or specialists who deal with things. The two are conjoined. The important thing is whether we have the balance right; that is what needs to be looked at.

I will make a very quick point on capacity creation. It is an argument that frustrates and annoys me continually. We have challenged the suggestion because a weak argument is used: that the service could expand into other areas and do other things because it has lots of spare time. We certainly do not have lots of spare time, and the suggestion that we do is based on the single argument that there has been a significant reduction in fires over the last 10, 20, 30, 40 years. Nobody is challenging that; everybody knows what that percentage drop in fires has been.

The argument should be that the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service is expanding to take on additional roles such as emergency medical response, out-of-hospital cardiac arrest response, and formal arrangements for responding in a multi-agency environment to a terrorism incident, because it is the right organisation to do them and firefighters are the right professionals—obviously, given the right pay, terms and conditions, training, PPE and so on. We welcome the Government’s recent additional investment in the budget to help and support us in moving into those areas.

This question is for Calum Steele. In terms of specialist support, has the right balance been struck for more equal access?

That is probably one of the most difficult questions, because the amount of resource that is required depends on the incident that is being dealt with. Specialisms are multidisciplinary, and include firearms, public order and major investigation teams. Is the balance right? All I can say is that those departments—not absolutely but largely—have been staffed to the gold standard. Would you want to diminish that? The answer is probably no. If the cost of maintaining that gold standard is to have a copper—no pun intended—standard elsewhere, perhaps there is a need for some rebalancing, but the consequence will be that we will not do as well as we currently do in some areas.

I will go back to the 2012 act. The act’s policy intention was to strengthen the connection between the services and communities, to involve many more local councillors and to have better integration with community planning partnerships. Has centralisation helped or hindered that intention?

In my experience in the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, centralisation has certainly helped. As I said earlier, there is a good line of communication between communities and partner agencies within local senior officers’ areas. Local senior officers are held to account and are scrutinised by their local scrutiny boards—everything that they do is open to scrutiny by members of the public in the communities. I think that that element of the 2012 act has worked.

The partner agencies are probably best placed to judge whether engagement by the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service has improved or has been positive. There is definitely room for expansion; I have touched on some of those areas. We are talking about expansion of the role and moving into other areas of community safety and health—dealing with out-of-hospital cardiac arrests, emergency medical responses, marauding terrorist firearms attacks and so on. The local set-up and arrangements will assist in that, because in the areas that might require such services there are good communication links and there is evidence of good collaboration between blue-light services and some of the wider health and social care services.

I am going to come back in a minute to ask about whether the 2012 act could be improved with specific reference to the local fire and rescue plans being agreed, so I will just put that out there now for you to think about, while I take the police answer to my first question.

The simple answer is that how what is written in the 2102 act was implemented in the first two or three years hindered it fundamentally. There was a focus on structural and technical elements of building the service. Centralisation of budgets and the lack of empowerment for decision making within territorial divisions meant that there was perhaps some withdrawal from partnership working around community planning. That tide has turned, and the service recognises that. There is a project, again under “Policing 2026”, about local approaches to policing: there has been recognition that we need to regain some of that.

The one caveat to that would be that a lot of the personalities and individuals within local divisions have remained constant; working relationships remained but were sometimes under the radar of what happened centrally. There is lots of good work going on that was perhaps not recognised or valued as much as it should have been within the first three years.

The answer to the question will always be subjective and depends very much on how people interpret “connection”. I know that the service would advocate that it has, principally because of advances in technology, enabled communities to connect with it in a wide variety of innovative ways that used not to exist. However, if you are talking about connection on the human level, I think that many communities, depending on the part of policing or how they are exposed to policing, would say no.

The simple reality is that the police were, in terms of physical presence, withdrawing—I use “withdrawing” carefully—from many communities a long time before the creation of the Police Service of Scotland. The Police Service of Scotland provided no hiding place for that and removed any illusion of connecting with the community through community assets in the way that had previously prevailed. Removal of police stations, largely as a consequence of finances, is the obvious example of that.

I am sure that advocacy groups for, say, victims of domestic violence, people who are involved in some of the large ongoing inquiries into historical sex abuse or child abuse in various institutions and those who represent such communities would say that there has been improvement as a consequence of the single service. However, if we are talking about communities as we traditionally know them—clusters of people living together in geographic areas—I suspect that many would say that there has not.

I will stick with the 2012 act. It set out specific ways in which local policing plans and local fire and rescue plans were to be agreed. Do you have a view on whether the legislation could be improved to ensure that local input is as effective as possible? I will take Mr McGlone first, please.

I will give a quick diplomatic answer. I would be happy to have a chat with the deputy assistant chief officer and local senior officers to get feedback on that before I answer, because I do not think I could give you a decent and informed answer at the moment. I am quite happy to get back to you on that, if that is okay.

I do not think there needs to be a change to the 2012 act. The solution is about interpretation of what is in it. It is also about the relevant people with the right abilities and empowerment to make decisions at locality and divisional levels getting together, agreeing their plans, putting the resources into them and empowering staff to go out and deliver the service. There is more than enough professional ability within the framework to deliver that.

I largely agree with Ivor Marshall that the principles in the legislation remain sound; this is an argument from a number of years ago being rehashed. The service in the first years of its creation gave the plan to the local areas to agree on them. We have refined our approach since then, although we still have not got it entirely right.

My question about changes to the legislation has been answered.

In that case, I thank the witnesses very much for attending. If there is anything from Unison that we have not been able to cover regarding policing, we will follow that up in writing. I thank you all for a very worthwhile session.

11:31 Meeting suspended.  

11:38 On resuming—