Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)

Meeting date: Tuesday, June 21, 2022

Official Report 901KB pdf

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Urgent Question

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Forensic Testing (Delays)

To ask the Scottish Government what its response is to reports from the Scottish Police Authority that 386 cases of potential drug driving cannot be prosecuted because of major delays in forensic testing.

I was first notified of potential capacity issues last year and, in October last year, I authorised urgent additional funding of £325,000. In late April this year, the Government was alerted to a significant number of cases that had not been processed in time for the Crown to take further action. I instructed my officials to urgently work with the Scottish Police Authority, Police Scotland and the Crown to assess the scale of the issue and determine what immediate and longer-term mitigations were needed. Further exceptional funding of £370,000 was released earlier this month and I fully support a commission from the SPA for Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland to undertake a formal review.

Three years ago, Humza Yousaf stage a public relations event alongside a police officer at which he said:

“The police are ready, they have the tools necessary and if you are caught there will be a zero-tolerance approach and you will face some hefty consequences.”

The police were indeed ready, except that we now discover that the tools were broken and that hundreds of drug drivers face no consequences for recklessly endangering others on our roads. We know that the Scottish National Party is great at announcements but not so good on delivery, so what is the cabinet secretary doing now to fix this and will he reconsider his planned police budget cuts, which risk making such failures more likely in future?

First, I mentioned the additional financing that is being provided to the SPA. That involves both a series of tranches of additional funds in terms of resources and additional capital expenditure. It is true, of course, that the estimates for how many cases there are likely to be were formulated by Police Scotland, the SPA and the Crown Office—people who are much more expert in this than me. I cannot do an estimate of how many cases there are likely to be. It is also true that the police, the SPA and the Crown Office will say that it has been an underestimate—there have been nearly double the number of tests done and people coming forward with positive tests. Those organisations are the experts; they do that. They are also independent—I do not know whether Russell Findlay accepts that fact. We will do the two things that are required of us. The first was to bring forward the legislative tools that they need to do that and to make Scotland a safer place, which they have done.

This is of course a serious error; the SPA has said that. It has a full meeting on Thursday to go over it in more detail. It has had the legislative tools to allow the police to make these stops and get people tested for drugs, which has made Scotland’s roads safer. However, they have to correct this, so we have also seen the commitment from the SPA to get HMICS to investigate what more can be done to make sure that this can be fixed now and into the future. That is the right thing to do.

In terms of the resources, the budget cut that Mr Findlay should have mentioned is the 5.2 per cent budget cut that we have had from his colleagues, the Tories at Westminster. Last year, the police had their resources budget protected and I am pretty sure that there were no amendments from the Tories seeking further budget for the police. We will see what happens this year.

I will not bother addressing the cabinet secretary’s creative accounting. However, three of the dropped cases involved someone being injured. Can the cabinet secretary explain whether those injured people have been told that their case was dropped? If not, will he commit to doing that? Can he provide Parliament with a detailed breakdown of each of the 386 cases, and, indeed, apologise to the victims and all law-abiding road users who have been endangered by this incompetence?

I note Russell Findlay’s point about incompetence. I do not have the full details of the three cases that he mentioned because that information is held by the Crown Office, but I know that, in one of the cases—and possibly the other two—the injury was self-inflicted and did not involve a collision with another vehicle. I am happy to provide more information about the figures—it has taken some time to get the definitive figures that I have already stated—as and when we get that from the SPA and the Crown Office. They are the only ones who will have information on the stage of the prosecution process that they are at, for reasons that I am sure that Russell Findlay is aware of. As I said, I am happy to provide that information when it comes forward.

There is no creative accounting: there has been a 5.2 per cent cut to this Government’s budget. However, despite that happening, we protected the police resource budget last year. In fact, in the past two or three years, we have given more to the police than was even asked for by the Conservatives, and we have more police officers per capita in this country and they are paid a higher salary than police officers in the rest of the UK.

It is welcome that the Scottish Government introduced drug driving limits and roadside testing in October 2019. However, we have heard that the demand for forensic testing has exceeded supply. Despite the budget constraints that the cabinet secretary alluded to earlier, what funding has the Scottish Government provided to the Scottish Police Authority to build testing and analysis capacity since the introduction of the new offence in 2019?

Overall, £1.9 million has been provided to the SPA since 2018-19 to assist it in delivering testing for the offence. That funding has been in addition to the core budget that the SPA has received to ensure the delivery of policing in Scotland.

The new offence required new forensic testing machines to be purchased by the SPA, and we provided capital funding totalling £572,000 for the machines. We have also provided more than £1.3 million in resource funding for outsourcing through three tranches of funding, including the £370,000 that I agreed to issue earlier this month.

Are other crimes beyond drug driving affected by the issue? I understand that, in November, the Government paid to outsource 30 per cent of testing to commercial forensic services, to allow about 900 drug driving cases to be dealt with. Is that a long-term solution or is it the plan to return to an in-house service?

The initial intention was to have an in-house service. I should have mentioned that part of the problem is that the in-house lab that Police Scotland uses suffered a flooding incident during the course of the pandemic, which has caused problems. The outsourcing that took place was in deliberate response to that, to ensure that we had the capacity in relation to that. Part of the investigation by HMICS and the work that we will do with the SPA will be to ensure that we plot out the way forward. The main objective will be to drive out the risk that such things happen again in the future.

As for Katy Clark’s question on other crimes, that is for the procurator fiscal’s office to answer.

I know that the cabinet secretary accepts that the buck stops with him, but it is disappointing that, in reporting the statistics, he did not take the opportunity to apologise to the public for what is a massive failure on the part of the whole system when it comes to prosecuting people who have been found to have driven under the influence of drugs.

I am not sure that there is a question for me to answer there, but I—of course—regret any instance where the opportunity to prosecute a case of drug driving has been lost as a result of the issues that have arisen with SPA forensics.

The whole point is to build on success, which is undoubtedly there, because more than 5,000 people have been stopped who would not have been stopped under the previous legislation. We want to ensure that every case that needs to be prosecuted is prosecuted.

This is not passing the buck, but the SPA, Police Scotland and the Crown Office are independent—I know that the Tories have a hard time getting their heads around that—and we want to ensure that they have all the tools that are necessary to prosecute every case that they have to.