Chamber and committees

The court custody and prisoner escorting in Scotland contract provides escorting services for prisoners aged 16 and above.

Prisoners are not handcuffed during journeys on cellular vehicles. Currently, all prisoners are handcuffed during embarkation and disembarkation.

The court custody and prisoner escorting in Scotland contract provides escorting services for prisoners aged 16 and above.

The following table sets out the number of hospital appointment escorts that have been undertaken over the past three financial years.

To ensure patient confidentiality, information on a prisoner’s medical condition is not routinely shared with the service provider. Only information that is specifically required for the health and safety of the prisoner and service provider would be shared.

Prisoners are not routinely handcuffed during transport on cellular vehicles.

The decision on handcuffing prisoners at hospital is a decision taken by G4S on the basis of an individual risk assessment.

I have asked Colin McConnell, Chief Executive of the Scottish Prison Service, to respond. His response is as follows:

The court custody and prisoner escorting in Scotland contract provides escorting services for prisoners aged 16 and above. This answer refers to this contract only.

All vehicles used for the provision of these services are fitted with seatbelts.

All prisons provide prisoners with the opportunity to exercise and spend time in the open air. Where a prisoner is attending court or a hospital appointment or outside the prison for any matter, this may impact on their ability to participate fully in the regime that is in place.

I have asked Colin McConnell, Chief Executive of the Scottish Prison Service (SPS), to respond. His response is as follows:

The court custody and prisoner escorting in Scotland contract provides escorting services for prisoners aged 16 and above.

This information is not available, as it is not required by SPS for the management of the contract. The contract records the number of movements for which the contractor has responsibility. It is also important to note that an individual may in the course of court proceedings be subject to multiple movements which cannot be accounted for in aggregated data.

Information is, however, available on the total number of movements. The following table shows the total number of movements undertaken by the contract service provider in the past three years broken down by age and gender where an adult is anyone over the age of 21 and young male/female refers to those aged between 16 and 20.

The court custody and prisoner escorting in Scotland contract makes clear that handcuffs should only be used if required. The current contract places the responsibility for risk assessments with the contractor to determine whether handcuffs should be used on an individual. Prisoners are not handcuffed during journeys on cellular vehicles. Currently, all prisoners are handcuffed during embarkation and disembarkation.

The contract includes escorting services for prisoners aged 16 and above.

This is a matter for Police Scotland, working in partnership with local government and communities across Scotland. In consultation with stakeholders, Police Scotland will renew their existing local multi-member ward plans and pilot a new approach in three local authority areas - Aberdeenshire, Dumfries and Galloway and Fife. The pilot is intended to make 'local community policing plans' better aligned to the existing local authority provision of services, scrutiny arrangements and community planning boundaries. Any alterations to multi-member ward plans are only if authority chooses to change the existing arrangements.

This pilot is being taken forward partly in response to a recommendation made by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland through their Local Policing+ pilot inspection programme.

The detail of the consultation exercise and timing are matters for Police Scotland

I have asked Colin McConnell, Chief Executive of the Scottish Prison Service (SPS), to respond. His response is as follows:

The court custody and prisoner escorting in Scotland (CCPES) contract provides escorting services for prisoners aged 16 and above. This answer refers to this contract only.

All escorts, other than transfer arrangements relating to community placements and home leaves, require a prisoner escort record (PER) to be completed. The PER records information to inform risk which is passed to the service provider to inform their risk assessment to undertake the escort at the time of transfer of responsibility.

SPS is not aware of any occasion when the required information was not made available.

I have asked Colin McConnell, Chief Executive of the Scottish Prison Service, to respond. His response is as follows:

The court custody and prisoner escorting in Scotland (CCPES) contract provides escorting services for prisoners aged 16 and above. This answer refers to this contract only.

The following table sets out the number of occasions where establishments have reported that hospital appointments have been delayed or cancelled due to problems relating to the CCPES contract.

The CCPES contract is a self-reporting contract with the service provider providing a business report on a monthly basis. This report identifies failures in performance where hospital appointments have been delayed or cancelled. The contract contains a variety of performance measures which are applied when the contract requirements are not met. Each of these delayed or cancelled appointments were reviewed by the escort monitor team to ensure that the relevant performance measures were applied.

The Drinking Water Quality Regulator (DWQR) has a role to supervise local authorities’ regulation of private water supplies, including the provision of technical guidance.

Since autumn 2013 DWQR has redesigned its website to improve the accessibility of technical and regulatory guidance. In this time, 15 technical guidance notes on specific parameters have been published as well as two guidance notes on treatment processes.