Fy gyd, wrth gwrs, ddim yn fawr i'r ddechrau ddechrau ddechrau i ddweudio i ddweudio 19th. Felly, mae'r gweithio allodau yma yn ystod i'r pannau yma o gyflawniwr cyflawniwr o ddweudio ddweudio'r prysgol â'r ddechrau'r ddweudio i ddweudio'r prysgol. Felly, rwy'n fawr i'n fawr i'r pannau o'r ddweudio i ddweudio hosgyn Lloror, of Policy Community Justice Scotland, Colin McConnell, chief executive of Scottish Prison Service, James Mayby, Highland Council, representing social work Scotland and Kate Wallace, chief executive of Victim Support Scotland. I refer members to paper 1, which is a public paper and paper 2, which is a private paper. I will kick off with a question to all the panelists. If they could comment on the resource implications of the current short-term custodial sentences and community sentences alternative, and in terms of the implication for the extension of a presumption against a 12-month sentence, so who would like to start with that? I'm happy to start. In terms of the resources, what we've done at Community Justice Scotland is we've actually done an analysis and some research that we've submitted with our evidence on the needs that people on current short-term sentences versus those who are on community sentences face. What that clearly shows is that those who are currently serving short-term sentences have more needs across a whole range of issues—housing, financial, mental health, etc. We know that, if pass was to happen, the resource implications for those people would be greater should they be in the community. That, in itself, is not to suggest that they shouldn't be given community sentences, but only that more resources will be required. We know that there are different resource implications for those serving community sentences. In terms of current community sentences, I don't have that information to hand, sorry. In terms of the current resources that are available just now for short-term sentences— I think that my colleague from Social Work Scotland, perhaps, could give us some more information on that. Mr Mabee. Thank you. Based on the Scottish Government officials' scenario planning, it is looking at a seven and a half per cent increase, potentially, in community payback orders if the presumption against short-term sentences has extended. That brings great challenges for community base services. Going back to when community payback orders were introduced in 2011 since then, I think that I am right in saying that the Scottish Prison Service had an increase in funding of about 8.9 per cent. For criminal justice social work, the core grant has remained static at £86.5 million per annum. If we were to get an extra 8.9 per cent, that would raise it by something like £7.6 million, £7.7 million. That is indicative of the fact that there has been resources in one part of the system, but a lack of injection of resources in the other part of the system. I was set out in the Social Work Scotland response that the Scottish Government has made some resources available to assist criminal justice social work to prepare for the presumption against short-term sentences. It is very much catch-up. A lot of those resources are going into trying to maintain the status quo rather than building new capacity. A number of authorities, and one or two who have submitted responses to the committee, are still receiving support from their local authorities in addition to the section 27 core grant for criminal justice social work. That is simply in order to sustain services at the current level. If I could maybe draw a footballing analogy, if you have only got 10 players, it does not matter how tactically astute you are or how brilliant you are as a manager, you will find it difficult. Your team might score a goal against the run-of-play, but the players will become tired, they will become demoralised, inevitably they will probably lose the game. That is very much a feeling in criminal justice social work that we are running to stand still at the moment in terms of the demands on the service and the complexity of the work that we are doing. The work that Community Justice Scotland has done very recently looking at that prison population up to 12 months and the anticipation that if some of those individuals do come on to community sentences, they will bring with them much more complex needs, particularly around mental health, for example, and other services. There is very much a ripple effect here. Yes, criminal justice social work needs to be resourced to do this, but so do a whole range of other agencies in the community. The ripple starts at the court stage when a report is made, but once somebody is on to an order, there is a whole range of statutory and third sector agencies who do require the resources to provide the input in the community and in particular make reference to the women's population in prison. It is quite a staggering figure that 90 per cent in 2017-18 of women receiving a costal dissentance were less than 12 months. That is a really interesting piece of information. If some of those individuals find their way on to community payback, which we would very much hope, they will bring them very complex issues. We know that women often have greater adverse childhood experiences, for example. They are often victims and domestic abuse, so we need to make sure that we have the resources to be able to deliver pass if it is extended. Other panel members? From victims' perspective, they want to have confidence in the criminal justice system and confidence that nobody else is going to be in the situation that they have found themselves in. That means putting enough resource behind community payback orders. We were very interested, for example, in Social Work Scotland's evidence, to say that those orders need to be heavily resourced from a social work point of view. They also need to be targeting the offending behaviour and the underlying causes of it, as community justice Scotland has said. For example, targeted programmes, a couple that spring to mind around stalking, for example. Susie Lampley Trust has found that, unless there are targeted interventions around that fixated and obsessive behaviour, anything that is done is unlikely to be successful in helping that perpetrator to stop re-offending. We would echo what has been said about resource and make sure that, if we go down the road, community payback orders are as well resourced as possible to be as effective as possible, otherwise re-offending will continue and victims will not have confidence in the justice system at all. There are a couple of points that have been made about SPS's resources, which I will address in due course. To respond to your overall questions at the starting point, I think that the resourcing of the system in general needs careful consideration. The churn of people who are given short sentences to under 12 months is considerable. The stock that I was checking before I left the office, which has 1,049 people in our care today, is the stock, but the churn on that is quite considerable. That takes up a lot of front-end resource through reception, through settling people into their period of custody. If you are looking at that from a value for money perspective, you seriously have to question that, because someone being your sentence to a relatively short period of custody, we would reasonably only expect them to serve half of that. While someone might get five or six months in custody in reality, they are serving about a few weeks. It is right that we reflect on whether that is value for money. That takes us into the overall effectiveness of short-term prison sentences compared to community payback orders or other sentences that might yet be developed or implemented in the community. From a custodial perspective, I would certainly welcome the scrutiny that is being applied. That has to be put in context, though the general upward trend of the numbers of people being sent to custody. That is a system that is designed and resourced for 7669. That is what we are designed and resourced for. This morning, we have 8,242 people living with us. That is the equivalent of a large prison—too many people living with us on a day-to-day basis. It is not enough resource to look at them. Forgive me, but I was slightly surprised at James's analysis of our financial situation. It is a matter of public record. If you look in the public domain at our corporate plan that has just been published, it actually records that, over the past five years, SPS has been subjected to either flat cash or, in fact, cash cuts. We need to, so that I can respond to that properly, separate out cash or running costs and that which is capital. It is the running cost side in particular of the custodial service that has been driven down year on year on year. We have to be careful and not be attracted to this notion that somehow we have a Scottish prison service that is absolutely awash with cash and that, only if we could take out a few hundred people, then there are millions and millions of pounds that can then be redirected to the community space. I go back to the point that I made initially. I think that the system needs properly reviewed so that funding gets put in place to support where the right solutions can be considered to be more effective. It should not be considered as a binary. It is either this or it is either that. I think that the system needs to be properly resourced as a whole. That is very helpful, setting the background or the scene for further questions. John, you have got a supplementary question. Thank you very much, convener. Good morning, panelers. It is a question for Mr Maybe. You mentioned a specific sum coming from the Scottish Government, as I understood, for criminal justice social work. Is that ring fenced exclusively for criminal justice social work? Is there a distinct budget within local authorities for that? Or if there are cuts, for want of a better phrase, to come? Do they come across the board in social work departments in each of the local authorities? The section 27 grants what it is usually referred to as ring fenced. The money goes to local authorities, is ring fenced and is protected only for criminal justice social work. However, it is fair to say that, given the pressures on local authorities in the broader sense, that does have an impact on criminal justice social work, in terms of all the other services that local authorities provide, be that housing, be that children and families social work, adult social work. We are not protected from that, but the money that we receive from the Scottish Government is ring fenced. I would just like to test and probe the logic of the proposition that we have in front of us. In some ways, it stems very much from what Colin McConnell just said. We have a cohort of people that seem to be, essentially, repeat customers of the Scottish Prison Service, with recidivism rates of around 50 per cent for short sentences. I was just wondering, first of all, if the panel would agree that that is in a nutshell what the issue is, or if there are other elements that we need to be considering in terms of the problem that we are seeking to solve here. If I could possibly respond, initially, I think that the evidence would suggest that those given a custodial sentence of under a year are reconvicted almost twice as much as somebody who is given a community payback order. There is an issue there in terms of matching the two populations that do not match up completely. I think that the academics and the research evidence would suggest that, if those individuals were put on community payback, they would be less likely to be re-offended and to be reconvicted. That is generally accepted within the criminal justice world. I do not know if my colleagues would agree or disagree with that. I would just add another figure, short custodial sentences of high reconviction rates, of those released from a custodial sentence of one year or less, 51 per cent are reconvicted within a year, 35 per cent are back in prison within a year. It does touch on Colin McConnell's point about resourcing. I was not suggesting for a moment that Scottish Prison Service are awash with cash. I do not think that they are. I was quoting a figure in the Howard League of Penal Reform's submission in respect of 8.9 per cent. I think that there is an issue about people going into prison for very short sentences, as has been outlined. With the best will in the world, the Scottish Prison Service cannot provide a full range of service to those individuals. I was sent by colleagues in SACRO a short clip from a TV report at the last couple of weeks on the presumption of short-term sentences. There was an individual who had been in and out of prison for nine or ten years. He was saying that, for the first time, he is now getting the support through SACRO, and he has made more progress in the eight or nine months that he has had that input in the community than in the whole time he was in prison. That is one individual, but I am not sure that he is alone in having that particular view. I want to highlight that the data that James is discussing is about reconviction. There is Social Work Scotland saying in its own written evidence that the evidence around re-offending and the impact on that from community payback orders is a lot more contested. It is not as straightforward. There is a difference between re-offending and reconviction. A very small number of people who are charged and arrested go on to be convicted. That is worth bearing in mind. It is by no means as straightforward as saying that community payback orders are absolutely reducing re-offending rates. The data does not support that at the moment. I think that there is an issue around the problems that we create by sending people to prison on short-term sentences, particularly in relation to home housing accommodation needs. We mentioned our evidence, the fact that people leaving prison are much more likely to have problems with finding accommodation. We are actually creating new problems for some people by taking them away from their employment, their tenancies, etc. We also highlighted the child poverty action group research in terms of people's legacy benefits under universal credit, whereby, if they go into prison, they lose their existing thresholds on that benefit. When they come out, they make a new claim and they are given the lower rate, so it makes a bad financial situation even worse for them. By sending people to prison for very short-term periods, we are actually creating a lot of additional social problems following the longer term. Indeed, I would certainly agree with all of what has been said. My position is that I do not believe that, in any way, those on the Shrevel bench are sort of knee-jerk into sending people to prison. I think that much of the proposal is crafted in the sense that it is a presumption against rather than a prohibition. I think that it is right that it is predominantly sheriffs that sheriffs are left unfettered but guided in terms of how their decisions affect the individuals that are in front of them. I was just checking this morning in terms of the presumption against sentences of three months or less. There are 55 people in our care today who are serving sentences of less than three months, so that gives us some insight into how that could play out in the future. That sheriffs may well decide for those who are in front of them that, for their reasons, that prison remains for them the appropriate—not the issue of last resort, but the appropriate decision—but we have to be absolutely clear that people coming into prison custody in Scotland for very, very short periods of time, there is little opportunity, effectively, to do anything that is in any way intended to change the criminogenics that lie behind why someone might be committing particular forms of offences. There just is not enough time to do that. And really what that short period has to simply focus on is the administrative process of taking someone into custody and, beyond that, stabilising them in terms of their condition and their situation for that very short period of time. Therefore, perhaps we shouldn't be overly surprised that when someone is sent to custody for a very short period of time, that offending behaviour does not really alter that much. On the other side, if I may just take another 60 seconds, I suppose that it takes us into the realms of what the sentence is for and how much of that is deterrence, how much of it is about rehabilitation and how much of it is aimed, ostensibly, to punish. It might well be, and I don't know because I don't sit on the shrivel benches, that there may well just simply be an intention, a well intended, that a short sentence is simply an indication or a way to punish someone for a wrong done, but because of the short period of time, there's little in the way of reformative engagement that can take place. I think that the points that you've just made there, Mr McConnell, are particularly relevant. I broadly agree with the analysis that we need to do something about reducing the number at the cohort of people who just seem to be in the revolving door. I also agree with the question of the assumption of whether or not prison is the right or the best place to deal with those people. However, I worry that, perhaps, that essentially drawing an arbitrary time limit does not really look at the underlying causes, especially if you look at some jurisdictions such as Norway, which takes a progressive approach. Its typical sentence is three to six months, and if you look at what you just said there, we don't have enough time, I would question whether, if someone is in your care for two or three months, is it the fact that that's not enough time, or is it rather that there are insufficient resources to engage with that person adequately? When we know that you direct more of your resources towards long-term prisoners rather than medium and short-term prisoners, that's just a fact. I wonder whether or not really what we should be looking at is what people do when they're in prison and making sure that that's as effective as possible rather than looking at an arbitrary time limit. I'm slightly playing devil's advocate here, but have we put the cart before the horse and looking at a time base rather than the effectiveness of what actually occurs when people are incarcerated? That's a hard logic to unpick or to argue against. I think that it is, regardless of which jurisdiction we consider, certainly in the UK, and as you know, I've worked in all three UK jurisdictions. My observations and my experience would remain consistent across those three jurisdictions. It's incredibly difficult to engage transformatively with someone over a number of weeks, as opposed to many, many months off of that matter years, in terms of building trust, other more informed cognitive programmes, for example, having time to influence and have effect on all those things to take time. However, if I may respond directly to your challenge about resources, it would seem entirely consistent in terms of what you've put forward. We're a system this morning with 8,242 people living with us. The resource base for the system is 7669. I agree with your analysis that, in that context, it is extraordinarily difficult to focus progressively on 8,200 people at a time when 1,000 of them are with us but a matter of weeks. I would just like to put one final question to Laura Hoskinson. I think that Cymru will just Scotland have set out well what the alternative is. The alternative is available to sentences right now. If we work on the assumption that sentences don't like people returning to their courtroom, the question then is why aren't they using those alternatives now? Are sentences, in effect, over-reliant on prison sentences? Is there something else going on in terms of those alternatives available to them? I can't speak for the judiciary in terms of how they make their decisions, but it has been said that sentences and victims need confidence in a robust community provision and that the issue may be one of the lack of confidence on what is available locally. I think that SACRO mentioned in its submission the issue around the very short-term funding cycles for support for third sector agencies in particular to deliver good community provision on the ground. Again, we get back into the discussion around resources. I think that we need to make the community provision more robust. I think that looking at a slightly longer funding circle, cycles would be a really good start. I think that we would potentially see a shift. It is really interesting in some parts of the country. I think that Clats Council mentioned its submission allo a sheriff court. There is almost a de facto 12-month pass in operation. Very, very few cases do not go to the community. I think that there are different behaviours around the country. There are also some really good examples of structured deferred sentences working in Lanarkshire court. There are good models around, but we probably need to invest more in them, so we are picking up again on that resourcing issue. That is not necessarily just for criminal justice social work. It could be for the third sector and not just even in the justice field, but maybe in the broader housing, mental health and other areas as well. I think that I should pass on to a colleague at this point. A supplementary on your own question, Fulton, and then Liam Kerr. I think that you have a supplementary. Good morning, panel. It was a quite specific question on the back of Daniel Johnson's line of questioning. He probably picks up a wee bit on the structured deferred sentence that you were talking about there, Laura Hawkins. I wonder if the panel could comment on the direct interplay between community payback orders and short-term sentences. For example, if perhaps somebody is on a community payback order, and I believe that that is not to be too uncommon, the example that I am giving, somebody is on a community payback order, and then they are later given a short-term custodial sentence for a completely unrelated matter. Would you be able to comment on that perhaps yourself, Lauren? In James Mayby? That is a fact that you respond. Certainly, on occasions, people do go into prison and come back out and they are still subject to the same community payback order. That certainly does happen. I cannot comment right here, right now, on how widely that happens. I suspect that it is not that wide, but I would need to go in and check that one out. I think that there probably is a need for more research on reasons for non-compliance with CPOs, because there is that kind of suggestion that, eventually, a short-term sentence is the answer to the repeat attendance at court. However, we probably need to do some more research on the reasons for non-compliance. I probably did not put that question particularly well if I could reframe it in another type of example. If perhaps somebody is doing really well on a community payback order, but they are in court for a totally separate matter, I was more wondering about the interplay between that. The impact, basically, on community payback orders of short-term sentences when somebody is already serving a community payback order? I think that, clearly, if somebody is on a community payback order and they have established a good relationship with a social worker and they are engaging in work, and then they find themselves in prison, clearly that would interrupt that course of work. One of the things that we do know from academics is that one of the really important things in terms of making a difference with people is that relationship that the individual has with their social worker. Again, picking up the short-term sentences, Scottish Prison Service staff do not have an opportunity to develop that longer-term relationship. Any interruption to that can be problematic and potentially be a backward step. I think that the issue of non-compliance is a relevant one. I suspect that it is something that sheriffs struggle with if they are getting the same individual back time and time again. Non-compliance can be willful or it can be quite complex in terms of why somebody is not turning up for an appointment or engaging as well as they could be. It could be because they have a whole range of issues that they are trying to deal with—mental health, homelessness, housing, benefits, et cetera, et cetera. We need to think about how we work better to support individuals who are struggling. There is a commitment there. They want to engage, they want to change, they want to move forward with their lives, but they actually need quite intensive work. A number of areas, Glasgow being one, for example, have a persistent defenders project. We do in Highland. Often individuals engage with that. They have multiple convictions. Often they are not engaged with services, they are not on statutory supervision, but they are getting the intensive input of people who can see them several times a week to engage with them, get them linked into services and re-engage with what is going on in their community. I think that we need to give some thought to that. Particularly if pass does go ahead and the extension is taken up to 12 months, we are likely to get people who are going to need that kind of input to help with the community payback. We know through services for prisoners coming out on release, through SHINE, for example, through SACRO, through new routes through Action for Children, who are providing really good high-quality mentoring services that that can make a difference to somebody walking through a prison gate. We need to think about that from somebody walking from a court, that they are getting that really intensive support. At the moment, victims do not get any information at all about what has happened with a perpetrator where there has been a community payback order given. Even a victim knowing that someone has successfully engaged with a community payback order and has successfully completed it, I think that we tailp on the point about having confidence in the justice system and having an understanding about what has happened to them is not going to happen to anybody else. Again, I agree with everything that has been said by the other panel members. I think that what is coming out here is that, in some sense, it challenges the raw financial comparisons between the cost of a short-term prison sentence and the cost of keeping someone in the community. I think that it would be wrong for the committee, or more generally, to think that by keeping people in the community, that somehow is going to be a cheap option, or a cheap air option. I fundamentally challenge that from everything that has been said. It would seem that, if indeed that becomes part of our justice infrastructure—and I certainly hope that it does—it will require substantial financial and other resources, skills and competencies across the system, whether it is in the statutory services or, for that matter, in the third and voluntary sector. Over time, I think that that will cause us to spend a lot more on the justice system, perhaps not a lot less. It is important that, again, we do not see that as some way of reducing the cost of the system because, quite clearly, it will require significant investment over a sustained period of time. Just to come back on that point, I think that it is a really important one. It is almost a spend to save here. If you look at the evaluation that was done of the Glasgow Persistent Offenders project in the 2000s and also the evaluation that we have done locally in Highland of our project, we are able to demonstrate significant cost savings to the justice sector system. That is a really important point to make. Yes, there might well be very high up-front costs to do this properly, but if we do further down the line, we will be able to recoup that cost, I think. I think that that is a really important point. I appreciate that that will be my only line of questioning. Based on what has been said there about the investment that is needed in community resources to make it work, rather than looking at it as advantages of community sentences over short custodial sentences, rather than looking at it in that line, does the panel think that the introduction of the presumption against short custodial sentences could, in the wider scheme of things, enhance the effectiveness of community payback orders? Who would like to answer that? If resources are, as you have mentioned. Outcomes for the individual would be better. If the resources are there, I think that there would be benefit for victims as well, because what we are all trying to achieve is to stop people from re-offending or being reconvicted and causing harm. Certainly, social work Scotland is very much of the view that prison should be—there is a place for prison in the sentencing framework, of course, there is, but it should be restricted for those who are causing serious offences who are at the highest risk of causing serious harm. I think that I am right in saying that 80 per cent of people get 12 months or less in terms of the sentence they get in court, so we can make a real difference with that group, I think, if we have the resources and the synergy between the various parts of the system. My colleague mentioned diversion and structured deferred sentences, and I do not think that we should forget those, because they are a potential implication as well. If ffiscals are making different decisions, if sheriffs are making different decisions in court, that again may be a cost implication, a resource implication for services in the community. Just to say from a victim's perspective, a couple of things. One of them is about the safety of the public and the safety about victims. I think that your point that you made about the effectiveness of a criminal justice system overall is obviously what victims are looking for. It is not just about resources in terms of community pay back orders but about the effectiveness of those. The targeted nature, as I mentioned earlier on, is about tackling some of the offending behaviour. To highlight that, we are already, for some types of offences in some situations, we are already using community pay back orders where there have been pretty serious offences being committed, some resulting in death and some resulting in quite serious injury. For example, the Scottish campaign against irresponsible driving in their evidence to you talked about a case study of an unlicensed driver who played guilty to causing death of three teenagers while careless driving. He was given 300 hours of a community sentence. Just in the context of what you have described around an effective justice system in the whole, we need to remember about the safety of victims and about the effectiveness of interventions in the whole to reduce offending. There are some victim organisations who are calling for the presumption against short sentences only to be used where there has been no either physical or psychological harm to a victim because of those reasons that I have just illustrated. Supplementary Liam Kerr and then we are moving on to Rona. Thank you convener. I would like to go back to Daniel Johnson's line of questioning to Mr McConnell, if I may. Mr McConnell made some good points in there about the stabilisation at the start or the challenges around stabilisation. Given that I think that the last statistic said that 60 per cent of drug treatment testing orders out in the community are not completed, may I have your thoughts on the argument that actually a short period in your care gives an opportunity for some very targeted, very effective work to be done with perhaps the chaotic population that I think you alluded to? Indeed, I think that if I may relate the answer back to the discussion that we had about resourcing, it simply cannot be an either or. I think that the proposal as it is currently crafted does leave sheriffs with the option to send someone to custody for a short period of time so long as a sheriff has good reason to do that and those reasons are explained. I think that whether it is a fashionable reality or not, prison can be, in some circumstances and for some people, a place of safety, particularly for those who are leading just fantastically chaotic lives, who may well be without an abode, not registered with a GP and so on and so forth. Again, whether it is fashionable or comfortable or not, prison for all its foibles and weaknesses, a prison space for a period of time, can bring with it stability in terms of somewhere warm and dry to sleep, three meals a day, medical attention and so on and so forth. I still make the point, however, that that reality, even in itself, begins to lose much of its attraction or its effectiveness if the period is particularly short and placing someone with us for a couple of weeks or so. Even in that regard, I think, is a wee bit on the negative side. However, I think that the point that you make is absolutely right for some people. That could persuasively be the right thing to do. Broadly, I think that the discussion that has been had around here is the right one, which is that there are far more positives in terms of trying to keep people out of custody in a well-resourced and well-structured community setting. I think that that is important. I think that you make good points on that. I would just like to stay on that short period, but I take your point about the very short period, the two weeks or whatever. Daniel Johnson talked again about using the short period productively. I am right in saying that the purposeful activity that goes on in prisons is currently at a very low level. I think that it is its lowest since about 2010-2011. I would be interested to know if that is a resourcing issue, if that is a decision that has been taken, and if so, is it about putting more resources in? However, I go back to the point that I think that Daniel Johnson was getting at, that there is not a window where, if we put in purposeful activity even for, not a terrifically short sentence, but a short sentence, that that actually has a value that perhaps a CPO cannot deliver. I think that that is a hard one for me to call. I am not sure necessarily where we are comparing apples with apples there. I can answer for the custodial space. The prison setting, as all the committee members will know, is a really complex interplay of a whole range of issues. We have 8,242 individuals living with us today, and each one of them would benefit from a highly specialised, highly individualised service provision. That is the ideal, but it is not always possible when you are trying to look after that many people. I think that it goes back to the fact that we have a prison system. This is not just Scotland, I would say, the same for the rest of the UK, which fundamentally is still born out of the Victorian era, which essentially was about calm, quiet incarceration. Contemplation and reflectiveness. As a modern era has built on that, we have introduced education, we have introduced works and skills, but those have been add-ons to what is still fundamentally a system based on accommodation. We have limited opportunities to provide full employment, full education or full wraparound service. We are much better at it, and you would expect me to say that, wouldn't you? Scotland is ahead of the game, as far as the UK is concerned. I have worked in all three jurisdictions, but we have to be realistic about the capacity of the prison service to be everything to everybody. It simply cannot be, and fundamentally it is still based on safe accommodation. Before my main question, I just wanted to go back to something that Mr McConnell said, and it was about the drop in number of people being receiving sentences of three months or less. There is evidence of some up-tariffing, so some are getting four or five or six, so would you agree that the presumption against 12 months would mitigate that? That is a hard one to call. Justice Analytical Services has done some analysis that I believe that the committee has already got the data on that in terms of what the likely or the potential impact of presumption against sentences of less than 12 months is. It is set out here in 10, 20 or 50 per cent. The evidence based on presumption against three months sentences, in itself, is compelling. I think that there is reason to leave the judiciary unshackled on that basis and then be trusted in the sense that they must be free to make decisions based on the individual that they have before them. On that basis, even with the presumption against in place, I have every expectation that we will still have people living with us in the future who are serving sentences of less than 12 months. I would like to move on to the subject of the number of women being imprisoned. Mr Mayby gave the shocking statistic of 90 per cent of women serving sentences of 12 months or less. Seven in 10 of those women are victims of domestic abuse. 65 per cent are mothers. Those statistics are incredibly alarming. We know that £1.5 million has been put into women's funding and women's services. In my view, there could never be enough money put into that to cover all needs, but my question is, is some of it down to organisational lack of joined-up organisations such as housing, the benefits system, the NHS, getting together to have a programme in place that would not necessarily be resource intensive, but just to make it easier for women not to have to be in prison or if they are in prison when they come out to have things put in place so that they would not re-offend. It would be the revolving door that we are used to. I think that it is a massive problem and we should not be doing it. Can you ask Laura Yw for you? Certainly the figures that you quote are ones that we are all familiar with and they are indeed shocking. There may be examples of good practice from places such as Northern Ireland where they have enhanced combination orders, where, as part of their overall problem-solving approach to justice, they focus on rehabilitation, reparation, restorative justice and assistance. Those are more expensive than CPOs, but they are less expensive than sending someone into prison, particularly as we know the outcomes are not so good. I think that the echoing Colin McConnell's earlier point about perhaps looking at the system and its entirety, there are other things that we could maybe think of doing and investing in. Can I ask you how long that system has been in place in Northern Ireland? Since 2015, I think, in Northern Ireland. That's right, because it's relatively new. Anyone else, Mr Meeby? Yes, I'm sure that members will recall the commission on women offenders that was led by Dame Eilish Angelini, which was a very influential report and very wide-reaching in terms of what's required to work with women who have offended. Certainly across the local authority landscape, that's very much become the template in terms of how we structure services for women and it is very much about trying to create seamless services—one-stop shops—to draw in all the agencies' services that are available so that women aren't going from place to place. Sometimes that can be done physically by bringing people together in one space, sometimes that's not possible simply because of the infrastructure around, but it is about linking people in so that people aren't telling the same story twice and it is very much about bringing services together. I think that that's a journey. I wouldn't claim that we've reached the end point of that. We still have the same number of women in prison as there was 10 years ago. There's something missing, isn't there? I hear what you're saying, but there's something not working when there's still that amount of women being receiving custodial sentences. Community justice is obviously still irrativally in its infancy in terms of community justice Scotland and the arrangements of community justice. That is very much about bringing all the players and the justice system together locally within local areas. Again, we're a partway through that journey in terms of people bringing their knowledge, skills and experience, looking at what the gaps are in the criminal justice system, how do we resource and fill those gaps collectively, and it's not just about criminal justice social work or Police Scotland or the Scottish Prison Service or third sector agencies about what we can collectively do. That's a very challenging agenda. We're only a couple of years into that, and we need to give that time to breathe and to develop and build that trust and confidence locally. That applies to working with women and, of course, to men as well. It's a good concept, it's a good model, but we need to go further in terms of actually really sharing resources in a true sense amongst partner agencies. Presumably, the presumption against 12 months or less would help that figure if 90 per cent of women are in for 12 months or less once the presumption against that would imagine that that wouldn't happen quite as much being optimistic about it. Being optimistic is clearly a matter for sentences. I would make the point that the point of sentence, a sheriff or a needed judge has a significant amount of information before them. They can't make a community payback order unless they have a criminal justice social report. That report contains a wealth of information regarding the offence and previous offending, assessing risk and need, using accredited tools, both for general offending and specific tools, for example for domestic abuse, the spousal assault risk assessment tool, for sex offenders. All that information is laid out to the sentencer to help inform them. It's particularly important that, from a victim's perspective, that report will contain information about who is at risk, what's the seriousness if that offending was to happen again, the likelihood of that impact. We need to go further. We need more information at the point of sentence. We often need to be reliant on what the offender tells the social worker, and that's not, frankly, good enough. We need to get objective information about what somebody has done. Some people, of course, are honest and will be upfront about what they've done and the impact, but some won't, and that's just a fact of life. I would like to see social workers getting that information, getting what we call summaries of evidence in all cases, to give us that holistic information about what somebody has done, so that we can really analyse offending, really analyse the potential risks to victims, and put forward proposals to the court that are credible. It does happen that a sheriff will read a report and say that this is just not credible because the offender hasn't been honest about what they've done, and we need to fill that gap. We have three panels today. We're working to a very tight schedule at timescale, and we've already overrun. We will have to include this session by 11th Sukhuras, the following questions from members and the responses from the panel to be as succinct as possible. Liam McArthur, followed by Shona then, Jenny. Thank you very much. Good morning. We've touched on some of this, but I'd be interested to know the panel's assessment of what the impact of that presumption against three months sentences has been. We heard from Rona Mackay about some concerns about up-tariffing. We've also seen a reduction in the figures, but that predates the introduction of the presumption and linking that to what the expectation would be of extending that presumption to 12 months, given what we know about what has happened since 2011. In terms of the custodial population, I think that this information has already been shared with the panel. For example, this morning there were 1,049 people in our care, seven sentences up to 12 months. If we use the justice analysis formula on the basis of the decremental effect of that presumption, a 50 per cent take-up, if you like, by the sheriffs could, over time, have 525 or so fewer people in our care. However, the figure that justice analytics are settling on at the moment, which is based on the evidence around the presumption against three months, is around 20 per cent. Over time, and again, it's considering the difference between stock and term. Whilst over time it could see something in excess of 1,000 fewer people passing through prison in any given year, it will actually only reduce the stock of people serving a sentence by about 200 on any given day. Potentially, we could still see a significant number of people in our care serving sentences of less than 12 months. However, if I may offer the view, I think that that could well be appropriate if we are not going to shackle the judiciary and allow them to make decisions for what they believe is the right decision for that individual in front of them. I'm trying others as well, but I think that Kate Wallace-U earlier was suggesting concerns of some victims groups about certain types of offences falling within that broad presumption. Is that a concern that's shared more widely across the panel within the sector? If it could be as succinct as possible, that would be appreciated. The position would be that we think that this is a matter for the sentence, so we wouldn't be proposing or suggesting that it's restricted to certain offences. Just taking that a little bit further, the 20 per cent assumption on reduction of custodial sentences that we can take from the three months—I think that it was yourself, Laura Hoskin, said earlier on that the huge variation in sentences—I think that you mentioned Allawer as being a court where they have less short sentences. I guess my question would be why is there such a variation? In what is driving that, obviously we all support the—I think that it was yourself, Colin McConnell, who said—unfettered but guided policy, but clearly even within that there's nothing particularly different about Allawer and the population that it serves, so there's something driving different custodial decisions even within the same policy. I'd be interested just briefly to hear what you think that is. The independence of the judiciary, the fact that in the evidence from Clats Council where they actually mentioned the Allawer sheriff court, it picks up on an early point that I think Colin McConnell made or maybe James actually around relationships. Obviously, in a small area, you're possibly potentially more likely to know the people that are coming up in front of you. I don't know, but that's probably a more appropriate question for sheriffs. I think that we have to recognise their independence and make those decisions. We all do, but I think that in order for a policy to be successful, we need to understand why it's more successful in some areas than others. It would be helpful perhaps also to get the figures for each court, which I think we should do, but those sound like quite soft issues. It's about maybe trust, relationships, trust in the alternatives. Is that your educated guess of what would be going on there? I think that again as before, it's a range of issues. I think that it's about the independence of the shrivel benches. I think that it's about, in different locations, the availability of alternatives and the perception of how effective those alternatives are. It's about sheriffs having the information to hand, both about the individual and about the alternatives. The sheriffs' job is to match that up in terms of what's the best disposal. I don't think that it's a common picture across the landscape. I think that it's quite diffused. That's my informed position on it. It's not just about sheriffs acting independently, although they do. I think that the variations in provision and information that's available also influence that. Finally, the success, as we've heard, albeit some of those variations, is the success of the three-month policy. Has that been of interest to other parts of the UK, given the direction of travel? I think that it might be particularly Colin McConnell, whether you've had any visitations from ministers or officials from other parts of the UK, or further a field to look at the success of the three-month policy? Yes, very much so. There has been, in the past, an interest from England Wales in terms of Scotland's position, both the journey towards the presumption—of course, England Wales appears to be taking a different approach—but certainly the journey towards the presumption, as well as, more broadly, how that relates to the delivery of services in our world in the custodial space. We have been seen as leading the way, as far as considering what court disposals might be, but in the context of the impact for the individual. That's what we should all be concerned about—getting the right impact for the individual. I would certainly echo that. I make reference in the social work Scotland response to a report made in 2019 on what could England and Wales learn from Scotland's approach to justice. Other jurisdictions are very much looking at what's going on in Scotland, looking at the good practice, learning from that and evaluating it. That says something very positive about the criminal justice system in Scotland. I will be brief, convener. I would like to speak to Kate Wallace, particularly if I may, just three questions for you. First of all, I am sticking on the CPO side of things. You talked several times earlier on about victims and the public's confidence in the system. I understand that one in three of the CPO's are currently not completed. Do you think that, if there are more people coming into that system, that statistic is likely to get worse? How will that play with victims in the public? I think that it's the point about resourcing, isn't it, and about having effective interventions and effective community payback orders. Unlike social work Scotland, we are concerned about ensuring that there are enough resources around community payback orders to make sure that they are as effective as possible, and transparency. I find that area very opaque and difficult to get information out about breaches, about community payback orders. There are things that go on for victims and support that is provided to them within the criminal justice system, where a custodial sentence has been given that there is not in community payback orders, where perhaps we could look at that. Information about whether somebody is engaging or not, information about whether or not somebody has breached an order, and information about whether or not they have successfully completed one, I think, would help to address some of the public safety concerns and some of the victim's concerns. I'm grateful, I think that that's an excellent point. VSS victim support said in February that custodial sentences provide victims of domestic abuse with some breathing space, and you make a similar point in the submission. Can you help the committee to understand what safeguards are in place currently for victims of domestic abuse if the abuser gets a community disposal? What I'm concerned about is that is there a danger that people just go back to the homes that they came from? The time and the presumption against short sentences was designed to coincide with the new domestic abuse act in Scotland around coercion of control and around non-harassment orders and stuff like that, to provide some protection to address some of those issues. That, in terms of timing, the new domestic abuse act should potentially assist with that. Finally, for me, you say in your submission that the current presumption, so the three months presumption that we looked at, is inadequate in terms of its protections for victims and witnesses. Do you take a view on if the current presumption is inadequate? Shouldn't this whole process be put on hold until we are absolutely certain that sufficient protections are in place? That relates back to my earlier point about information for victims, about more transparency and around the more resources that has been put into community payback orders to ensure that they work effectively. Without that, we are potentially going into a situation where Scotland is taking quite a bold step. However, as Collin and others have rightly pointed out, if the resources around community payback orders are not put in place, we could be monitoring this very carefully as people will and look back in a year or two's time and see that the effectiveness has not been what we had expected. For me, there are a number of things that could be put in place around increased transparency and information to victims to support and help them to understand what is actually going on around community payback orders, the level of compliance or not, that type of thing. As I said earlier on, I am conscious of your time. Can I thank the panel for your evidence and especially for the written evidence that the committee finds particularly helpful? We will now suspend for two minutes to allow for a change of witnesses. I am pleased to welcome our second panel, Dr Katrina Morrison, board member of the High League Scotland, Dr Sarah Amstone, Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research University of Glasgow and Professor Cyrus Tata, director of the Centre for Law, Crime and Justice University of Strathclyde. Can I perhaps begin by asking the panel about the resource implications currently for short-term custodial sentences and the alternative community service orders, and how that will play to the extension of a presumption of 12 months? The extension of the presumption cannot be supported in order because it is going to save money. That is not a reason for supporting the presumption. We support the extension of the presumption but not as a cost-saving exercise. It will require significant resources in order to make it work, as has been outlined by the earlier panel. In order for community alternatives to be regarded as credible and legitimate statutory and third sector organisations must be adequately funded. I would also like to say that it is not just about funding for criminal justice services. We also need to be thinking about adequate and robust resourcing beyond the criminal justice system, so we need to be thinking about services for mental health, addiction, housing, employment and so forth. If those services are not adequately funded, we are setting people up to fail. That runs the risk of people being sent to custody in order to access those services, which is also inappropriate. The point was made earlier that, in the long term, that could result in a saving of money, but that will not be the case if it is going to work well, certainly initially. I agree very much with what Dr Morrison said. It would be overly simplistic to try to look at it as the comparative cost of community sentences versus prison. There is a lot more cost to be thinking about it. I do not want to repeat anything that she said, but I will point out that my speculation is that there would be increased cost associated with that. Although Colin McConnell suggested that there would be 500 fewer people in prison, a number that I am not so sure about, but if that was the case, I have not heard him say that he would close a prison of 500 beds and, without the closure of a prison of that size, you are still going to incur a significant cost associated with prison. In terms of the community sentence side of it, there are costs associated with community sentences, which is not just to include the running of them, but managing the breach. One of the points that I raised in my written submission of evidence to this committee was that community sentences are themselves a driver of prison population growth. That needs to be modelled and analysed by an economist, probably. You raised an excellent question, chair, about resources, and I think that that gets to the heart of the matter. We talk about this proposal as something bold and radical. Actually, if you look at the formulation of it in section 17, it is really a rehash of what we have been trying to do for the past 30 to 40 years, which is to say that it does not use the language here in the legislation in the 2010 act, but ministers have talked about this again, which is to say that basically prison is a last resort. Do not pass a custodial sentence unless you think it is appropriate. Who passes a sentence that they think would be inappropriate? Who does anything in life that they think is a serious decision that they think is inappropriate? My first point is that I am less sure that this proposal is going to change a huge amount. In fact, we can easily end up with a polarised debate around, and I understand absolutely the concerns of victims groups and so on around that. I see the point of that. Given how permissive the legislation is, I am not sure that we will see that much of a difference. In fact, the Government's own research published in 2015 said that there was little sign of the presumption of figuring prominently or explicitly in decision making and so on. It really made the point that, again, it is not in itself going to make a difference. The problem is the one that you identify, which is that there is a group of people who are serving short custodial prison sentences by instalments—almost life sentences by instalments. Everybody pretty much agrees that many of these people are non-dangerous and should not be going to prison at all. Do not pose a threat other than often to themselves. They end up going to prison and it is wrong to blame the sentences. It is too easy to blame sentences or individual, professional social workers sentences and so on. They end up going to prison because it appears that no one else wants them. Their lives seem to be so chaotic. Their homeless addiction problems, physical health, mental health—these problems are so chronic that often a sheriff will say, what else can I do? Nobody else wants them, and I do not think that it is fair in general terms to blame the sheriffs. They are left with an apparent discretion, which is a kind of hollow virality symbol, because they are not equipped to do what they would like to do, which is to make—they know most of them very well—that prison is not the right place for people whose needs are often greater than their offending, far greater. They have committed minor offences, but they do not show up for appointments and all the rest of it, so the sheriff says, what else can I do? That is the group that we can get a consensus around. We should be targeting and we should be thinking about that. Unless there is a plan to ensure that there is a major change of resourcing around just what you say, not just community justice, but also community services more generally, because often community services will say, we cannot deal with this person. It is too difficult. We end up using prison. What are we doing? We are using the resource of prison essentially in the same way that the Victorians did. We use it as a poor house. We use it as the last line in the welfare state. That is a societal issue. It is not fair to point the finger at individual professionals and it need not be a party political issue. My proposal is that we—I will set it out briefly—have a principle stating who should not or what cases should not normally be imprisoned and that we have a date by which we ensure that there is a transfer of resources. Unless you have that transfer, I do not think this presumption proposal—whether it is 12 months or whatever—is not going to make much difference.  It is the last resort. Prison becomes the default when nothing else seems to be there. Prison never has to prove itself. Everything else has to prove itself. I would like this committee to consider—obviously, we have an issue here—it may well go through. In a sense, I think that the much bigger issue for us is to have some vision. If we want Scotland to be as the successive justice secretaries have said one of the most progressive in Europe, then we need a vision to say that by 2040 or such a year give ourselves a target, we are going to stop using prison as a place, essentially, to access services. I heard what Colonel Macdonald said and he is doing the right thing as the director and chief executive of the SPS. However, we need to think as a society. Is that what we should be doing? Should we really be locking people up because of their needs and poverty-related needs? It does not even make financial sense, sorry. That is pretty comprehensive, and members will be going into that in some detail. Jenny. Professor Tassas touched upon my line of questioning. I looked at Dr Morrison at your written submission. You pointed to Scotland having one of the highest prison rates in Western Europe, and six months ago, nine out of Scotland's 15 prisons were at or above capacity in April 2019. HMP Barlinnie was operating at 142 per cent capacity. Obviously, in the previous panel, we heard from Colin Macdonald about the current numbers in our prison population. Why does the panel think that we still have such an attachment to imprisonment more generally in Scotland in 2019? That is a very interesting question. It has deep cultural and structural roots. It is very easy to say that we need to change the sentencing legislation around this in order to reduce the prison population, but there is a cultural context in which all of this is sustained and legitimised. That also needs to be addressed. We can think about top-down approaches and policy changes and whatnot, but we really need to have a deeper conversation about what punishment is and what it is not in order for a real reduction in the use of imprisonment to be sustained. You have probably read the recent Scottish Crime and Justice survey that showed that three quarters of the Scottish population say that they know nothing or nearly nothing about the criminal justice system. In that context, it is easy to have populist reactions against offenders walking free from court if they are subject to community sentence instead of a sentence of imprisonment. We need to have a much deeper conversation involving everybody and civil society about what punishment is and is not, but there is also a bigger and echoing what has been said before that the solutions to this problem lie beyond the criminal justice system. Those are really big structural problems relating essentially to questions of social inequality and social justice. If you look across the world at countries that have got higher rates of imprisonment, there is a very strong relationship there with questions of social inequality. We need to be looking beyond the criminal justice system as well. Again, I think that Dr Morrison has summed up the situation quite well. That is the profound question that we would all like to have an answer to. Scotland's imprisonment rate means that, comparatively, if it were a state in the United States, it would be Texas or Louisiana, which makes no sense because unlike Texas or Louisiana, the social welfare policies and commitment in Scotland is quite the opposite. This is the paradox that people like me, scholars of punishment in Scotland are struggling with, is how a country that is so committed to social welfare investment is also making such huge use of an incredibly expensive resources prison. My own sense is that there is a combination partly of a conservatism with a lower case C, a sense of moving change at a particular pace, in combination, ironically, with a very progressive spirit of wanting to do something to improve the situation. I think sometimes we believe within the criminal justice sector and within criminology that we can solve the problems if we just do something differently. If we add a new reform, we add a new sentence, we come up with a new idea, we create a new agency, we create a new workforce, that we can solve this problem, that more people working on this problem will mean better results. We've seen the result of that has been only expansion of the criminal justice system following reform of bail and remand, the remand population increase. Following successive reform reviews of the number of women in prison, the number of women in prison has increased or remained stable, certainly not gone decreased by the three times what Angelini was looking for. Every time we try to come up with solutions within the criminal justice sector, we also come up with ourselves as the answer, there's a criminal justice solution to a social welfare problem. I'm a criminologist and I am not qualified to offer advice about cancer care or the curriculum for excellence, but increasingly we're asking the criminal justice system to come up with solutions for people whose problems lie in substance abuse, in housing, in jobs and other kinds of settings than we are qualified to act on. I think the question about why is prison so central in our kind of cultural imagination is a really good one. I think the point about welfare as an excellent one that in a sense we so easily use prison as actually kind of penal welfareism, that the idea that because nothing else out there seems to be good enough or seems to work for people prisons the last line of the welfare state, that's what we're doing, we're using it as the poor house for many people. I have no problem with people who have committed serious offences who need to be there, they need to be there, that's enough, but people whose offending is not serious and we wouldn't normally want to send to custody end up in prison because it seems like a place of sanctuary, it seems like a kind of a place that will help people, it's the old idea of using an institution to help, it's a Victorian idea, we'll use an institution to help people. Again, I don't blame individual practitioners for the dilemma they face, but as a society we need to have much greater clarity of vision about what we're trying to do. We need to say that in next year's time set ourselves a target date we will not use prison as a place of welfare, nobody should go to prison unless their offending demands it. Then when they're in prison, SPS can do the great rehabilitative work that they should and they want to do with people, but that churn shouldn't be happening, people shouldn't be sent to prison essentially, and I don't blame, as I say, I don't blame practitioners, sheriffs and so on for that, but we're using that really as the last line of the welfare state and we need to face up to that problem and it is actually the desire to be benevolent, ironically, that you end up using prison more unless you've got a clear vision and clear demarcation around what you're trying to achieve. Thank you. Going back to the initial presumption, the number of individuals receiving a custodial sentence for three months or less has decreased from, I think, 35 per cent in 2010-11 to 27 per cent in 2017-18, so do you think there is a role for sentencing in this context? I appreciate that we've spoken about why there are welfare concerns as well, which ultimately play a huge role in terms of some of our prisoners in Scotland, but sentencing itself is part of a bigger picture, would you say, or is there a role for the presumption and can that help, do you think, in reducing the overall population? I'm probably the exception on this panel and that my thinking has really evolved on this and I no longer support a presumption against the short sentence and one of the reasons that I'm sceptical of it having an effect is this quite unilateral blunt tool of a single sentence change under the three-month presumption initially bumped up the numbers of four months and longer sentences, so it did seem to have an initial up-tariffing effect, which is not yet fully stabilised. We couldn't tell you today exactly how many people are in prison serving four months or three months or nine months because the prison service has not published prison statistics that have been validated since 2013-14. Another reason, though, that I wouldn't, I don't think that the single sentencing change is enough is I think that there'll be unanticipated effects in other parts of the system and so that this is a very elaborate architecture of sentencing and punishment that we've set up in this country and making this one change is going to have some unanticipated effects, which I think will drive further net widening of the higher tariff population. There's no indication that the way the law would currently be phrased, which is simply not to use this sentence unless a judge feels it's absolutely necessary, will affect anybody who this legislation presumably is trying to target, which are the people doing the churn who have serially served 10, 15, 20 of these sentences. Those are precisely the people who a sheriff may feel feels there's nothing else that can be done but to issue a custodial sentence. Thank you. I echo the comments that Dr Armstrong has made in that creating or extending this presumption in and of itself is not going to create the policy objective of reducing re-offending. Howard Lee Scotland supports the extension and believes that it's a good first step, but it needs to happen alongside other measures. Recent data published by the Council of Europe, which I think has been cited in one of your written submissions, show that Scotland has the highest number of people subject to penal sanctions, so that's imprisonment and community services together than any other country in Europe. It's not simply we can't think of transplanting people from the prison and putting them into community sentences as an achievement. Community sentences are still a sanction, they still impose harm, and they still are experienced negatively. As Sarah Smith said, community justice sanctions often have the effect of funneling people back into prison following breach or non-compliance. We need to really be thinking more ambitiously about reducing the penal system and making greater use of diversion from custody suspended sentences and deferred sentences, as well as thinking about questions of sentence length, etc. To answer the question, the use of three months was already going down, and the Government has clearly noted that well before the presumption was implemented. I'm sceptical as to whether it's going to make much difference. The three-month presumption doesn't appear to have made much difference. I know that the Government has said that it has credited the presumption with reduction in reconviction rates—I think that's a rather dodgy claim—for all sorts of reasons, not least that the term of conviction is about criminal conviction. There's been an enormous growth in direct measures, i.e. out-of-court office of settlement, like the fiscal fines and so forth, so I would suggest that the committee would look at that quite carefully. I suppose that, for my part, I've never really been persuaded that this idea of a presumption—and this was at the time when the original legislation went through, coming up for 10 years ago now, I was always sceptical then, I'm afraid. I'm not sure that it's going to make that much of a difference, so in a sense we got quite excited about it, and I know that victims' groups are concerned and so on. In a sense they don't need to be, I don't think that concerned, because the legislation is already very permissive, and it says, well, don't do it unless you think it's appropriate. Well, that's what sheriffs surely have always been doing, and quite rightly so. Why would you want them to do anything that wasn't inappropriate? My point is, back to the resourcing issue, which is unless you make sure that community services particularly are there, then understandably courts and other social work and so on will say, well, you know what, we can't do anything with this, we've got to be present, because that's the default, that's the last resort. If nothing else is there, it's prison. Shona, followed by Liam Kerr. I don't know if the panel heard the previous evidence session, but one of the points made by Laura Hoskins from Community Justice Scotland was that part of the variation in the application of the existing three months sentencing was, she thought, and I think that the panel probably agreed with her, down to what the trust and confidence of sheriffs had in what the alternatives are within localities. My question would be that the presumption against short sentences could be effective and appears to be in some areas particularly if it goes hand in hand with a confidence in the system and a variety of disposals. Is that something that you would agree with? The case. However, one thing I would say is that we've got shockingly poor data in this country available, and that's no criticism of the statisticians in Government who do their best. We have very little data to be able to verify whether that's the case or not, very little data about Raman, very little data to really drill down, the quality of it's actually very poor, and comparing one locality with another is very difficult because you're often comparing apples with pears. You can say one area's got a high custody, one area's got a low custody rate, but unless you actually compare the seriousness of the caseloads in each area, then it's meaningless. I know the Government used to produce these kind of league tables, utterly spurious, I'm afraid, to come say that area X is harsher than another unless you know what the caseload looks like. You have to have proper data, unless you've got that data. We just don't know, we just don't know on that point, but my hunch is that yes, I think you're right, the relationships are absolutely crucial and the sense of credibility is important, but I think I come back to the point and I know I'm hammering it, but I really want the committee to consider in the long term, have this long term vision to say in that we should have a target and by this date, 2040 or whatever it might be, we are committing ourselves as a society to say unless the seriousness of your offending warrants it, we are not going to use the valuable resource of imprisonment, which is so damaging unless the offending requires it. Yes, Dr Martin. Just very quickly, it was highlighted in one of your written submissions, I think it was from criminal justice voluntary forum, I can't remember their exact name, but they said that they were often frustrated when they spoke to sheriffs who didn't know the available services in their area, so I think that there is more that can be done, which might potentially help by raising awareness of exactly all of the non custodial services that are available, that might help. Have you completed your line of questions? Yes, that's fine, thank you. Very brief first question to Professor Tarte, if I may. Is your view, just to reflect back something that you just said, is your view that the current community system isn't there presently to such that there would be any change to such that judges don't have confidence in moving out into it? Inevitably judges are, and by the way, when we're thinking about sentencing, I should just preface by saying, don't forget about remand and backdating for remand, and our data on that is really poor, as far as I can see. There's no differentiation and say that, actually, a lot of the time someone will be remanded in custody because a sheriff will say, well, and social worker will say, well, we need these persons in such a bad way, we end up sending them to give them remand, and then they might get a backdated custodial sentence, and we really need to look at that data. But I think the problem is, yes, is one of resources. Inevitably, when you're faced with someone who's in that kind of situation, you are comparing, you're trying to look for, you say, you know this person hasn't committed a really serious, they're not a danger, particularly to the public, you'd rather that they got help in the community, etc. But actually very often, and we've got to be honest about this, quite often people are saying, well, we don't really want this person, they don't say so quite as explicitly that as that, but it's the message that comes across. The only place that will take them is prison, and so therefore prison almost becomes the attractive place, it becomes the ever-reliable option, while community penalties seem to be a little non-credible, slow, and particularly in the voluntary sector, their funding is often so precarious, and it's made unreliable by the precariousness of their funding, so sentences will often say to pick up the point that Dr Morrison said, well, is that service still available? They're not sure, but they know prisons always there. We all know prisons there as a society. These other things are almost made precarious, and we need to think about that problem. If I may move on, Dr Armstrong, you say in your submission that there are flaws in the evidence that those given CPOs have lower re-offending rates than those given short sentences. Can you explain that to the committee, please? If you're right on that, doesn't that undermine the central tenet of this legislation? I didn't say there are flaws. I said that the comparisons that are normally made aren't matched to compare similar populations, so what happens now is the statistics are, raw statistics are compared between those who have done a community sentence versus those who have done a short sentence to look at the re-offending patterns of those, reconvictions of those people over two years. That doesn't control for the histories of those people, and we know that people serving community sentences generally have many fewer convictions because one of the systemic problems in Scotland is once you've been allowed to serve one or two community sentences, you are increasingly seen as a poor risk or someone unable to benefit from them and never given that opportunity ever again, and you're only then continuously given short sentences. The short sentence prison population will be people who have done many short prison sentences or have had experience of community sentence. It is comparing apples and oranges. If you could match those populations, then you would know what the reconviction rates are. I'm afraid to say we just don't know. It may well be that community sentences for the similar population would have much better outcomes, but you couldn't do that just with a raw comparison of those two figures. What I will say is that in the research that I myself have done with Beth Weaver at Strathclyde University and that my colleague Margaret Shinkle has done, is that many people are ready to do a community sentence after they've been quite deep into the system and had many convictions, and that when they do a community sentence, particularly when it's a project that feels meaningful, that that has had a huge impact on their lives and in transforming their sense of relationship to a given community. I think there already has been some debate about this process by which people are excluded from receiving community sentences once they've served a prison sentence. That to me is a significant issue. I'm sorry, but I forget what your other question was. No, that was a very comprehensive answer. I'm very grateful to you. Now I'm riffing slightly. You talked about the meaningful activity out in the community. I will be quick. I'm always quick, convener. You talked about meaningful activity out in the community. Am I right from your research that one in four community sentences don't have any of that purposeful activity or it doesn't have any unpaid work element? Is that right? That was in my research, but that might well be shown in the community social work, the criminal justice social work statistics. I think there could be an issue and actually probably Dr Morrison would be in a better position to speak to that than I am possibly. I would only add, I don't know about the details of of CPOs for different sentence lengths. I'm afraid I'm happy to send that to you later if you want. I would say that that doesn't mean that prison is the solution because, as Colin McConnell himself said earlier on, we know that that activity also isn't being provided in a prison setting. Maybe I could just go back to Ms Robinson's point about why different areas use community sentences at different rates as an alternative and is there a trust or confidence issue. First, I would say that alternative is the wrong terminology to be using as community sentences at the moment are not alternatives and with this presumption would not be alternatives. They are working and have worked under the three month presumption as additions to sentencing. We are seeing growth both in the community payback orders and in the prison population. There is no kind of balance between those things as we are increasing both those populations, which is why, as Dr Morrison pointed out, Scotland has the largest proportion of people under some form of criminal justice control than anywhere else except, I believe, Russia and Turkey. I just wanted to clarify that. I think that that is very helpful. Fulton, supplementary, and then Rona and David. I remind members that we are against clock. Thanks, convener. In bearing that in mind, it is just a very quick supplementary. I agree fully with the panel and thanks to the panel for your very articulate views and I agree with where we need to get to. I mean, I have no doubt at all that most people will be here, the population that we are talking about today that this legislation targets shouldn't be in custody in my own view. Like Dr Morrison, I see this as part of a package to get us to that place. Professor Datter, you have put forward a very powerful stance today. I just wanted to ask, is there anything that you think the committee and the Parliament could legislate for to get to the point that you have spoken about? Well, thanks for the invitation to discuss that. Yes, whether it be the Parliament, whether it be a body, we need some kind of an authoritative principle which says, by this point in time, we will cease to use, as a society, imprisonment for people unless people's offending warrants it, and at the end of my submission I set out a two-part principle, both parts together. Obviously, principles don't produce results in themselves, but it gives us a vision. It's a bit like having a climate change target or whatever it is. This is our target date and this is how we might concentrate minds. I think unless we have that, we're going to continue in this discussion that we've been having for the last 40 years. The extension of the presumption is, I know it sounds bold on its face, to my mind it's simply a rehash of the same thinking which you can call last resort thinking. Don't do this, don't pass a sense of imprisonment unless it's the last resort. Well, unless you make sure that what's in the community is really reliable, then inevitably, people who nobody really wants to see ending up in prison and who cost us as a taxpayer apart from anything else, even if you don't take the moral case financially, it's perverse. Unless we do that, we're going to carry on with that turn, I think. I'm not sure that the presumption is... I'd like to be proved wrong, I'm not sure the presumption will make a huge difference. I kind of share and I understand the concerns of victims groups about that in that 12-month co-hort. You can end up with them quite nasty offences, which we might say actually they are deserving of imprisonment. Having said that, I think that we can trust the judiciary on that point, but my point is actually that we need to think as a society about what prison is not for, not what it's for, but what it's not for. It's not a sanctuary, it's not a school, it's not a hospital. Okay, we might be using it like that at the moment and Colin McCollum talked about how he had to do that, give people a warm dry bed, give people a place of safety and I understand that he's doing his best and they're doing their best, but we need as a society to have a target date by which we say, we're just going to stop doing that, that's not what we're about in Scotland anymore. I don't disagree with anything you've said in the principle of what you've said. I suppose the only other quick question that I would have way around that is if we were to put in place some principle, whether that's through legislation or another body, does that not run in some sort of conflict with another key premise if the criminal justice system in Scotland that it would take away the discretion or to some extent the discretion of sentences which obviously we want to protect as well? I mean, I'm all in favour of judges being able to use their sensible discretion. I think the problem at the moment isn't so much that they are being stopped from using imprisonment, that this extension will continue to allow them to use that, but rather the opposite, that the discretion they have, they often find frustrating because it's hollow, it's a hollow virility symbol, that often they feel that they can't, they're simply not equipped to do what they feel they should be doing. We don't want this person to go to custody, we don't want to remand them in custody, we know that's damaging. You know, I think that the Shrevel bench in general is probably very different from what it was 30 years ago, but they're much more enlightened, I think. We don't want to do this, but we don't see any other option, they don't see it there. There are lots of aspects to that, but one of them is about us making sure as a society that we really make a major shift of resources so that community services, as well as community justice, but community services are there for people, otherwise they just say, well, I have to use imprisonment because there's nowhere else. It's the last result, i.e., it's the default, and this legislation and this presumption is still in the last result, i.e., imprisonment as the default discourse. That's the problem with it. It's still the same old idea. I'd like to return to my earlier point about women in prison. I'm not going to, you probably heard it, so I'm not going to rerun everything that I said, but given what Professor Tata was saying about only the most serious offences should be custodial and targets, should we be setting a target that no woman should serve a less than 12 months sentence, say, by 2030? Would that be progress? I see where you're coming from and that's a really nice question. Personally, I would still always go for culture in terms of the seriousness of the case. That has many aspects and there's detailed work that could be done. Indeed, as the Scottish Sentencing Council really develops and establishes itself further as it's doing, it may well decide that it has the confidence to start looking at what that would look like, i.e., what the seriousness means in that it's perfectly possible to do. That's a long-term project. While I absolutely agree that there are particular issues, many of those issues are also true for men. The proportion can be a bit different, but a lot of the things that we talk about. I wouldn't nest myself, I'm not sure that would be the most, I would prefer to just couch it in terms of the seriousness of the offence. Now, gender may well be a part of that, of course, when you do the detailed work, then you can start saying, well, there are certain aspects of imprisonment that may affect women in certain ways that don't affect men and so forth or in different ways. We recognise the very, very vulnerable and highly victimised experiences that women in custody have and the fact that a greater number of them are serving very short sentences than in the male population. We support any measure that will reduce the numbers of those women in custody. I would probably not support a target of no women in custody for the reasons that cyber has outlined, but if we're looking at seriousness of offence and particularly related to violence, etc., then, if we follow that principle, many women would not be in custody. Thank you, convener. The tenor of your evidence seems to be that we've identified the right problem, but we're not really looking at the underlying causes of what's here and indeed. I remember struck by Dr Armstrong's written submission, where you posed the rhetorical question, is it the sentence or something more fundamental that doesn't work for short-term prisoners? On that basis, can I ask the panel two questions? First of all, is there actually any evidence base for picking 12 months as the threshold? If not—and think about your answers more widely than you've given this morning so far—shall we be looking at having more precision in our sentencing? Indeed, Laura Hawkins raised the enhanced combination orders that are used in Northern Ireland, which have explicit components to address such things as social rehabilitation and so on. Is that really what we should be looking at? Those are the two questions. Is 12 months arbitrary and should we be having a different type of approach to sentencing? That's all that I'll be asking the panel. I realise there's a lot in that question. If you could be as succinct as possible, it would be very much appreciated. We'd like to start, Dr Armstrong. Briefly, yes and yes, 12 months is arbitrary. I have not seen any evidence for 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, 12 months at all. There is research that can tell you what the magic number is. That is possibly a decision for you rather than for us. Are there alternative sentences that we should be thinking about? The combination order that you mentioned sounds a lot like moving a heavily circumstrived experience within a prison to a heavily circumstrived experience in the community. What European countries make use of that Scotland does not are suspended sentences, or at least to any significant degree where somebody may be given a prison sentence with some conditions attached to it, primarily not committing that offence again or not committing any offence again, but also possibly engaging in other services, but also receiving some supportive services. I don't want to say that with certainty that's what should be done, but there are alternatives to thinking about this. My submission was mainly targeting the fact that the legislation is changing a sentence. It's not changing the situation or addressing a group of people who experience that sentence. Yes, 12 months is an arbitrary figure, but any figure in a sense is arbitrary. We highlighted in our written submission that Finland envisages that all sentences of two years and less are translated into community supervision. That again is an arbitrary figure, but one that supports their significantly reduced use of imprisonment. Arbitriness in and of itself needn't be a problem, I would argue. In terms of different sentencing approaches, we can definitely look to suspended sentences, deferred sentences, and much greater use of diversion from custody. We might also consider, for example, approaches that are used in problem solving courts. There was a recent evaluation of the problem solving court in Aberdeen, which showed how effective that could be. There are targeted changes that could support those proposals. Yes, 12 months is arbitrary in criminological terms. It's gone for 12 months because it's top-end summary puzzle. There are exceptions around that, but that's for another discussion. I would prefer not to use the category of time to identify who should be presumed not to get a prison sentence and who should, as I've said. It's much more justifiable to use the broad language of the seriousness of the case and then there can be work done around that. Time is a problem, which is why you've got the concerns from victims groups and so on. It's more difficult to justify, but that's what may well go through here. My appeal to the committee is to consider raising the gaze to think about what we should be doing long-term, because I don't know if that's going to have that much effect. Can I thank all the witnesses for their evidence today? If there's anything that's occurred to you in the course of giving that evidence and you want to write to the committee, please do so, but thank you so much for your written submissions for appearing today. We would normally have a comfort break at this time. We're only going to suspend for two minutes because one of our witnesses has to go categorically for 12.15. I thank the panel and ask the next panel to take your seats. I'm pleased to welcome our third and final panel for today, the right honourable Lord Turnbull, senator of the College of Justice, and Graham Ackerman, secretary of the Scottish Sentencing Council. I refer members to paper 1, public paper and paper 2, a private paper. We'll now start with questions, starting with Daniel Johnson. Just begin by thanking the panel for coming in particular. I think it's always useful for legislators to engage in dialogue with sentences. That's fundamental with the job that we do. We've heard from the previous panels that the alternatives to prison sentences exist, but for a variety of speculated reasons that sentences don't use them, I'm just wondering if Lord Turnbull could give his view as to why sentences perhaps prefer prison sentences to the alternatives that exist at the moment. Therefore, the proposal is coming forward. I'm not entirely sure that I would understand the premise that you've used that sentences would prefer prison sentences. I did hear the tale end of some of your previous witnesses, and I heard Professor Tata explain that, in his opinion, the shrivel bench is occupied by sentences that would prefer not to send people to prison if they could. That is a view that I would recognise. The question, from your perspective, is why are so few non-custodial sentences being imposed, as one might categorise them. I'm sure that the answer to that is in two parts. The first is that sentences are guided by a number of considerations, but one of which is plainly the seriousness of the offence. The principles and purposes of sentencing guideline that the council produced fairly recently identified as one of the principles, the principle of parsimony, namely that a sentence should be no more severe than is necessary to achieve the sentencing aim that a sentence has in mind. We would assume from that, which, by the way, we consider to be a principle that reflected long-standing sentencing practice. We would assume from that that if a sentencer was to select a period of imprisonment as a sentence and, for example, say in the range of six to nine months, that he or she must have concluded that because of the gravity of that particular offence or because of the circumstances of the offender or a combination of the two, that there was no other appropriate sentence available. That, then, I suppose, leads into the question of, what are the alternatives? The alternatives that are available are well-liked, I am confident, alternatives that are recognised as being robust. They are not, in any sense, a soft option. A community payback order, for example, with a supervision requirement and a requirement to perform unpaid work in the community, has a punitive element to it and a rehabilitative element to it. However, if there were other options available to sentencers, then those sentencers who feel that the available options to them mean that they have no choice but to select a custodial sentence might be able to come to a different conclusion. For example, over recent years, projects such as the Caledonian men's project and the TAY project have increased in popularity and have been used more and more by sentencers. They are considered to be effective and they are disposals that sentencers have confidence in. As time has gone on, projects of that sort have become available more broadly than they once were. I do not believe that they are still universally available, but I understand that the Caledonian men's project, for example, is being rolled out to most parts of the country. There is also an interesting project in the Sheriff's Court at Hamilton, where the court is looking at using what it is calling a structure-deferred sentence approach. At the moment, principally, I am not exclusively in relation to young offenders, but it is a project that permits the sentencer to engage in a managerial fashion with the offender, similar perhaps to the concept of a problem-solving court. The pilot project seems to be proceeding well and the perception is that it is effective and appears to receive far fewer breaches, for example, than community payback orders do. Once that pilot project is completed, it may be that something of that sort will be available more broadly as well. All of those options, if available, will provide a sentencer who, at the moment, concludes that perhaps a sentence of six or nine months imprisonment is the only suitable sentence available to him to come to a different view. Do you have anything to add? I know that Lord Turnbull and I are both here representing the sentencing council. Okay, that is absolutely fine. Shona, Liam Kerr. Lord Turnbull, you have just touched on this. We explored in the previous panels about the geographic variation in relation to the success of the presumption against sentences of three months or less, and what was suggested by Laura Hoskins from Community Justice Scotland was very much the point that you are making that sometimes it depends on what is available, but also perhaps the softer end of that, the confidence that the sheriff has in those alternative dispositions. Is that something in your experience that you would agree with? I am perhaps not best placed to offer a very informed view on that. I suspect that sentencers from the sheriff court might be better placed to inform you on that. My overall sense is that modern sentencers do not consider non-custodial sentences to be soft options. There is a range now. For example, there are drug treatment and testing orders, which are very onerous. I think that people's experience of those orders is that they have to accept an inbuilt period of partial failure. People who undertake those programmes cannot just simply transform their lives instantly, so it is recognised that there will be a period during which compliance will be less than perfect, but the sentencers tend to invest in that disposal and to stick with it. However, there are other disposals, which are very far from soft options as well. The requirement to perform unpaid work in the community is a significant form of undertaking. It not only requires effort on the part of the individual, but it has a constructive element to it as well. I think that I heard one of your other contributors say that evidence tends to demonstrate that it can transform their lives in a positive way. I would be surprised if there was a general sense that community-based disposals were something of an unviable soft option. It was suggested by one of the pieces of evidence that perhaps awareness wasn't always as good as it could be about the range of disposals that are available. Is that something that could be tackled? That might be right. Again, what is important, I imagine, is that if new opportunities become available, the judiciary is fully aware of what they are and of the scope for benefit that they present. Therefore, there is a role for social work department, for other third sector organisations perhaps, and also for the judicial institute, which provides national judicial training, but it is important that judges are kept aware of what is available. For example, in rolling out the Caledonian men's project or something like the TAID project, it would be very important to educate the judiciary and the receiving jurisdictions as to what those particular projects can provide. Follow that up. Lord Timbal talked about the onerous nature of some of the community payback orders or the details, which I think reflected on what we heard from the previous panel. There was some suggestion there that this was creating a pipeline into custodial sentences and that a greater use of deferred or suspended sentences might be a way of allowing the wider supports to be brought in to help individuals to turn their lives around. Is that something that you would recognise and support? I am not entirely sure, because I have sometimes heard it suggested that the concept of prison as a last resort is misplaced and therefore that if someone receives a community-based sentence by way of disposal, regardless of what happens with the progress of that sentence, no other form of sentence should ever be imposed. I think that that is difficult to understand because I think that sentences will tell you that non-custodial sentences work for a significant number of the offending population. They do not work for others and sentences will have experience of imposing non-custodial sentences with which the offenders do not comply. Although they may get a number of opportunities to comply, they still do not comply. The question then is, what is the court to do in the end of the day? If somebody is given a community payback order, the concept out of thought is that they require to make restoration to the community for the harm that they have caused to the community. If they simply decline to do that, what is the court to do? Is it to be left with no sanction? For some experience, we will demonstrate that simply to say to them that they must comply and they must now do more by way of unpaid work in the community than they had first received, just simply will not work. I would have thought that if the court has no sanction in the end of the day, in the nature, say of a custodial sentence, it is likely that there is a risk at least that non-custodial sentences come to be portrayed as sentences that are voluntary. It is a matter for the offender whether to comply or not. Any such perception, I am pretty sure, would undermine the confidence that the public had in the use of those disposals by the judiciary. I understand that you need to support people who are given non-custodial sentences, but if the court does not retain a final sanction, somebody would need to explain to me what it was supposed to do in that situation. I want to adjust to that power before I bring in Liam Kerr. Is there any ever analysis of why someone has breached or is it just de facto breached and therefore a prison sentence is the disposal that must be looked at? There will ordinarily be an explanation. The offender will say, for example, I did not turn up for my unpaid hours of work because I was not well that day or because something happened. The person of the drugs treatment and testing order who is found to have a positive test for heroin or something of that sort will provide an explanation as to why they relapsed, but what is the court to do when it is hearing the same explanation over and over again from the same individual? I think that sentences feel that there comes a stage when they just simply are looking at someone who is declining to comply rather than someone who has a particular reason for non-compliance. In your experiences, is that what is happening? When someone defaults, every effort is made to look and see whether there are extenuating circumstances, could we suspend that to give them one other chance or not? I suspect that you might be better informed by the sheriffs who tend to impose those sentences more frequently than other judges do, but I do know and the council knows from its combined experience of information from sentences across the board that people who fail to comply with the requirements of community payback orders will almost inevitably get another chance. They will ordinarily get a number of chances, assuming that they do not just turn up and say, I did not go because I could not be bothered. If they have an explanation, the court will take account of that. The court wants those disposals to work, otherwise the sentences would never have selected it in the first place. In those circumstances, is the disposal of last resort to come to a good studio sentence after all those breaches? That is what will happen. The sentences will conclude that I have tried to support this individual. I have tried to give them an opportunity, but they have demonstrated that they are either incapable of taking it or unwilling to take it, so I have to now apply myself to what the sanction is. In those circumstances, there are two issues. There is not just the fact that the sentence that the court passed for the original offence has not been effective. There is also the fact that the individual has breached the orders that the court imposed upon him. There are two elements to that, perhaps. Two brief questions for me. In the submission from the Scottish Sentencing Council, it is flagged up that this presumption would cover solemn sentences of up to 18 months as sentences can be discounted by up to a third due to early guilty pleas. Am I right and thinking that this could catch some really serious crimes then? If so, are you able to give any examples? Could this committee have cited the data that you have collated on that? The council has not specifically collated data on what offences result in particular sentences, but, just for example, as to what kinds of offences will be caught, it is obvious that offences of assaulting or impeding providers of emergency services or police officers will be caught by the presumption because the Emergency Workers Scotland Act and the Police and Fire Reform Scotland Act carry maximum sentences of 12 months in prison. Equally, more serious offences could be caught in the circumstances that you have identified where an individual pleads to an offence that the sentencer thinks might be appropriately dealt with by a sentence of, say, 15 to 18 months. If that offender has plead guilty at an early stage, then conventionally he might expect to receive a discount of a third. As you have anticipated, that brings the final sentence down to, say, somewhere between 10 and 12 months, which is right into the teeth of the presumption. Offences that might be in that sort of category will include perhaps causing death by careless driving, causing death whilst driving disqualified, possession of indecent photographs of children, possibly distribution of lower-category images, possession of offensive knives or weapons, assaults and, perhaps even in relation to the 15 to 18-month period, some drug supply charges, sexual offences, charges of multiple housebreaking. The question is then what will the sentencer do, although the sentence that we are discussing might be attributable to offences of that sort? If the sentencer concludes that the sentence of the court ought to be around 15 months imprisonment and then discounts that by one third to bring it down to 10 in light of the early plea, he will then have to apply his mind to the question of whether or not, despite the presumption, a sentence of imprisonment of that sort still remains the only appropriate sentence. We will have to wait and see what individual sentencers decide in that situation, but I would have thought that if the sentencer starts off with a conclusion that a sentence in the region of 15 months is the only appropriate sentence, he is quite unlikely to change his or her mind once he applies the discount and realises that he has got to take account of the presumption. Yes, he will think again, but is he likely to come to a different conclusion? I am not so sure. Thank you. The submission talks about one in ten receiving a headline sentence. There is some data there that I think the committee would be interested in. Would you just pick that up from the Scottish Government figures? My second question is just about something else that is in there. There is an assertion that it cannot be assumed that those who previously would have got custody but now get a community sentence would show a similar reconviction rate to those who would currently get a community sentence. Could you just elaborate on that point for the committee, please? Our thinking there is that, in the face of a three-month presumption, people who receive non-custodial sentences are probably quite likely to be people who are relatively new to the criminal justice system, whereas at the moment people who are receiving sentences say in the region of six to nine months are either pleading guilty to quite serious offences or being convicted of them, or are individuals who have probably got quite a history of involvement with the criminal justice system. We just question whether the rehabilitative effect that we see from one group of offenders is likely to be replicated in another. In the group of offenders who currently receive sentences of imprisonment of, say, six to nine months, it is very likely that they will already have received a number of non-custodial sentences and probably community payback orders as well. Despite that, they have not desisted from offending. Fulton? Fulton, I appreciate that we are really short on time, good morning, or good afternoon, sorry to the panel. I want to just ask if you could make any comment on the use of electronic monitoring, the various sorts of electronic monitoring, as an option to reduce short-term prison sentences? Electronic monitoring is now available as part of a community payback order, and certainly legislation was in place to bring about that option. It is a sentencing tool that will be available to sentencers. Electronic monitoring is really just a tool to ensure compliance in relation to a restriction of liberty order. Restriction of liberty orders certainly have the effect of imposing a degree of punishment on an individual, particularly perhaps a younger offender, and also have the ability to provide a degree of public protection, because many of the sorts of offences that those offenders become involved with are committed at night, and a restriction of liberty order can ensure that the offender stays at home. It may be that, as a consequence of the change in the legislation that I alluded to, those orders will become more prevalent in the future. I wonder if you felt that you were able to comment on the resource implications of the presumption against the three-month sentence that is currently in place, and the proposal to extend that to a 12-month presumption? Well, it is certainly necessary that non-custodial disposals be adequately resourced, and if Parliament's policy is that more of those disposals should be provided for, then it is essential that both the sentencer and the public have the confidence in the robust and effective nature of those disposals. We are not aware, as a council, of any research that demonstrates that there is an inconsistency in the use of non-custodial sentences around the country, other than perhaps anecdotally in areas in which particular projects are not available. I know that one could look to certain sheriff courts and say that there seems to be a better or a more prevalent use of a non-custodial sentence there than others, but I think that one would need to dig a bit deeper to try to understand why that actually was, because geographical locations will throw up all sorts of differences in offending behaviour, and it is not necessarily terribly easy just to compare one with the other. However, as I say, I suppose that principally the concern that sentencers would have is the availability to them of a non-custodial disposal, which they can see as sufficiently well resourced to have confidence in. That concludes our questioning, and I thank you very much for attending today. Thank you. We will now have a five-minute comfort break to allow for an exchange of width. Our next item is consideration of a negative instrument, title of conditions, Scotland Act 2003, rule housing bodies, amendment order 2019, SSI 2019, oblique 172. The delegated powers and law reform committee has considered the instrument and has no comments. I refer members to paper 2, which is a note by the clerk, and ask members if they have any comments or questions. That being the case, is the committee agreed that it does not wish to make any recommendations in relation to the instrument? We are agreed. Agenda item 3 is feedback from the meeting of the justice sub-committee on policing on 30 May. Following the verbal report, there will be an opportunity for brief comments and questions, and I refer members to paper 4, which is a note by the clerk, and I invite John Finnie to provide that feedback. As you say, the committee has a feedback note in its papers on the most recent meeting of the sub-committee, which was on 30 May. We took evidence on that day from the Association of Scottish Police Superintendents, the Scottish Police Federation and the Police Staff branch of Unison Scotland regarding the capital funding for Police Scotland. That was all as part of the sub-committee's pre-budget scrutiny of the 2020-21 draft budget. The sub-committee heard that the capital budget allocation for Police Scotland was inadequate and that the lack of resources was impacting on the ability of police officers and staff to provide an efficient service. Witnesses stated that the suboptimal conditions and equipment were impacting on police efficiency and that a longer-term capital investment programme was required. The capital budget allocation for Police Scotland is low when compared to other police services across the UK, with Unison describing the capital settlement for this 2019-20 for the forces, quote, a sticking plaster. The sub-committee also heard that, while communications with the unions by senior force management and the SPA has improved, there had not been any meaningful pre-budget engagement with them by force management and the SPA. The Scottish Police Federation was also critical of the level of suitable engagement with unions on the policing 2026 strategy, which is a 10-year plan to transform the force. There is a strong feeling that the SPA needed to make a more robust case to the Scottish Government for the funds that Police Scotland needs to overhaul its ICT systems and deal with a major backlog of maintenance and replacement of buildings, fleet and equipment. The sub-committee was told that Police Scotland is carrying out health and safety surveys across its estate, in addition to the workplace inspections undertaken by the staff associations, and that Police Scotland is doing that in order to identify, maintain its priorities and assess the working conditions for officers and police staff. The sub-committee has requested both that and the Police Staff Association and unions receive a copy of that information when it is available. The next meeting of the sub-committee will be on Thursday, 13 June, when it will take evidence from the Cabinet Secretary for Justice, Samza Yousaf, on the Scottish Government's response to the sub-committee's report on Police Scotland's use of cybergears. That will be the final meeting of the sub-committee before the summer recess. Thank you very much. Do members have any comments or questions? Liam McArthur? Thank you, convener. It was, I think, as John Finnie has indicated, a very helpful and revealing session. I think that we all understand that, with budgets tied, Police Scotland will not be the only organisation that comes forward with claims that more money is required. However, I think that the stand-out takeaway from the session for me was the suggestion that the SPA itself is not being robust enough in outlining the effect that an insufficient capital budget is having on front-line policing and policing generally. I think that that is clearly something that we will need to keep an eye on as we go into the budget process. Any further comments, Liam McArthur? Just on that, as someone who is not on that sub-committee, are you able to help me to understand that this is hugely concerning when I was reading this and recognise the point that Liam McArthur is making about the SPA? Where does it go from here? There are clearly some serious concerns, so how does the sub-committee or whoever is tasked with it follow up on this to make sure that something changes? Through yourself, convener, we are aware that the Scottish Police Authority plays particular tension to the work of the sub-committee. As I said in my report, we are hearing from the cabinet secretary for justice next week, and we will be putting very strongly those points to him. Indeed, that will strengthen his hand, presumably in negotiations with the cabinet secretary for finance when the budget decisions are to be made. We will continue it, and that will be a matter of public record. If I could just concur, it was a concerning, a very concerning to the least session. I think that the committee was left in no doubt about the inadequacy of the resources affecting the efficiency of the police, especially in the state fleet and vehicle management. I think that there was a very concerning comment about the lack of transparency in terms of the SPA highlighting the full extent of the problem that rates cell health and safety issues. Again, I think that it was really quite frustrating and disappointing that the stakeholders all said that there was still this lack of meaningful engagement with them in the pre-budget process. I just should correct myself to Mr Kerr. It is not on that matter that we are speaking with the cabinet secretary in the 13th. I think that it is after recess, but he will be clearly cited on the minutes. If there are no further comments, that brings us to the end of today's meeting. Next meeting will be 11 June, when we will continue our consideration of a statutory instrument setting out the Scottish Government's plan on a presumption against short sentences. We will also continue to take evidence on our inquiry on secure care for children and young people in Scotland. I now formally close this meeting of the Justice Committee.