Seòmar agus comataidhean

That is helpful. You talked about learning and identifying what trackers and monitoring tools are used elsewhere. The Human Rights Measurement Initiative has tools at state level. Colleagues round the table who have not come across it should take a look, because it is great fun to play with. I do not think that it provides full coverage yet, but it is trying to get to that point. It tracks UK parameters—as you have just said, Scotland is not a signatory to international treaties.

Will you undertake to explore something like the HMRI for Scotland and what we would need to provide that? Would it require a change in how we collect data and who collects it? Could we do that? I have had fun playing with the tool and looking at other countries. I would love to be able to do that for Scotland. It would show some really interesting stories that we could then use as ways to promote human rights in Scotland.

Thanks, convener. I thank the minister for her comments.

My comments cover all the motions, so I will say all this only once, you will be pleased to know. I am grateful to the minister and the Scottish Government for responding to the concerns that we have heard and discussed both this morning and at previous meetings. For me, and for many in the sector who provide advice and advocacy as well as legal support, the response is not sufficient to allay those concerns. That is why I am moving my motions this morning.

There are, in my view, four areas of significant difficulty. The first is the assumption that full cost recovery is a necessary goal to which we should aspire. On the contrary, many experts and legal scholars, as well as social justice advocates, believe it to be deeply problematic. Justice is a matter of public and common good—a benefit to the whole society, not just to the participants of a particular case. If justice is presented as a consumer luxury—one that only the privileged can choose to indulge in—all our communities will be harmed, our trust in the rule of law will be threatened and our human rights will no longer be universal. That is recognised in the context of many tribunals, including following the Unison case in employment tribunals. That principle should, as the Human Rights Consortium Scotland suggests, also be applied to human rights, equality law and public interest cases—situations in which the very fundamentals of this committee’s work are centrally concerned.

The second problem with the orders is the lack of justification for such steep hikes in fees—10 per cent to 20 per cent—in addition to the regular annual increases. Costs, including energy, have increased, as the minister has noted, but wages have not risen in line with inflation, so the burden falls more heavily on struggling individuals and families than it does on institutions. As the Human Rights Consortium Scotland has highlighted, the rises will disproportionately impact those who are already marginalised—those who, without litigation, are unable to obtain their basic human rights, including their rights to an acceptable standard of living, to privacy and family life, to freedom from discrimination, to independent living and to inclusive education. Some of those people, but not all, will be exempt from fees, and some will be eligible for legal aid but, again, not all. The shortage of legal aid solicitors means that even those who are eligible may need to pay privately for legal assistance or to bring cases in person, with the latter course representing a significant cause of delay in and expense to the court system.

The third difficulty is that we have not received enough clarity from the Scottish Government about the proportion of the overall SCTS budget that is expected to be dependent on the fee increases. We have seen a list of projects that the minister tells us may be under threat, but no detailed costings or indication of priorities. Evidence suggests that higher fees deter claimants from embarking on litigation in the first place, so we cannot be confident of the overall financial effects of such a dramatic rise. I also suggest that, although many of the initiatives are laudable and some, such as the remote provision of evidence by police and expert witnesses, will benefit other bodies and individuals, few of them are more important than the maintenance of access to justice in itself.

My fourth and final concern is about the wider access to justice barriers that we see in Scotland today. That broader context represents my primary concern. The Human Rights Consortium says:

“the Minister’s letter misses the mark by not engaging with the underlying crisis in civil legal aid that many people are facing today.”

As I mentioned, that crisis is not only about eligibility but about accessibility. It is of little use to know that you qualify for legal aid if it is impossible for you to find and consult a legal aid solicitor. The fact that legal aid advice and representation are so prohibitively expensive should not be an excuse for raising court fees; it should be an incentive to make real and overdue change.

The Scottish Government’s failure to comply with its Aarhus commitments, its failure to include legal aid reform in the current programme for government and its failure to reverse the devastating cuts to the early resolution and advice programme—ERAP—stream 2 funding must all, along with the fees instruments that we are considering today, be matters of deep disquiet to the committee. I invite us to act upon those justified concerns and I urge colleagues to vote with me on the annulment of the instruments.

I move,

That the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee recommends that the Sheriff Court Fees Order 2024 (SSI 2024/235) be annulled.

I am sorry—I thought that we were just making contributions for or against the motion.

As I said in my remarks, I hear the minister’s concerns and have heard what she said about the impacts, but there is actually no detail on any of that. We know that, for the last year for which we have figures, civil court running costs were £40 million, and the minister has mentioned a £4 million value for the fees. We have no information of what the SCTS will do differently if the motions are not passed and these increases do not go through. Despite having asked the minister in a letter previously, we do not know what the exact impact will be. We have heard general words about the fact that there will be an impact, but there has been no quantification of that at all either in this morning’s meeting or in writing previously.

I am not sure that we could see your hand on the screen, Karen.

We move on to questions from Elena Whitham.

Elena Whitham wants to come back in.

It is those pictures that tell stories that we can use not only to understand how we are doing but to increase citizens’ awareness of what they should expect from us, public bodies and others.

As there are no further questions from colleagues, that brings us to the end of this evidence session. I thank the cabinet secretary and her officials for joining us this morning and for the evidence that they have provided.

We will now suspend the meeting briefly before we move on to our next item. I hope that Karen Adam will be able to join us remotely.

You talk about pay and inflation being the assumed pressures, given the figure that you have from the SCTS. I appreciate that it is the SCTS’s figure and its methodology. In the Scottish court fees 2024-25 consultation document, there is an analysis of inflationary pressures, and other than one year when the fee increase was more than 10 per cent, all the increases are under 10 per cent. What is the rationale for the 20 per cent increase for some court fees?

I will not repeat what I said, but I flag to colleagues that the main reason given for the changes is inflationary pressures. We have heard, in response to questions earlier, that the Government is looking for an average increase of about 13 per cent in court fees. However, let us not forget that, as the minister outlined, there have already been increases—3 per cent in 2022, 3 per cent in 2023 and 2 per cent this year in April—so it is not as if it is starting from 0 per cent. We need to take that into consideration.

On that basis, the increases are out of line with what is appropriate—never mind my earlier point that I do not believe that full-cost recovery in the justice system is an appropriate approach. Justice should be universally available and not just for those with the ability to pay. I press my motion.

For the next votes, put your hand closer to your face.