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You can achieve the same thing. A High Court judge—Lord Bracadale, for example—who sits in the High Court could sit in a newly created sexual offences court and preside over a sexual offence case or a rape case. They would have to be trauma informed to do so, but they would not stop dealing with cases in the High Court that are not sexual offences cases. A High Court trial for rape could be tried with the same people, who have been trained to be trauma informed.

I will rehearse the same argument as I rehearsed last week. I do believe that there should be a specialist element but, as I have argued from the beginning, it can be done in a different way. The bill will create a sexual offences court for all solemn sexual offence cases, which is quite a big change. My position is that specialist divisions of both the High Court and the sheriff court could be created to achieve the same thing. The judges and practitioners would still be required to be trauma informed.

Separately, on the question whether murder with a sexual element should be indicted in the new sexual offences court, I am arguing that all the people involved in the sexual offences court will also be able to practise in the High Court, so they would still be trauma informed if they dealt with such a case in the High Court.

That is just a different way of going about it. It is not that I fundamentally disagree with your perspective; I just think that it is an awful lot of change and an awful lot of money to spend, and we do not know whether anything different would be achieved at the end. I suppose that that is a difference of opinion on how to go about it. Does that make sense?

Yes—that is exactly right.

I am happy to give way to the cabinet secretary.

So there are three categories of people—High Court judges, temporary High Court judges and sheriffs—who can preside over rape or any other sexual offences case.

Thank you very much.

Just for clarification, it would be helpful if I could check that I have understood this correctly. Am I correct in thinking that, in the new sexual offences court, there could be High Court judges, temporary judges and sheriffs, and that either type of High Court judge can sit on any sexual offences case?

I will make a short contribution. As Katy Clark said, we have had the debate and accepted that the Government has had a change of heart. The committee spent a lot of time considering this particular proposal. The huge number of legal concepts and detailed changes to criminal justice in one bill has exercised me from the beginning. I will continue to make that point, and I will certainly make it at stage 3.

We have come to the right conclusion, but it has taken a considerable amount of the committee’s time to examine the proposal, and rightly so. I appeal to future Governments to think twice before they give any future committee such fundamental change all in one bill. I do not need to say for everyone here that it has been a difficult week, what with trying to cope with this big bill and the Criminal Justice Modernisation and Abusive Domestic Behaviour Reviews (Scotland) Bill that we debated in the chamber yesterday.

As I have said before, I do not think that it is ideal in the long run to scrutinise a bill as large as this in one statutory document.

Cabinet secretary, what you have outlined makes sense—not to chop up the act into bits but to review it in one comprehensive report. My only concern is that, if some aspects of the bill are not enacted within the five years following royal assent, or are enacted at the tail-end of the five years, there is only a very short period of that aspect to review—you said that the plan is to draw down in stages. Could you give consideration to that? You might say that it is unlikely that something is not drawn down, but it could happen, so could we take account of that? If that happened, it would be another five years before that aspect was reviewed.

That is a fair point. The intention behind the amendment is to allow the complainer to get an insight into how the case will be argued and into any other factors that might have arisen. We have heard the case for independent advocacy at the preliminary trial and in relation to a section 275 application, but then there is the trial itself. How the case looks at the outset will differ from how the case looks later on. As is often the case with provisions that are drafted by back benchers, there is room for improvement.

I will hear what the cabinet secretary has to say about it, but I am sure in my mind that I want the measure to be permanent. It is worth having a discussion, because there is a lot of commonality in the principles of providing legal advice and legal support and changing the fundamentals of how a victim is involved in understanding the case throughout. I feel more strongly about this stuff than I do about the change in structure that was debated in an earlier group, which the Government feels strongly about. I want to support measures that would change fundamentally the experience of victims, because I believe that victims can give their best evidence when they have the fullest understanding.

Katy Clark’s approach to piloting independent legal representation is important. It is right that we evaluate something that is not tried and tested.

I am sympathetic to Maggie Chapman’s amendment 264, because that is something that Lady Dorrian asked for, and that is quite persuasive. Again, I do not know whether there is a crossover between independent advocacy support and what I am trying to achieve. It probably needs to be further fleshed out, but I am clear about the principle that something permanent needs to happen to change the experience of victims before and during the trial, and some of the amendments would make that change happen.