Seòmar agus comataidhean

The committee will reflect on the answers to our questions on the health inequalities impact assessment data and the fact that it has not been published. We will deliberate on whether we can make an intervention on that.

The final area that I want to ask about and which falls within your domain relates to planning and budgeting. How do you plan and budget in a situation in which a third party—essentially the JCVI—is deciding who the priority groups are, and the chronology of who should receive boosters and further access to vaccination programmes? Do you have any reflections on how well the Scottish Government, health boards and so on have responded so far in that environment? What will the future look like and what difficulties and challenges are posed to those who have to budget for and plan those vital services?

Thank you. The committee will look forward to receiving the outcome of that work, so I am sure that we will have more evidence-taking sessions on it in the months ahead.

I thank the Auditor General and his colleagues very much for coming along and taking part in this morning’s very helpful session.

Good morning. I welcome everybody to the seventh meeting in this parliamentary session of the Public Audit Committee. I remind members and guests that the Parliament’s rules on social distancing should be observed, and it would be greatly appreciated if you could wear a face covering when moving around, entering or leaving the room.

The first item on our agenda is to invite members to decide whether to take items 4 and 5 in private. Is that agreed?

Members indicated agreement.

We are in our final few minutes. If other members want to come back in for another go, they are welcome to do so.

Going back to the overall outcomes and where we began, it struck me that, although we have a national strategy that has been in place since 2016 and an act of Parliament that provides for a new institutional structure to deliver community justice, the conclusion of the Audit Scotland report was that little progress appears to have been made in the intervening period.

I understand the points that Mr Griffin made at the beginning about the total volumes and how that has changed. However, as the Public Audit Committee, one of our maxims is follow the money. The Audit Scotland report states:

“Community justice funding makes up less than five per cent of overall justice funding, and there has been little change in recent years.”

If we are following the money and this is a priority and everybody wants to see a change in the balance between custodial and non-custodial, why is that so static?

Craig Hoy has questions to probe into that area a bit more.

I want to move on. I will bring in other committee members shortly, but one thing that stood out in the briefing, which other members will address, is the quite significant geographical variations in community sentencing—for example, by local authority areas. What is your understanding of the reasons for such wide and marked variations, depending on where someone is in Scotland?

One area that is highlighted in the report is digital access and the use of digital tools. Craig Hoy has a number of questions on what is an evolving picture, and I think that Willie Coffey might want to ask briefly about it, too.

Thank you, Mr Griffin. Feel free to bring in the other witnesses alongside you, if you think that they could helpfully illuminate some of those points further.

You spoke of totals. I am not in a position to dispute the figures that you presented to us, which we will look at in a bit more detail, but there is an emphasis in the Audit Scotland briefing on the proportions. It is a stated aim of public policy to change the balance between custodial and non-custodial sentences. However, over the past three years, the proportion of non-custodial sentences went from 59 per cent to 56 per cent, then back up to 59 per cent. That does not show a clear line of progress to the public or members of this committee; rather, it looks as though there has been one step forward, one step back, then one step forward again. Will you reflect on the proportions as well as the totals?

The second item on our agenda, and the main purpose of the first half of our meeting, is to discuss the Audit Scotland briefing, “Community justice: Sustainable alternatives to custody”. We have with us three witnesses from the Scottish Government. I am delighted to welcome to the committee Joe Griffin, who is the director general of education and justice; Neil Rennick, who is the director of justice; and Catriona Dalrymple, who is the deputy director of community justice and parole.

We have a number of questions to ask, but perhaps Mr Griffin would like to begin by making an opening statement.

Thank you, Mr Griffin. As I said, we have a range of questions that we want to ask and ground that we want to cover.

I will begin by reflecting on the briefing, which put in fairly sharp relief the picture as Audit Scotland saw it. When we received evidence from the Auditor General, he said that there was

“a fairly static level of progress”,—[Official Report, Public Audit Committee, 30 September 2021; c 37.]

which was an interesting—and perhaps a polite—way of describing what could best be described as a zig-zag in the outcomes of custodial versus non-custodial sentences.

It is important to emphasise that the findings of Audit Scotland were that, if people with sentences of one year or less were put in custody, there was a 49 per cent chance of reconviction within the next year, whereas if they went into the community justice system, there was a 30 per cent probability of reconviction.

We also know that there is an enormous cost to the public of people serving time in prison. Audit Scotland came to the figure of a cost of more than £37,000 a year for somebody to be kept in jail, compared with a cost of around £1,894 a year for an equivalent community sentence. That is a massive discrepancy and, as the Public Audit Committee, we are interested in such figures.

Do you accept those findings and all the other findings in the report?