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The financial memorandum associated with the bill includes commentary that the Government believes that what is proposed will not result in any up-front or one-off costs for the Crown or the SCTS. However, earlier, you stated that some procedural or technical changes would need to be made within the system to accommodate and implement any changes as a result of the bill.

Do you agree with the Government’s assertion that the bill will come at no cost to your organisations? If you disagree, will you go away and do any associated analysis or work on what changes would be required and the potential costs of making those changes?

Thank you.

Yes, but you will know the cost, for example, of non-attendance and repeat diets coming back to the same place or of additional deputes. I am sure that those things have costs.

Good morning to our guests. We have spent a bit of time talking about input from social work and other stakeholders to inform bail decisions by sheriffs. None of that is unwelcome, but other parts of the bill deserve further scrutiny. In particular, I want to focus on the parts that deal with grounds for refusing bail and the removal of bail restrictions.

From the discussion that we have had, it sounds to me as though many of the issues in the system are practical ones around the provision of information and the knock-on effect that that has on resources for criminal justice social work or local authorities. I want to ask about the legislation. It is not obvious that you need primary legislation to fix what are clearly practical issues in the system; they could be fixed as it is. Why do we need a bill in order to reduce the remand population? The Government clearly thinks that there are too many people on remand—that is the whole point of the bill. Is the remand population too high, and does the bill deal appropriately with any perception that there is a high remand population?

That is quite a general first question. I will come on to a specific question afterwards.

I will come back to Joanne McMillan in a second; I want to move to the Law Society first. In your written submission, your response to that question is rather brief and non-committal. I get the impression that the Law Society does not really have a view on changes to the grounds for refusing bail; you just state the obvious in the sense that judges give careful consideration to such matters and that they judge each case on a case-by-case basis. We all know that already. You have not made any commentary on the proposed changes, so I wonder whether you could share a view, if you have one, now.

They could be fixed externally.

Those are problems that the bill does not address or fix. We know that the backlog and the amount of time that people are being held on remand awaiting trial is an issue. Another problem is the suspicion that defence lawyers might be saying, “Just plead guilty, because the sentence will be less than the amount of time you spend on remand.” People are still in the same environment, but they have fewer rights and options open to them, which is worrying.

Mr Mackie, could you go back to the original question? You will know, because you sit in a court, that courts deal with different cohorts of people in different ways, but the bill does not do that.

I am sorry to interject, but we are tight on time. From what I saw at Glasgow sheriff court on Monday, sheriffs consider such factors. They will consider, for example, whether the accused is a young person, a female or someone who has been declared as having mental health or addiction complications. Having a full-time job is clearly a factor in some cases, as is the mention of children or the fact that the person is somebody’s carer. Those are already factors, so why do we need to bake that into the legislation?

My final question is on a specific issue. If the changes in the bill come to fruition and the public safety consideration is the primary consideration for whether bail is granted or otherwise, what powers will the sheriff have to deal with the issue of repeat non-appearances? That has been specifically raised with us. There is concern that a person will simply fail to appear at future diets, and sometimes custody is the only way to ensure their presence at the trial, for example. If the sheriff has nothing up their sleeve to ensure that a person who, historically, has breached scheduled appearances on a number of occasions appears in court, they will not be able to do that. How do we deal with that?

Good afternoon, chief inspector. I want to follow on from that conversation around the duties on the police and enhanced responsibilities that result from an increased volume of people on bail. This was mentioned in the previous evidence session. We do not know how up to date the figures are, so perhaps the parliamentary research team could help us with this, but when I last checked, the figure was that one in eight crimes was committed by someone on bail. I do not know how many crimes that is, but it is a fair amount. Obviously, the police are the front line when it comes to dealing with reported crime. They are responsible—and not just for how the reporting is handled. We can talk about 101 calls until the cows come home—that is another matter for another day. You have to turn up to and deal with the initial report and, perhaps, arrest someone, potentially dealing with their custody over the weekend, for example. I will turn the phrase on its head: is it inevitable that if the bail population—rather than the remand population—increases, the number of offences committed by people on bail will also increase? Is that a wrong assertion?