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It is all very well speaking to newspapers, but it would be nice for the federation to speak to the committee about it.

Thank you for letting me back in. Obviously, when you are the first to speak, it opens up the can of worms.

My question is about the issue of backfilling positions. Rona Mackay is right to point out that the aim—and Police Scotland’s wording is very specific—is that

“Police Scotland will endeavour to recruit 300+ probationers per quarter.”

That would work out at 1,200 per year, which is still less than the number who are retiring. However, there is obviously a time lag between recruitment and going live on the job, and it is fair to assume that the majority of those who will graduate and go into service will not be going into the higher-end roles. It is quite notable that, of the 1,377 who could leave in the next 12 months, approximately half are at police constable level, and that is a substantial number, but of course it is unlikely that many of the people of the cohort of 300 per quarter will be going into roles as chief inspectors, superintendents, or chief superintendents. It is therefore inevitable that those higher-ranking roles will not be filled quickly, and that is where that loss of experience is important. Rona Mackay is right to say that people with 30 years’ service will be thinking about retirement; I know that if it was me, I would be thinking about my retirement. It is the rate at which that might happen which could cause worries.

There may not be a panic button now, but I do not think that we are far around the corner from pressing the panic button on this, because we do not really know how many people Police Scotland will recruit and how long it will take them to get into active service. These are questions that we must ask Police Scotland.

Notwithstanding the pay dispute, which has its own process, if there is the real-terms budget cut that is forecast and widely acknowledged, what effect will that have? Is that a capital resource or a resource budget cut or both? What effect will it have on increasing that churn? We do not want to get to a point, in a year, 18 months, or two years, where they say, “We told you so—the numbers are far lower than what is needed.”

The police are already talking about moving into front-line services people who currently work in the force but are not in local policing, for example. I am not quite sure what corporate service roles are and why those people are doing those roles and not local policing or front-line policing, but if Police Scotland is already having to take people out of those roles to fill in gaps, who will fill those back-office roles that obviously need to be done? If they did not need to be done, no one would be doing them.

The correspondence that the committee has had raises a whole bunch of questions and we should either try to take evidence or write to ask for more detail on that. I would quite like to see a forecast plan of numbers and the ranks that people will be at. The police will surely be doing long-term resource planning for the next couple of years. That might give us a better idea of when we could see a crossover between everything being just about manageable to there being a major issue for us, and the sooner we get sight of that, the better. If that major issue does not exist, that is great, but those projections should be quite easy to forecast, given the numbers.

That was years ago, and that was a very specific trial that went wrong. We get that. However, I do not understand the link between a seven-year-old decision that cost tens of millions of pounds for technology that is currently sitting there and not being used to its benefit, and the modern-day environment, when we are halfway through 2022. I think that the conversation has moved on. Technology—the software and the hardware—has certainly moved on. However, are you saying that the public mood has not moved on so, as a result of that, we should not do things, because the public are against them?

Yes. It is not necessarily on the same issue, but it follows on.

Good morning, commissioner. I have to say that I find this quite challenging. As you have said, much of the narrative being played out in the media is about a polarised debate between human rights and public safety considerations and the use of technology that enforcement agencies could and should be using.

If the SPA or ministers were to propose, say, a trial of facial search or recognition technology at a specific event or locus or just some wider policy, what test would you subject it to? Would it simply be subject to the code of practice? At what point would you feel comfortable with pushing back on political decisions or even operational matters being proposed by the police or ministers and saying, “No, I’m uncomfortable with this”?

That is helpful. The scenario that you mentioned is a useful one to put the issue in context, but there are obviously hundreds of other scenarios. My concern is about how you worded and structured your answer, in that it seemed to imply that it would be nice if they involved you, but that there is no statutory duty on them to do so. Theoretically, I guess that that means that they could do what they want in that respect within the confines of what is and is not legal—in the overt environment, anyway; we know what happens in the other world. If they did not actively involve you, you would therefore be merely an observer to the proceedings and then part of the mop-up in deciding whether any good or damage was done. Does that make you feel uncomfortable? Would you prefer a more active or statutorily powerful role?

Yes. My question follows on nicely from the point about procurement. It is not directly about that, although procurement is an issue.

I am sure that you will remember that, as far back as 2015, through the future cities project, Glasgow procured a high volume of digital surveillance cameras to replace its old analogue system, at a cost of around £24 million. Around 500 cameras currently sit there. They are capable of providing forms of facial identification if the appropriate software were to be enabled. That was quite widely reported at the time and probably quite widely resisted by many stakeholders.

Reading between the lines, it seems that the Scottish Police Federation is of the view that its operational members in front-line policing are very much in favour of much more enhanced use of technology on a proactive basis, such as the enabling of CCTV to perform certain functions around the specific targeting of people, tracking missing persons and preventing crime in certain areas of the city. However, off the back of the 60-page report that the Justice Sub-Committee on Policing published in the previous parliamentary session, the federation felt that those views had not been taken fairly into account by that sub-committee. I say that with respect to members of the current committee who sat on the sub-committee. That is just a general overview on the part of the federation.

It seems to me that there is a conflict. It seems that local authorities and operational police are very much in favour of the benefits of the technology, but they feel that its use has been thwarted by a public or political perception of the so-called big brother state argument. Where do you sit on that? Are you likely to make a more proactive recommendation to Glasgow City Council and the police on enhanced use—in other words, the switching on—of those cameras, which are sitting there and not being used to their benefit?

The reality is that our phones have more biometric data about us than the police, local authorities or the NHS. The problem is that we are talking about narrow use of facial recognition, such as cameras that identify people at football matches, but if we look at where technology has gone, it is 100 years ahead of that. There is ear recognition, hand and finger recognition and vein pattern and voice recognition. Artificial intelligence could be using pretty much everything about you to proactively identify you, and it is already happening in many commercial settings. However, we are talking about what happens in the legal world and we already know that law enforcement agencies in some countries are using it to discriminate and pull out certain ethnic and minority groups to incarcerate them. It can therefore do down a dangerous road. Thankfully, we do not live in that environment.

Will the member take an intervention?

I thought that, rather than intervening, I would let the cabinet secretary make his case. However, I have one comment.

The argument seems to be that, in an emergency, the affirmative procedure would simply take too long and would affect the policy intention of an instrument. How long is too long? How long would the affirmative procedure take in practice, and how long has it taken historically? I question whether it would take too long.

If the argument is that amendments 1024 and 1025 would mean that, if the Parliament was in recess, nothing would happen for months on end, I dispute that. We found during the coronavirus emergency that, in such emergencies, Parliament can be recalled and can sit virtually or otherwise to pass legislation, including regulations that are subject to the affirmative procedure. The amendments could easily be fixed on a technical level to ensure that they applied only when Parliament was sitting and that there was sufficient time to give the affirmative procedure its due process.

In the past, the Government has expedited regulations and law-making powers when that suited it, so we know that the process can be shrunk not just to days but almost to hours. Therefore, I dispute the argument against Mr Simpson’s amendments.