Chamber and committees

Thank you. Convener, could I respond to what we have just heard?

Thank you, convener. I hope that everyone can hear me okay, despite my earlier technical difficulties.

Good morning, Lord Advocate and thank you for appearing before us today. Much of what I was going to ask about has been covered in the initial questions. I will pick up on another point, which is based on the evidence session that we had with the cabinet secretary last week, which I am sure that you saw or indeed read the transcript of.

I was quite struck by what the cabinet secretary said in many of his answers. He made it clear that any fundamental changes to the legal system, whether on corroboration, judge-only trials, the removal of the not proven verdict and jury sizes and majorities, were matters for the Lord Advocate, and not for him, as cabinet secretary, to comment on. I want to get to the bottom of that, because in your answers you seem to be implying that such decisions are political decisions and matters for parliamentarians, not for the Crown. The politicians, on the other hand, are saying that those are matters for the Crown.

Where do you think that the buck will stop with the decisions that we are talking about, some of which will be very difficult and controversial?

Thank you—that was very helpful.

Thank you, convener—I will try to keep my questions succinct.

In 2018, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prosecution in Scotland produced its “Thematic Report on the Victims’ Right to Review”. Last year, there were nearly 34,000 cases in which the Crown Office either discontinued prosecution or decided not to prosecute a case in the first place. What percentage of complainers were notified of those decisions and how were they notified? Why are less than 1 per cent of victims applying for a review of a decision not to prosecute or continue a case?

That question is to the Lord Advocate.

Thank you, Crown Agent—I appreciate that. I wanted to flag up the point, because the review was clear in its recommendation that all victims should be “notified of such decisions” and offered whatever options of remedy are available to them, should they wish to apply for a review. The numbers speak for themselves. I look forward to getting more detail on that from the Crown.

My second question concerns the Moorov doctrine, which is highly relevant to many of the cases that we are discussing today. We heard compelling points from victims of such crimes in our private sessions. I will not go into great detail, but they felt that the practice was perhaps misunderstood. They felt that they misunderstood the implications of that type of prosecution, and that juries perhaps misunderstood the consequences of the decisions. That is well documented in the public paper that we have produced.

Will the Lord Advocate or the Crown Agent comment on what measures the Crown is taking to improve communication on Moorov as practice and on whether they feel that it is an appropriate and successful metric for prosecuting people in complex and multiple circumstances?

Good morning. I want to follow the same line of questioning. I will not elongate it too much, because you have covered a lot of the ground.

There seems to be a general acceptance that things do not always go well 100 per cent of the time and that every case that does not go well is unfortunate. However, what struck the committee was the scale and volume of the negative feedback that we heard. We do not seem to be talking about isolated incidents. The whole experience of reporting such offences seems to be traumatic.

What improvements could be made to the environment in which crimes of this nature are reported? We have heard that they tend to take place at certain times of the day and on certain days of the week—at weekends, during the night or early in the morning. Some witnesses or victims might be intoxicated or under the influence, voluntarily or otherwise. During the night, officers at the front desk or on the front line might not be as trauma informed as officers would be at other times of the day. Could the police do more to ensure that that first contact is not as traumatic and scary as it seems to be for many victims? That is directed at anyone who wants to respond.

That response is welcome. We will come on to the issue of training—other members have questions on that. In the scenario that I painted in which it is 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning on a Saturday going into Sunday, what is the likelihood that someone who has had that robust and comprehensive training will be at hand in a local police station in the middle of nowhere? Such a station might deal with these incidents only a couple of times a year. Is it more likely that people will get that trauma-informed approach in our large cities, where the volume of cases is higher or where you simply have more staff on duty, than in rural environments or small towns?

DCS Faulds wants to come in.

Absolutely. There will be resource implications not only for the SCTS and the Crown but for the defence sector. If more cases per day are run than is currently the case, we will obviously have to provide sufficient resources to ensure that people are represented.

The concept of a specialist court is not new, and I hope that we can learn from the integrated domestic abuse courts. We accept that, if a large number of crimes are of a similar nature, they can be dealt with in a similar way in a central place, for example. What feedback has there been on domestic abuse courts from the Faculty of Advocates, the Law Society, the police, victims organisations and the third sector? Those groups will have had to interact with specialist courts in the past, so have any learnings—positive or otherwise—come from that?

Good morning, cabinet secretary and guests. The central question with regard to specialist courts is whether they are intended to be used instead of, or as well as, existing infrastructure. The fundamental issue, which is still unclear, concerns what would be taken away from other court mechanisms in order to specialise in those dedicated courts.

Would we be taking things away from existing mechanisms or simply adding to the capacity of the courts in order to clear the backlog? We need to clear the backlog—nobody disagrees with that. Each of those approaches creates its own set of very different issues, and I think that the committee is struggling with that. There is a top-level recommendation from Lady Dorrian, which seems to have a lot of positive elements to it, such as the importance of taking a trauma-informed approach. However, the devil is in the detail. What will the Government present to the committee and the Parliament, so that we can work through the detail? There will clearly be financial and resource issues in relation to how specialist courts might work in the future.