Seòmar agus comataidhean

I want to ask about resource implications, and I will put the question to David Hamilton. Rona Mackay asked about the distress to officers, and I will quote one of the statements that is made in the SPF’s submission:

“I have seen my hands shaking on my way into some nightshifts knowing I may only have 1 or 2 cars available, just that added stress of increased call volume and low staffing levels is shocking.”

Further on, there are comments from other officers about not being able to get leave, which impacts on the service. As we know, if we lose a lot of police officers under the McCloud judgment, we will be left with a lot of less experienced officers. That would have a huge impact on the mental health of officers, who are having to deal with other individuals who are experiencing mental health issues. Is resourcing for mental health a big issue in the police service?

I have two questions. I want to explore what I have just heard about police officers being the first responders and, in effect, the last resort. What is the answer to that? I also want to ask about the resource impact.

The testimony that the federation has submitted to the committee is very useful but very difficult to read. It amplifies what we have perhaps always known, which is that the police service is the only service that cannot walk away. As a politician, I do not think that that is recognised enough and, however we have arrived at holding this round-table session, it is a crucial issue.

On the part of Professor Heyman’s submission about section 297 of the 2003 act, I do not understand why the police would even be involved when there has been no self-harm and no offence has been committed. Of course, I understand that police officers need to step in if there is harm involved. We have heard from David Hamilton about the long wait times for people to be seen by healthcare staff. It seems as though every other service can say, “We can’t take you,” but the police cannot. It is fundamental that we resolve that.

ACC Hawkins has suggested that multi-agency discussion seems likely, but we have heard that 101 services are now almost exclusively operated by the police. Is such discussion going to lead anywhere? From what I have heard, we need to make specific provision for the police not to always be the service of last resort. I do not know enough about mental health services to know what duties need to be imposed on them. Why should mental health services be able to walk away from a person who is at risk, yet the police cannot?

My question is for ACC Hawkins in the first instance. Do you not feel that, even if there is multi-agency discussion, the police will still be left as the last resort and we will get no further forward?

I do not know whether this is for you to answer, Professor Heyman, but you say in your submission:

“If no offence has been committed and there is not at immediate risk of life, police may not legally remove them from their home for assessment or safeguarding—from a Place of Safety”.

Can you tell me why the police are involved in cases like that?

I endorse what you have said. The visit was fascinating, and I learned a great deal from it. I wrote to the convener, Audrey Nicoll, with three points that came out of the group discussion, which I think the committee should consider further. I can remember two of them. One was about prescriptions not being available on a prisoner’s release. For people who need drugs immediately, that almost puts them back in jail, because they cannot get the drugs on time.

The second point related to Friday release, which has always been an issue. Why can we not do something to ensure that people have the services that they need? We could explore whether there is another way round that issue.

I might need someone to remind me what the third issue was. Oh, I remember what it was. It related to eligibility for work.

It seems that there are commonsense things that we could do to address those issues. We should write to the minister about them to see whether there is a way forward.

Would it not make sense for another service to pick that up?

Are there any gaps that need to be plugged that will not be addressed by the Online Safety Bill? Some social media companies such as TikTok, which is a big one for younger kids, are meant to have age restrictions, but I am fully aware that it is much harder to catch that when there is live streaming and ways that people can be ingenious around that. As a layperson, it strikes me that those companies are not doing enough, so do we need more laws? I appreciate that TikTok is not a UK-based company, so there would need to be international collaboration.

I was going to ask you about international examples, but you said that Scotland would be groundbreaking if we introduced such legislation.

To illustrate what you have told the committee, I note that there was another example of male power yesterday—the case of Tim Westwood, who has been a well-known DJ for 30 years. There are such examples every day. It is a global issue.

Can you point to any countries that are doing something similar? You mentioned Mona Rishmawi from the United Nations. If the committee wanted, could we get access to her through you? If Scotland is going to be groundbreaking, it would be helpful to get an international perspective, because it is a global issue.

I want to say in public what I have said in private: the work that you have done is tremendous and I thank you for it.

I am on record as voting for sex to be an aggravator in the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Bill. I felt strongly that that was missing from the legislation. However, I think that the rationale for not doing that seems to make sense. What problems do you think that we, as legislators, might come up against when we have to define something that is not already defined? The simple part of it is that sex is defined in the Equality Act 2010, whereas we will have to look at the idea of misogyny in some detail.

The working group’s definition of misogyny includes

“male entitlement, while subordinating women”,

and it is important that you talk about male power. To me, that is central to everything that the committee is doing, not only on this legislation but as it looks at the range of things that the Parliament should do. I know that you agree.

Do you have any concerns about how we go about defining? We obviously have to define misogyny and I presume that we also have to define ideas such as the subordination of women. We have an ordinary understanding of what that means, but we know that, when it comes to legislation, things may not be as simple as they first appear to be. Do you want to say anything about that to the committee? We will be dealing with it further down the line.

I thank Jamie Greene for raising the issue. The policy note could have been clearer. It refers to

“two further ways in which a person on bail can have conditions varied.”

I am struggling to determine what those two variations are. If that is the substance of the SSI, I do not understand why that has not been set out to the committee.

It looks as though the Government is saying that the instrument will just make a technical change, that we do not need to worry about it and that, as Jamie Greene has suggested, we just need to rubber stamp it. I suggest that the Government should note for future reference that, when we get an SSI policy note, there needs to be a bit more information in it. We need to know what we are being asked to sign off.

This is a short debate on the substantial set of papers put before us, so I think that we are probably all holding back a wee bit in terms of prioritising. I am not going to give all my thoughts—I just want to put that on the record.

I note Jamie Greene’s comments with regard to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service’s submission, and I want to raise a more general point just to find out what other members’ experiences have been. I do not feel that we are getting the data that we need from the Crown Office to support our examination of some of the issues that we are being asked to look at, and I do not feel that there has been transparency. A point that has come through loud and clear in relation to delays is that the Crown Office will be deciding which cases it is going to prioritise, and a big concern for me is the lack of transparency around that. I cannot disconnect the vision from the fact that we are coming through a pandemic that will cause the delays to continue.

For future reference, I would like—with anyone else who might be like-minded—to approach the Crown Office and ask for a little more information, now that we are, hopefully, coming out of the pandemic and beginning to tackle court delays. I do not think that it is unreasonable for us on behalf of our constituents and the people whose work we are trying to scrutinise—those in the Crown Office and the justice department—to get some insight into concerns that we will have over the next two years about the prioritisation of cases.

I will say no more than that, but I do not want to leave the matter there. Given that we are in public session, I put it on the record that I want to come back to the matter, because I am pretty certain that the committee will have concerns as things move forward and we try to get through these horrendously long delays. The Crown Office will, of course, want to protect its right to make its own decisions—and rightly so; I am not attempting to interfere with that—but I do not think it unreasonable for us as politicians and legislators to ask for a little bit more co-operation from the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service to let us do our jobs.