Seòmar agus comataidhean

I am listening carefully to what you are saying, but my fear is that if we do not do this, nothing will happen. We all agree on the need for sexual crimes to be dealt with by specialists and recognise the horrific rise in the number of those crimes. Do you not think that it is a step in the right direction to recognise that and to say that we are going to do something about it? I hear what you are saying, but nothing will happen if we keep the situation as it is.

I fully support amendment 233 and am glad that Karen Adam lodged it. Do you agree that the amendment could include Makaton and deafblind communicators?

You are supposing that. You are not basing that on any facts or any evidence.

I hear your point, but I come back to the point that I made to Liam Kerr. The amendment that you are proposing is far more radical, and there is no evidence of its benefits. We are saying that there should be a balance. We have come to a sensible balance with a jury of 15, so the jury size will not change, and I think that that is a safe road to go down. I think that common sense—let alone any evidence that there may or may not be—tells us that your supermajority idea would make convictions harder to get, so I cannot support your amendment 92.

There is no evidence for your position, either.

I go back to an earlier intervention that my colleague Katy Clark made on Sharon Dowey, who talked about a lack of evidence. Would you not concede that your position on a supermajority would be a radical change without evidence? You are saying that we cannot make a change because we do not have evidence, but you are proposing a radical change with a supermajority.

You referred to the bill at stage 1 proposing a jury of 12. We now need to accept that we are talking about a jury of 15, with a majority of 10. Getting rid of the not proven verdict is universally popular. Given that, do you not agree that the Government is striking the right balance by keeping the jury size at 15 but requiring a majority of 10? I think that your solution presents a much greater risk of making it much harder to get convictions. It is far more radical than what has been suggested.

I have already said, in my intervention on Liam Kerr, some of what I was going to say, but I have a question for Sharon Dowey. On amendment 92, you talked about how unsatisfactory the mock jury research was. Do you know how many people were involved in that? I know that it was quite extensive. I acknowledge what you said about it being a mock jury trial, but there was a lot of research and evidence.

Just for context, those trials involved 900 people and 64 juries. That is pretty extensive—

I completely get your point about things needing to be new and significant, but does that mean that the news is now just getting distilled into pretty much a snapshot or a headline for social media? In days gone by, you might have seen something in committee and thought, “There’s something behind that,” and you would have done more of a feature or piece on it. Of course, when I say “you”, I do not mean you personally—the media do not do that sort of thing any more.

Before we move on, I want to wind back a wee bit to what we first started talking about, which is committee structure and the suitability of members. As the chief whip of the party of Government, it is my responsibility to place members on to committees. In general, where possible, I take into account the member’s background, interest and suitability, but that approach has its problems.

I totally agree with Sir David that there are some committees that people do not want to be on, but they must be populated. Our system works on the d’Hondt system, which means that the committee structure is based on how many members the largest party has.

We have a finite number of back benchers, and in our party that is around 34. Most of those members are on two or three committees a week, and we sit for only three days. We also have a packed legislative schedule, which does not leave much time for some of the things that you have suggested.

Professor Russell talked about the justice committee. We have two justice committees, and I sit on one of them. We have a Criminal Justice Committee and an Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee, which is working well. However, on the logistics, it is difficult to get the perfect mix of committee structure and members.

I always try to get a gender balance on a committee where possible, because I think that that is important, but sometimes it is simply not possible. I just wanted to point out those things. I know that colleagues will agree with me; it relates not just to my party, but to all parties.

We have a much smaller pool than we would like of people who can populate committees and do the work that we want to do. We would much prefer to do a lot more post-legislative scrutiny and pre-scrutiny, but time and numbers of people do not allow us.