Criminal Justice Committee

Meeting date: Wednesday, February 22, 2023

Official Report 748KB pdf

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Access to Court Transcripts

We move swiftly on to our next agenda item, which is access to court transcripts and consideration of the Scottish Government’s response on that issue, which we recently raised. I refer members to paper 6. Once again, I invite any views from members on the correspondence.

Ellie Wilson is a rape victim who has been very vocal, and has been campaigning, on this subject. I declare an interest, as she used to work for me. In the past couple of days, she has made it known that she has now acquired some of the transcripts that she was seeking, but she had to resort to crowdfunding to make that affordable. I do not know what the costs were, but I think, from what the committee learned previously, that they were quite significant.

In the response from Keith Brown, there is at least some acknowledgement that this is an important and serious issue. One could be cynical and say that putting information on a webpage to explain that there is a process is not great progress, but it is progress. It shows that people have somewhere to begin.

Keith Brown talks about the potential route of making a subject access request as opposed to seeking a full transcript; I do not know how that would work in practice. He also talks about exploring new technology. I assume that he means software that transcribes automatically, which I have used; it is perhaps not as good as it will ultimately be. It has been talked about and considered, but where we go next, I am not entirely sure.

Thank you for that. Jamie Greene wants to come in.

Thank you, convener, for allowing me the chance to raise this point. I put on record my thanks to Ellie, who contacted me as well on the matter, for the very public work that she is doing. It cannot be easy for her, as a survivor of a crime of that nature, to talk about it in the public domain and in the media. It is important, because when people do that, others listen.

The issue that I have with that letter is that, at the end, it says:

“In a proactive effort to improve transparency”,

the SCTS will publish information, including costs, depending on

“what type of transcript is required.”

The only thing that is becoming more transparent is how onerous and expensive the process is. If nothing else, that ambition has been fulfilled.

12:00  

However, I have a question, which the letter does not answer, about the contract and tender, and I take real issue with the second paragraph of the letter. We have been raising this issue since this committee was set up after the most recent election. It came on to the agenda quite early and we have raised it numerous times. The letter says:

“The current contract is due for renewal imminently and ... the procurement timescales do not allow for adjustments to be made to the tender on this occasion”.

How on earth did we get into that scenario? We have been flagging this issue with the cabinet secretary for more than a year. We have now discovered that the contract is being renewed, presumably on the same terms and at the same costs. Nobody knows what those costs are, we do not know what the tender is valued at, we do not know who operates the tender and we do not know what the procurement process was. Had that been identified to us a year ago, perhaps we could have asked the Government to change the criteria of the tender or to be a little more transparent about the process. All that the letter says to me is that either the contract has been extended or renewed without any due tender process, or, if there has been a tender process, it has been on the same terms as the last one, which is completely unacceptable.

The letter says:

“The product of this work will then be reflected when the contract is next out for tender.”

When is that? How long is the contract? Is it for one, two, three or five years? Will we have to wait until the next session of Parliament to revisit the issue that we have been banging on about, simply because the Government has shooed through another contract with no questions answered? I find that unacceptable. The letter raises more questions than answers. It is a shame that the cabinet secretary is no longer here to answer the questions, because I would like some answers about how on earth we are in a situation where the contract has been renewed at exactly the same onerous costs, so that we are back to square 1 and we have kicked the issue back into the long grass. That is all that we are going to get any time that we raise the issue again. It is unacceptable.

Does anybody else want to come in very quickly?

I will be brief. I find it bizarre that we have discussed this so many times but are none the wiser about what the issues are. As I have said before, I suspect that the issues are about substantial cost. I used to work in the courts, so I know that getting transcripts was very expensive, although that was a long time ago. I suspect that very substantial costs are involved and that is why it has been difficult to get progress. I do not understand why the cabinet secretary and the Scottish Government are not sharing that information with us, so that we could have an informed discussion and debate. I do not understand why there is not more straight talking and transparency. I am guessing what the issues are, because that information is not being provided to us, and we are getting meaningless correspondence from the Scottish Government.

Russell Findlay has a final point to make.

I will go back to the point that Jamie Greene made. I presume that the number of people who seek transcripts is not huge, so would it really have made a significant difference to the cost of the contract? It is maybe an academic question, but if we are writing to the Government anyway, and unpicking or asking for details about the tender, it is perhaps worth including questions of that nature.

I am not disagreeing with what has been said, because we do need to ask questions, to see whether the Government can shine any light on the issue. The second last paragraph says that the SCTS will

“make information available on their webpages”,

which will include costs and information on how to get transcripts. Although I think that that is a move forward, questions still need to be asked.

Thank you for that. I concur with the comments that members have made.

To pull things together, I propose that we write to the cabinet secretary to ask for more detail on the scope of the new contract and to ask why that detail could not have been provided earlier, as Jamie Greene pointed out.

There is scope for us to build more of a case around the provision of transcripts for those who seek copies. It might also be helpful if we were to ask, for example, Scottish Women’s Aid and Rape Crisis Scotland—which will be interested and following the matter—for an update on how easy or challenging it currently is for individuals to obtain copies of transcripts. Is there still a significant cost or has anything changed in that regard? It would perhaps be helpful for us to get some insight into that.

Are members happy with that proposal?

I do not want to carry on too long on the subject but, yes, you are right that we should ask those questions, and you can copy my comments from the Official Report and stick them in a letter to the cabinet secretary. I know that the clerks will cover all those issues in the questions that we ask, in order to get the answers that we need. Whether or not we get a response is another matter.

However, if we are where we are and it transpires that, because the contract has been renewed or extended, the status quo remains for a period of years and not months, can the Government do anything in the meantime? I am quite keen to probe that, perhaps in the same letter. I do not think that the numbers are huge, so I am not asking for millions of pounds. Is there an interim solution or mechanism whereby the Government could make funds available to support victims who require access to transcripts? That fund could be delivered or administered by a third party, such as one of the charitable organisations or other publicly funded organisations that work with victims. The funding could come from the proceeds of crime money, which is often hotly disputed. That would be a perfect way to spend that kind of money. In future, no one should have to crowdfund in order to get a transcript. We are talking about peanuts. I know that it is still thousands of pounds but, if we are stuck with the contract that we have, surely the Government could find a few bob from somewhere to create a fund to support those individuals in quite stressful situations. In the future, if the cost comes down and the service becomes cheaper, that will be super and the Government will have done a good job in changing that. However, in the meantime, we still need to do something.

I am happy for us to incorporate that into correspondence to the cabinet secretary. Obviously, the criminal justice reform bill is coming forward, and I would be very surprised if the new contract and the process around that were not incorporated into the bill.

Are members happy with what we have proposed?

Members indicated agreement.

That concludes the public part of our meeting.

12:08 Meeting continued in private until 13:06.