Seòmar agus comataidhean

That completes consideration of the affirmative instrument. I thank the minister and her officials for attending. We will suspend briefly to give the witnesses time to depart.

We will come on to that later.

Thank you, Stuart.

Welcome to the eighth meeting in 2022 of the Criminal Justice Committee. We are joined remotely by Audrey Nicoll, Pauline McNeill and Fulton MacGregor. Jamie Greene is running late.

The first agenda item is consideration of an affirmative instrument. I welcome to the meeting the Minister for Community Safety, Ash Regan; Denise Swanson, who is the interim deputy director of the Scottish Government’s civil law and legal system division; and Martin Brown, who is a solicitor in the Scottish Government’s legal directorate.

I refer members to paper 1, and I invite the minister to speak to the draft instrument.

No members have indicated that they have any further questions or comments, so we move straight to item 2, which is formal consideration of the motion on approval of the affirmative instrument.

Motion moved,

That the Criminal Justice Committee recommends that the Legal Aid and Advice and Assistance (Financial Limit) (Scotland) Amendment Regulations 2022 be approved.—[Ash Regan]

Motion agreed to.

Item 3 is consideration of two Scottish statutory instruments that are subject to the negative procedure. I refer members to paper 2.

No members have indicated that they have any comments or questions on either of the instruments. That being the case, are members formally content not to make any comments to the Parliament on the instruments?

Members indicated agreement.

Item 4 is the continuation of our scrutiny of the provisions in the Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Bill at stage 1. I refer members to papers 3 and 4.

I am pleased to welcome to the meeting, albeit virtually, Vicki Bell, who is a member of the Law Society of Scotland’s criminal law committee, and Stuart Murray, who is vice president of the Scottish Solicitors Bar Association. We very much appreciate your taking the time to join us this morning.

I intend to allow up to an hour and 15 minutes for questions and answers. I remind members and witnesses to try to keep questions and answers pretty succinct so that we can fit in as much as possible. I ask members to indicate the witness to whom they are directing their question. If either of our witnesses would like to speak, they can let us know by typing R in the chat box.

We move directly to questions. I open with a fairly general question for you both on what are known as virtual trials or proceedings. After two years of the Covid experience, which has become a bit of a reality, what do you regard as the general pros and cons of the virtual approach? I do not know which of you would like to come in first—I will leave it up to you. Perhaps Vicki Bell would like to go first.

Thank you. We will move on to questions from Collette Stevenson.

I put on record my apologies to Mr Fulton—[Laughter.] Sorry, I mean Mr MacGregor; I did not get his name wrong deliberately.

Before we move to the next line of questioning, Rona Mackay has a brief question. I would appreciate it if we could keep questions and answers as succinct as possible, given the time that we have left.

We move to the next area of discussion, which is time limits in criminal cases. Jamie Greene will ask questions first, followed by Audrey Nicoll, who joins us remotely.