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That will be a decision for legislators—that will be for you and me. I am not going to make a blanket determination on that.

I would be happy to engage directly with Scottish Women’s Aid on that, because I do not want that to be the perception or the reality. As Ms Chapman mentioned, in the on-going improvement work following the workshops that we undertook with partners, 10 areas have been identified in which more detailed work is needed, including training, data sharing, court processes and structured case management. Ms Chapman spoke about some of the work that needs to be developed.

Rather than make promises now that I cannot keep—other than to say that I will want to give a fair hearing to all of this—I will simply say that we will consider matters further over the summer. I have a meeting arranged with Mr Findlay, and I would also be happy to meet Ms Chapman, separately or together with Scottish Women’s Aid, over the summer, so that we can at least ensure that we look with a fresh pair of eyes at where we are, what the timescales are and what the journey ahead is.

I would consider best practice to be aligned to modernising our criminal justice system so that—in the example of DESC—evidence can be shared from crime scene to courtroom. That supports the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the justice system and is to the benefit of everybody who comes into contact with it. As a programme of work, DESC has benefited from £33 million of investment and has the support of our justice partners. I hope that you understand my reticence about rolling back on the use of DESC. It is right and proper that I, with respect, point out that amendment 44 would not permit the use of DESC to store digital evidence and share it in court, which is one of the main benefits of that significant programme of reform.

My comments on amendment 46 also apply to Ms McNeill’s amendment 93. The bill, and my amendment 5, which I will come on to, clearly set out the process by which parties can apply for a judicial direction to have a physical item produced. Amendment 93 would give parties an unqualified right to have items produced when they requested it, with no role for the court to decide whether that was necessary to avoid prejudicing the fairness of proceedings.

I take this opportunity to reassure Mr Kerr and Ms McNeill that there is an existing common-law right for the defence to examine any physical item whose condition is critical to the case against the accused, even when it will not be produced at trial. There is nothing in the bill that interferes with that right, which will continue to apply even when an image is used at trial. That right should be exercised promptly after the defence is made aware of the item through disclosure by the Crown and should inform any application to require the physical item to be produced in court instead of the proposed image.

As members will be aware from the policy memorandum, there are clear statutory exclusions. Members will be familiar with what they are. That means that there is a cohort of people who are not considered for HDC. There are also other statutory criteria, all of which have to be met. Sentences must be three months or more. People must have served at least a proportion of their sentence—that is one of the things that we are proposing to change. People can be on HDC only for a minimum of 14 days and for a maximum period. The criteria around sentence length, eligibility, proportion of sentence served, and minimum and maximum period all have to be met.

The reality is that if, for example, someone was sentenced to one year, the change to the automatic early release point for some short-term prisoners will mean that they are released after 144 days, rather than after 180 days, which would have been the case before the changes. Due to the changes in relation to the short-term population, the potential time spent in HDC has reduced from 90 days to 54 days.

We want to realign the HDC process with the short-term prisoner 40 per cent programme. It does not mean that every prisoner who is eligible for home detention curfew will be eligible for the maximum time, because it depends on the length of their sentence, how long they have spent on remand, how long the assessment process takes, and how long it takes to gather information, particularly from the community. Of course, people must pass the assessments as well.

The requirement for virtual attendance was a clear focus of the committee throughout stage 1. However, it should be acknowledged that forms of virtual attendance have been practiced in our courts for decades. Vulnerable witnesses have routinely given evidence remotely; pre-pandemic, it was possible for an accused person to be sentenced via videolink from prison.

There are a number of benefits to allowing more witnesses to give evidence remotely. It reduces travel time and costs and reduces disruption for witnesses, making our justice system more accessible and responsive to the needs of all its users. Ms McNeill’s amendment 34 would therefore be a step in the wrong direction. A requirement for a court official to be in attendance with any person attending a trial virtually is wholly unworkable in practice and would place an unsustainable burden on court officers, leading to unquantifiable but significant costs.

The use of virtual attendance for police and professional witnesses giving evidence in high court cases is currently the norm. It allows police, and doctors in the national health service, to be removed from their front-line duties for less time. In his submission in January, Malcolm Graham of the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service confirmed that

“Since January 2022 more than 952 police officers and more than 371 expert witnesses have provided evidence remotely to the High Court of Justiciary.”

The amendments in this group address points that were raised by the Crown Office and the committee during stage 1 proceedings and address the request for reassurance that nothing contained in the bill will undermine the commonly understood definition of domestic abuse in Scotland.

Amendment 14 provides that the deaths of children who are killed by a parent where there was not domestic abuse, or where it was not believed that there was domestic abuse, will not be included in the domestic homicide and suicide review model. It does that by requiring there to have been, or to appear to have been, domestic abuse between the perpetrator and a current or former partner before the death can be a reviewable death.

That ensures that abusive behaviour is out of scope of a domestic homicide and suicide review if it is not anchored in domestic abuse between partners or ex-partners. I would clarify that that does not create or leave a gap in respect of deaths of minors, because cases that are, for instance, purely child abuse-related would continue to be reviewed, as they currently are, through existing child protection learning reviews.

With similar reasoning, amendment 14 also provides that a suicide will be reviewable only if it is thought to have been contributed to by abuse by the partner or ex-partner of the deceased. That means that children who are bereaved by domestic homicide or suicide who then die by suicide, or children who die by suicide where their parent was experiencing domestic abuse, would not be included in the review model. Where the child is a minor, such deaths would continue to sit within the remit of child protection learning reviews, although those can be brought into the scope of the review in future through the enabling power in section 10.

My amendments in this group will provide for the expansion of domestic homicide and suicide reviews in certain defined circumstances. At present, the bill will enable reviews that can learn lessons from the death and the circumstances that led up to it, but not beyond it. The amendments will allow a review to consider the aftermath of a death in circumstances in which the victim and perpetrator were partners or ex-partners and where, at the time of the death, either of them had a child who was a young person or an adult at risk. That will also apply if there was a young person who was not their child living in their household at the time of the death.

The amendments will enable a greater understanding of what happens to such bereaved persons following a death, whether their views are sought on decisions that impact them and whether those views are considered by professionals in making their decisions.

Amendment 19 will make provision to allow the remit for the reviews to be expanded beyond the point of death while setting out the persons to whom the expansion applies and the parameters of what can be examined within an expanded review. The amendment also sets out that the consent of the Lord Advocate will be required before the remit of a review can be expanded. That is to ensure that any live criminal investigation or proceedings are not jeopardised.

Amendments 12 and 13 will make consequential changes to section 9, which describes what a domestic homicide and suicide review is. That simply reflects the fact that, under amendment 19, in some cases, a review will now be expanded beyond the point of death.

Amendment 21 will make consequential changes to section 17 to require that the terms of reference of a review reflect any expansion of the remit. The amendment will also allow the review remit to be adjusted later to cover any cases in which it is appropriate to revisit the initial decision on whether to expand the review remit. That will allow for flexibility. However, it continues to be the case that the Lord Advocate’s consent will be required for any extension, so the same safeguards will apply as to any initial decision on whether to expand the remit of a review.

The expansion of the reviews to consider relevant bereaved persons following a domestic homicide or suicide is in line with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child—specifically, article 12, which states that children and young people have the human right to have opinions and for those opinions to be heard and taken seriously. By expanding the review model in such circumstances, domestic homicide and suicide reviews will help to learn from the aftermaths of such deaths to improve practice, implement change and better safeguard children, young people and supported adults.

I move amendment 12.

Amendment 12 agreed to.

Amendment 13 moved—[Angela Constance]—and agreed to.

Good morning. I thank the Parliament clerks, the Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee and the Criminal Justice Committee for agreeing to accommodate the scrutiny of the SSI within the minimum SSI laying period of 40 days.

I hope that the committee and the wider Parliament will support the proposals, which will allow us to complete the SSI process before Parliament rises for the summer recess. That will provide the Scottish Prison Service and justice social work staff with as much time as possible to make preparations before the proposed changes come into force on 20 October.

As members will be aware, the changes that are set out in the SSI relate to a commitment that was made in the programme for government for 2024-25. They are part of our on-going efforts to achieve an effective balance between the use of custody and the use of community alternatives, and they will support our efforts to achieve a sustainable population across our prisons.

Home detention curfew is a long-standing part of the prison system that is consistently deployed as a method of easing the transition from prison sentence back to the community. Home detention curfew provides a structured way to manage that transition, placing the individual under clear licence conditions and a nightly curfew, while allowing them to readjust to life in the community and engage with any support that they need.

The foundation of home detention curfew is the individualised risk assessment that is conducted by the Scottish Prison Service, with evidence provided by community-based justice social work staff before any individual is permitted release on home detention curfew. I assure members that the proposals in the SSI will not alter any of the risk assessment aspects of the HDC process.

The SSI proposes to allow home detention curfew to be granted from an earlier point in a prisoner’s custodial sentence, from the current point of 25 per cent of their sentence served in custody to 15 per cent. That change will help to realign the home detention curfew process with the new automatic release point for eligible short-sentence prisoners at 40 per cent. It will enable individuals to spend a similar proportion of their sentence on HDC to what they would previously have done. The SSI includes a further proposed change to increase the maximum permitted period that an individual can be granted home detention curfew, from 180 days to 210 days. That change will affect only a minority of prisoners, whose sentence length and other circumstances make it possible for them to be granted a longer period of HDC.

All eligible individuals will continue to have to pass the risk assessment and community assessment process before they are granted home detention curfew. HDC will continue to be based around the same risk assessment of each eligible individual. It is therefore not expected that those changes in time criteria will produce a significant increase in the number of individuals being granted HDC. Instead, it will facilitate suitable individuals to be granted more time on HDC than they currently can be, following the change in the automatic release point. That is likely to result in more individuals being in home detention curfew at any one time. However, the number of prisoners who will access home detention curfew in the future will continue to be shaped by the number of eligible individuals in the prison population at any one time and by how many of them pass the risk and community assessments.

Overall, the proposed changes are relatively straightforward. They are intended to enable individuals who are eligible and have been assessed as suitable to be granted more of the days on home detention curfew that they are eligible for. On that basis, I encourage members to indicate their support for the SSI. As always, I am happy to answer members’ questions.

There are two Government amendments in this group, both of which are minor technical amendments to provide clarity. Amendment 20 would replace the word “joint” in section 17(2)(a) of the bill with the word “combined” when referring to a

“review of two or more deaths”.

That is to avoid confusion as to what is meant by a “joint review”. The bill as introduced states that a joint review is a review of more than one death. However, stakeholders have adopted the term “joint review” to refer to a review that is carried out together with another type of review—for instance, a domestic homicide review and a child protection learning review. The amendment therefore looks to replace the term “joint” with “combined” to allow the term “joint review” to continue to be used as stakeholders are using it presently and to avoid any confusion.

Amendment 30 is another minor technical amendment, which relates to who, under section 25 of the bill, must have regard to guidance issued by the Scottish ministers. The amendment ensures that there is no doubt that references to the Scottish ministers’ “functions” mean the functions of the review oversight committee and case review panels. Although that is how the provision would likely have been understood, the amendment puts the issue beyond doubt.

I move amendment 20.

On your first point, the successful completion rate for home detention curfew, from the latest figures available, is 93 per cent, which means that there is a 7 per cent recall rate.

On your point about how rehabilitative opportunities can be supported if people are in custody for a very short time, the reality is that, although someone currently becomes eligible at the 25 per cent point in their sentence—that is one of the eligibility criteria; we are advocating that we change that—that does not mean that they will be released at that point, because they cannot be released until the risk assessment process is complete.

That process is significant—it would start with screening for eligibility. It is important to say that application is voluntary; prisoners cannot be made to go out on home detention curfew, and not every prisoner wants to be released on that scheme, which speaks to the restrictive nature of it—it is a licence tag curfew.

Once an application for home detention curfew has been submitted, the prisoner has to undergo a full risk assessment. I can talk you through that if need be—there are practice standards for that. If the assessment is positive, the prison will contact justice social work, which will look at suitability of address and speak to other individuals at the address. Information from social work and police is important.

To get to the nub of your question, a person cannot be released if they are not eligible and have not passed the risk assessment process.