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I am not informed of every single use of every single power, but if, for example, a wing has to be closed down or people have to be isolated in that way, or if there is a move towards double shifting, which means more purposeful activity is taking place, I am advised of those things.

As I have said, the priority was the 285 live cases, which have now been completed. That is the priority that we set for those involved.

I should say that it was 13 January when concerns first came to light, and further tests were done by Government on 24 January, leading up to 25 February.

On the previous point, about the types of offences, those 285 live cases would have been subject to the LS/CMI, which is why we made them a priority. However, I again mention that the ones that involved sexual offences or serious violence would have been subject to a different tool that manages that high level of risk. What Cat Dalrymple is now talking about is going further and considering previous cases to ensure that we are satisfied with the rest of the system, too.

I will let Cat Dalrymple come in, but our priority was to make sure that there were no public protection issues. As has been mentioned, the index case for which somebody was first convicted sometimes does not give the full information.

I do not know whether Cat wants to add to—

That would vary from prisoner to prisoner but I will ask Jennifer Stoddart whether she can give those figures. I am sure that they have been reported to Parliament previously. I do not know whether she has them to hand.

That is an entirely reasonable request. It is perhaps a bit distinct from the point that Mr Findlay raised about the chief inspector not having the information that she was looking for. I am happy for what Mr Greene suggests to happen. Obviously, when lockdowns happened very unexpectedly, it was more difficult to achieve that, but there should now be no reason for not having the maximum possible transparency. We are talking about prisoners, but their rights are being affected, so the call for transparency is legitimate. I will certainly do what I can, and I am sure that the SPS will, too, to ensure that we have that.

It is, for the straightforward reason that there are, literally, boundaries that apply to the prison estate that do not apply to wider society. It is true to say that no society had their public estates, whether it was their schools, hospitals or prisons, as they would have wanted them to be, in relation to ventilation and so on, to deal with a pandemic. That is no less true for the Prison Service. Despite the substantial modernisation that has taken place over the past 15 to 20 years, some of the prison estate is still Victorian. The Prison Service cannot get past that constraint. In wider society, we can change our behaviours or change where we go in a way that prisoners and prison officers cannot. That is why there are higher levels of restrictions in prisons. The consequences of one person getting the virus in an enclosed environment such as a prison can be much faster transmission.

I do not know whether Allister Purdie wants to add to what I have said, but that is the main constraint that I see. That is why, throughout the pandemic, as he said, we have required prisoners to meet a different standard. That approach has been really successful, and I acknowledge the work of the Prison Service and the pressure that staff have been under during the pandemic.

It is true that we are looking at only a temporary extension of that particular power for the purposes of the pandemic, but we are also consulting on whether the power of early release should be made permanent in separate legislation. In fact, the United Kingdom Government has the same power embedded in legislation for, it seems to me, contingency planning reasons.

I think that the same argument would apply in this case. If you have to do this in response to something unexpected, you might well not have all the time that you would like for consultation and forward thinking. The early release happened before my time as justice secretary, but I know that there were concerns about whether there was enough time for throughcare to be effective and, indeed, whether victim notification was as effective as it could have been. All that I would say is that we have learned lessons from that and will seek to apply them to any future early releases, even though we have none planned. Even taking our best guess with regard to the pandemic, I have to say that its impact on society does not seem to be anything like it was. For those reasons, this is a contingency power.

On a wider point, mass releases of prisoners have been a feature of systems across the world—I think of the states of Texas and Georgia, for example, and there are other countries, too—but we do not intend to use the measure for any other purpose. The state of California, for example, was told by its Supreme Court to release around a third of its prisoners more or less overnight, because the prisons were at 120 per cent capacity. We are not in that situation; we are simply looking for a temporary extension so that the power could be used if the pandemic were to justify such a move.

I will make a general point before I go on to the specific example of children or the under-18s. As I am sure committee members will know at first hand from visiting prisons, especially from having been to Saughton prison, there is a big balancing act to be done, not just between vulnerable prisoners of different kinds but sometimes between competing serious organised crime groups. The Prison Service is very good at doing that, although it is not without its tensions and problems. That includes looking after the rights, safety and health of vulnerable prisoners.

The number of under-18s in prison is much smaller now; I think that we are down to approximately 14 from perhaps 200-plus in 2006. However, the fact is that they are put in prison by the courts—that is who decides that they go there rather than to an alternative. It might be best to hear from Allister Purdie on this, but my understanding is that the same restrictions will apply. I would point out, though, that young people are based at Polmont, which is not currently full—far from it—so that might give some latitude.

I might ask my officials to make sure that I am getting this right, but it could change without the legislation, and discussions are being held about how that might be achieved with the consent of different partners. The legislation that we are talking about will roll over what we have now. The default position is physical courts. Jeff Gibbons will correct me if I am wrong.

The bill will not move things forward as far as virtual trials are concerned; those things will continue on the current basis and according to the default positions that have already been mentioned. However, as I have said, we will want to look at whether there would be other legislative vehicles for doing that, once we have carried out the consultations and the work with partners.

It is not for me to intrude on how defence representatives prepare very vulnerable witnesses, and I would not dismiss their view that they need to be able to talk directly to their clients. Indeed, I would think that those clients would want to have confidence in their legal representatives, and perhaps a personal meeting would be crucial in that respect. In any case, in the bill, we are seeking to extend the timeframe for doing what we currently do with virtual trials, and any further or permanent extension would come through other means after a due process of consultation. There is therefore no change in that respect, if that is what you are asking about.