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If further work is done, you could perhaps come back to the committee on that.

Good morning. There will probably be an opportunity for Malcolm Graham to reflect on some of the work that he has been talking about in response to one of my questions.

The main issue that I wish to address is one that came up when we had witnesses from Police Scotland before us last week, and it is an issue that the committee has grappled with on various occasions. I am referring to the amount of time that police officers spend in court. We heard some shocking figures from Police Scotland last week about just how much time is spent in court, including when officers are on annual leave or off for rest days. We also heard that, in about 90 per cent of cases, officers are not actually called to speak. We all recognise that from our work as MSPs and perhaps from previous roles before we came into Parliament.

What steps has the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service taken to address that issue? We heard last week that there has been good engagement between the police and the Crown and that work is on-going. Can anything be done to accelerate that and avoid police officers having to be at court unnecessarily? There could be huge savings in that for the police service.

That would be good—any progress in that area would be welcomed by this committee and others.

Malcolm Graham, I will give you a chance to come back in on some of the stuff that you talked about and which both of you had begun to reflect on in previous answers. Could there be more efficiency in other areas of the criminal justice system? You had started to talk about some of the IT systems, for instance. Can you give some practical examples of how that work might create efficiencies, perhaps with social work or health services?

I think that that was for the previous panel, but I am happy to ask it if you want. That is absolutely no problem.

Excellent, thank you. I will keep my questions specific to Stephen Llewellyn from North Lanarkshire Council. I declare an interest in that I know and work well with Stephen in his role as chief housing officer.

Stephen, I will ask about something that it might be helpful for the committee to know about. I note that North Lanarkshire Council has a quite an ambitious plan to acquire 100 properties this year via the open market purchase scheme. Will you share the lessons that you have learned from that and say what else you think your council and other councils could do to extend and improve the buy-back scheme to increase stock levels?

Sorry, convener. There have been some connection issues here today—I am not sure why.

I was saying that the Scottish Government has consistently called on the UK Government to abolish the bedroom tax and permanently uprate local housing allowance. Do the witnesses think that those reforms are needed? What impact do they think that they might have on the housing emergency?

Thank you, convener, and good morning to the witnesses.

I hope that you can hear me okay now and that the network issues have been resolved.

That answer was really helpful. I have one further question. I do not want to step on other members’ toes, because I know that we will be coming to the issue of voids, but can you talk about the void situation in North Lanarkshire? How are you ensuring that the situation is managed effectively? I know that North Lanarkshire Council has a good story to tell on voids, so could you elaborate on that?

Good morning. The time definitely seems to have gone by very quickly in this evidence session.

I wanted to focus my line of questioning on the interplay of the relationship between the Scottish and UK Governments. Obviously, we have a new UK Government in place now. One of the things that the Scottish—[Inaudible.]—consistently called on the UK Government—[Inaudible.]—I wonder whether the panel agree that those reforms are needed, and can they elaborate on what they think might be the impact—[Inaudible.]—on the housing emergency of such reforms?

Hello, convener. I did not ask to come back in.