Seòmar agus comataidhean

We are running out of time, so I will be brief. Do you see your organisation’s role as facilitating the administration of public money that goes to the legal profession, or are you more consumer facing? Many thousands of people are going to Citizens Advice Scotland, and we know that many of its services are being cut or have been lost recently. Is that a warning that people will no longer have an idea about where to go to seek advice and help? Could you play a better role by being more consumer focused, so that people would know who you are and where to go for direct advice from the body that administers the finance, rather than going to the third sector?

It sounds as if the legal aid payment review panel, which reported to Government earlier this year, has not gone down well with you either. You say that it

“has failed to produce any meaningful results.”

I note that there was a Government-initated question in Parliament today, and the Minister for Community Safety said that the Government accepts that more consultation and research into reform needs to be done. I am sure that we will come on to talk about reform later.

I have a separate question about moving forward. We all accept that we are where we are at the moment. I think it was Mr Moir who said that courts that were set up are being mothballed. We know that there is a backlog of almost 50,000 cases to get through, and that is a concern to everyone we have spoken to at the Crown Office and in the legal profession. How do we address the backlog in the short term if there simply are not enough people to do it? I will direct that question at the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service because you obviously have an ambitious drive to clear that backlog as soon as you can. We can do it if we have the buildings and the Crown resources, but we cannot do it if there are no defence lawyers. How do we plug that gap? That is quite worrying.

Why did so many defence lawyers boycott the holiday courts? Is that constructive?

Thank you.

Good morning—it is almost the afternoon—and thank you for coming. You will note that the committee briefly debated the instrument at a previous meeting.

I have comments and questions on two distinct areas: one concerns the process of deliberation for the instrument and the other concerns its substance. On the latter, I have sympathy with the need to extend some of the powers, for the reasons that you outlined. However, on the former, I have less sympathy with the Government on the way in which we are having to process the instrument. I will start with that.

The current powers expire tomorrow, which leaves the committee in the invidious position of having to either agree or disagree with their extension. Why, cabinet secretary, did the rules come to us only last week, given the likelihood of controversy—questions and concerns have been raised by numerous members across the political spectrum—around the content, nature and extent of some of the powers and the effect that they will have on the prison population?

Your offer and undertaking are very welcome. When we granted the Government the emergency Covid powers, we all accepted from the very beginning that they would not be in force for a moment longer than was necessary—indeed, I think that the Government itself used those same words—but despite the welcome commitment that you have just made, reservations remain that that might not happen, even with the virus’s lowering prevalence.

On that point, have you done any analysis of the Covid cases that are currently in the prison estate? Where are they? Do they involve staff or inmates? How is Covid coming into the estate? Are the numbers on the rise, levelling out or dropping? I would like to get some context.

Thank you for that helpful update. I was trying to make the link with the blunt tool that we are talking about. I presume that the assumption is that if we increase legal aid fees, that will somehow magic cash into your businesses, because that is the nature of the majority of your work. Therefore, either the amount of work has to increase, or the fee per job has to increase—one of those must be true.

Is it the nature of defence work that makes it so much more reliant on a subsidy? Effectively, legal aid is a subsidy to the profession rather than to the consumer.

Right. That raises a fundamental philosophical question as to whether the public purse should be subsidising private defence solicitors, but that is a whole other conversation.

I am sure that the Government is listening carefully to this exchange. Thank you for your comments.

Reform is not a new subject for the committee or, I suspect, our witnesses. It was touched on in each of the four written submissions. It is fair to say that the Scottish Solicitors Bar Association focused more on the fees and financial aspect of reform. The Scottish Legal Aid Board accepted the need for both short and medium to long-term reform. I was quite taken by the submission from Citizens Advice Scotland, which gave more pragmatic suggestions around issues such as triage and early intervention.

Other than reforms to legal aid fees and the funding of the sector, which we have discussed at great length, what practical or immediate reforms could, or should, we make to improve legal aid? That is an open question. I do not want to direct it to anyone specifically, because I am sure that all witnesses have a view on that. Now is their opportunity to share them.