Seòmar agus comataidhean

It is important to put on record our thanks as a committee and as members to officers and staff in Police Scotland who do an incredible job. That being said, to sum up Mr Page’s opening statement, if the RSR comes to fruition and you are offered a flat cash settlement, it sounds like you will be facing a simple choice between two options.

Option 1 is a pay freeze for five years, with all the implications that that would have. However, it sounds as if you have written off that option, as it is simply not doable because of the effect that it might have and, indeed, the resistance that you would be met with.

Option 2 is to offer some form of annual pay rise to staff and officers. Modelled on a 5 per cent pay rise, that would equate—if I am correct—to a loss of 4,400 staff over five years, which sounds like a lot.

What effect would that have on your ability to perform your basic statutory functions as a police force, notwithstanding any additional upgrade and investment projects that you may have to shelve? I am talking about your core work in protecting the public and in responding to their needs as the first response body.

The 4,400 number is modelled on a 5 per cent pay increase. If that pay rise was to increase as a result of industrial relations conversations, or industrial disputes or action, would the figure of 4,400 go up and, if so, by how much?

I live across the road from one of them.

Good morning, gentlemen. I have listened carefully to what you have said about it not being easy with your service to equate reductions in budget to reductions in head count, due to the nature of the roles and the types of contracts that people have. However, for the purpose of budget scrutiny, we have to perform some type of analysis, so maybe we could work on a full-time equivalent arrangement, which is not necessarily equivalent to how you operate, but it gives us an ability to equate people and numbers.

Could you help us to quantify what would happen in terms of front-line people if the proposed budget comes to fruition as a budget rather than as a forecast warning? The public are probably most interested in how many firefighters will be available, how many stations will remain open or have to close, how many fewer vehicles will be available and how many crew will be on a particular job or call-out. I am keen to dig below the surface in relation to that front-line service. What would it mean to front-line firefighting in Scotland if the budget comes to pass?

So, even on a flat cash settlement, have you factored in a pay rise or not? Does the calculation include a percentage pay rise?

We asked in June. We are not asking something new.

I am happy with that.

To follow on from that point, there are different bits of the bill and the implementation will come at different periods. Obviously, there was a rush to get the bill through to deal with the issue of proxy purchase and supply. I am not entirely convinced that people understand what that is or what it means. For example, parents out there might be thinking about buying fireworks. Does it mean that they cannot use fireworks in their household or if their children are there?

We understand the more obvious problem that existed, and that the bill was trying to address. However, I am concerned that, although the practice becomes illegal in five days’ time, there has been no public awareness raising. That is despite calls for that in our report and throughout the process; indeed, amendments were lodged to try to push the Government to do that. I would need to go back and check the Official Report, but I think that we were given categoric reassurances, and I am pretty sure that the Minister for Community Safety asked us not to move some of those amendments on the premise that the Government would be robust in its public awareness-raising activities. However, I have not seen or heard anything on television or radio or in ambient media—there has been zero coverage. The worry is that people will carry on doing what they do and find themselves falling foul of the law, having not known that the measure is coming into play.

There are other aspects. The other side of the coin is that people might think that we also banned fireworks, which we did not. There has not been much awareness raising on what we actually passed into law and what is happening this year versus what is happening next year.

I ask the Government to reflect on that. We are going into recess, so we will not be able to look at it until after 10 October. We are also looking at the letter only today, just a few days before the implementation of the SSI, which is not ideal.

I am content with all that, but perhaps we could be more explicit about what we want the Government to say in its response. If not, we might just get another letter that says, “We note your concern; don’t worry, we’re dealing with it.” We could ask straightforward questions about the funding barriers, the legislative framework that might cause problems and the contractual arrangements—within reason, and without delving into commercial sensitivities. I trust that the clerks could come up with reasonable questions to which we could ask the Government to respond, one by one.

This is one of the items on our tracking radar of Government actions, and the letter says nothing that we did not already know. The cabinet secretary kicks off his second substantive paragraph with:

“As you will have appreciated from the previous correspondence”.

In other words, we are to expect repetition. He goes on to say:

“the matter is not ... straightforward”.

Well, we know that. We asked what the Government was doing to resolve the not-straightforward issues.

The cabinet secretary then lists a number of barriers to making a scheme happen but does not expand on them. He talks about

“existing contractual arrangements that are in place”.

What are they? He talks about

“the potential funding resource that could be required.”

How much would be required? He says that there is

“a wider question around the existing legislative framework, and the extent to which that might need to be amended.”

Which laws does he mean?

I see no plan for how the Government might deal with those barriers, if they exist. If the Government made a robust case that the barriers are onerous—for example, because the approach would cost £20 million and there is not enough money, or because we are locked into a contractual obligation for five years, which we cannot break—that would be a fair answer and I would hear the cabinet secretary out. However, what he said sounds wishy-washy and is not acceptable, given the scale of the fees that victims of quite horrific sexual offences are asked to pay. The tone of the cabinet secretary’s letter, if not the content, does not suggest to me that the cabinet secretary will look further into the matter any time soon.

I would like us to follow up the issues that the cabinet secretary raises in his second paragraph and get a bit more of a plan from the Government on how it will navigate its way through them and come back with a solution and timescale.

I just think that, if we write in generic terms to say that we are still watching the Government on the issue, we will get a generic response. If we ask specific questions, the Government can choose whether to respond to them, but at least we will be starting to delve into the barriers to progressing the issue.

The letter flags up two issues that we were already acutely aware of, one of which is the disparity of provision across the country. The processes seem to be very different, depending on which national health service board you are in and which prison you are leaving. I understand that that is a by-product of having different NHS boards. Since the responsibility for healthcare has passed from the Scottish Prison Service to NHS boards, it seems that we are left in a mishmash of a situation.

The second issue is much wider and is one that I have been acutely aware of since I came into the Parliament: the lack of digitisation of that type of process. People have a prescription that is generated by a specific pharmacy along with a handwritten letter to their general practitioner—if they have a GP—and some prisons then have to print GP10 forms, which are then signed by somebody, presented to somebody else and then taken to a chemist.

The whole process is quite complex, and given all the money that has been spent on national NHS data systems and content management systems, I cannot understand why the NHS, in conjunction with the SPS, cannot come up with something digital that actually works. That might involve rolling back or blurring the lines of responsibility, but surely they could work together. There are not millions of people in the prison population. I appreciate that it could not be done overnight for the wider population, but surely they could come up with a digitised solution that works for the prison population.

Those are my only two comments, and the letter lays that case open again. It is something that the committee has been aware of.