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I am sorry to interject, but we are tight on time. From what I saw at Glasgow sheriff court on Monday, sheriffs consider such factors. They will consider, for example, whether the accused is a young person, a female or someone who has been declared as having mental health or addiction complications. Having a full-time job is clearly a factor in some cases, as is the mention of children or the fact that the person is somebody’s carer. Those are already factors, so why do we need to bake that into the legislation?

My final question is on a specific issue. If the changes in the bill come to fruition and the public safety consideration is the primary consideration for whether bail is granted or otherwise, what powers will the sheriff have to deal with the issue of repeat non-appearances? That has been specifically raised with us. There is concern that a person will simply fail to appear at future diets, and sometimes custody is the only way to ensure their presence at the trial, for example. If the sheriff has nothing up their sleeve to ensure that a person who, historically, has breached scheduled appearances on a number of occasions appears in court, they will not be able to do that. How do we deal with that?

Good afternoon, chief inspector. I want to follow on from that conversation around the duties on the police and enhanced responsibilities that result from an increased volume of people on bail. This was mentioned in the previous evidence session. We do not know how up to date the figures are, so perhaps the parliamentary research team could help us with this, but when I last checked, the figure was that one in eight crimes was committed by someone on bail. I do not know how many crimes that is, but it is a fair amount. Obviously, the police are the front line when it comes to dealing with reported crime. They are responsible—and not just for how the reporting is handled. We can talk about 101 calls until the cows come home—that is another matter for another day. You have to turn up to and deal with the initial report and, perhaps, arrest someone, potentially dealing with their custody over the weekend, for example. I will turn the phrase on its head: is it inevitable that if the bail population—rather than the remand population—increases, the number of offences committed by people on bail will also increase? Is that a wrong assertion?

That is entirely the answer that I expected from you. It is entirely appropriate that, if your workload is increased, the Government must rise to the occasion.

I have another question around monitoring. Let us say that there is a political decision to hold fewer people on remand, and so, subsequently, more people may be given bail—that is, after all, the premise of the bill. There may be additional conditions or increased monitoring, whether electronic monitoring or other forms of restriction of liberty. What role will the police play in that regard? Will the police have no role at all, with it being purely down to criminal justice social workers or other agencies to fill that role, or will the police have quite an active role with regard to those who are out on bail, who may be among that cohort of up to 20 per cent who reoffend while on bail? What duty do you have in relation to ensuring that public protection is paramount?

A few other things popped into my mind. How will we quantify that rebalancing, which I think is the word that you used, if we are shifting the balance of risk from one element of the criminal justice system to another—in this case, to the police? The financial memorandum is suitably vague in its analysis of that, beyond the fact that there may be a shift in the volume of people from those remanded to those who are released on bail. What work needs to be done ahead of the bill continuing its progress through the committee and Parliament to give you the satisfaction that the policy shift and rebalance will be matched by financial rebalancing?

They could be fixed externally.

I will perhaps come back to that question later.

I am not sure whether it is appropriate to intervene, but I will make a comment. I feel that the previous comments are very relevant. It is about not just the quantity or scale of trials that seem to be fully virtual but the outcomes. The other side of the data would be far more useful in some ways, and that was the piece that we were missing during the passage of the bill. Knowing the volume will be superfluous if we do not know what effect that is having on outcomes. That data might address some of the issues that members have in that regard. It is that level of data that we need to see.

Good morning. Thank you for your written submissions.

I will focus on the bill. I appreciate that there are many wider issues that the committee could focus on, but we have limited time and I am keen to extract as much as I can from you about the bill and its content.

Part 1 of the bill deals with narrowing or restricting the parameters for granting bail. I presume that the Government would argue that our remand population is too high. Others might attest to and agree with that point and would argue that the bill, as drafted, would meet its obligation of reducing the remand population. The financial memorandum to the bill estimates that it would lead to a reduction in the remand population of around 20 per cent. On current figures, that equates to the release of around 1,800 people who would be remanded under the current system.

On the face of it, the bill therefore meets its objectives. First, do you agree philosophically, or as a matter of principle, that the remand population is too high? Secondly, do you agree that the bill meets its objective of reducing the remand population, and does it do so in a way that also meet the needs of victims?

I put that question to Kate Wallace first.

To follow on from the conversation that we have just had, one of the difficulties that we are having is perhaps a keenness not to equate subjective assumptions or analyses with facts. It is quite easy to say that there are too many people on remand. That may or may not be true, but it depends on your definition of what is right and what is wrong in terms of remand decisions under the status quo.

Is it the case that there are too many people on remand or is it the case—I am throwing this out there, not taking a view—that the right people are rightly being held on remand but are wrongfully being held on remand for too long? Due to court backlogs, there is an inevitability to that—we have heard anecdotal evidence of people being held for longer than the end result of their custodial sentence would have been, even after conviction. It appears that there are simply too many people in prison on remand who should have been released much earlier because their cases should have been heard much earlier. That is off the back of the first evidence session that we had.

Professor McNeill made a point about the data—that we should look at not just the numbers but the context and the profile of those who are being held on remand and the types of offences that they are being held for.

I am just throwing that point out there to play devil’s advocate, because it is quite easy to say that there are too many people on remand, and then it becomes seen as a truth without being challenged, so I am keen to make sure that we challenge it.