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Justice Committee 19 November 2013

19 Nov 2013 · S4 · Justice Committee

Item of business

Victims and Witnesses (Scotland) Bill: Stage 2

MacAskill, Kenny SNP Edinburgh Eastern Watch on SPTV

Roderick Campbell has already said a lot of what I would have said. As I have said before, we are sympathetic to the idea of extending restitution orders to workers other than the police. However, we must consider what would actually work. What makes restitution orders workable is the existence of an offence that is defined in terms of a group of workers—the police—for whom there are specific support services already in place, including the Scottish Police Benevolent Fund and the Police Treatment Centres.Although offences of assault on emergency workers are defined in the Emergency Workers (Scotland) Act 2005, there is no specific support service or organisation that corresponds to those offences. Respondents to the consultation, and those who have commented subsequently, have not been able to suggest a suitable beneficiary to whom moneys could be paid from the restitution fund. There are some benevolent funds for distinct groups of emergency workers, such as the Fire Fighters Charity, the Ambulance Services Benevolent Fund and the Social Workers Benevolent Trust. Those organisations may or may not be suitable beneficiaries, but in any case they cover only limited categories of workers, and not all of those who are set out in the 2005 act.Would it be appropriate to hand moneys that were recovered in respect of an assault on a social worker to the Fire Fighters Charity? In theory, the administrators of the restitution fund might ensure that moneys that were received following an assault on a social worker would go to the appropriate trust. However, that would greatly increase the burden on the Scottish Court Service, which would have to split the charges in the 2005 act into categories of worker in order to ensure that money could be appropriately ring fenced when it was paid in to the restitution fund. There would also be a burden on the operator of the fund to ensure that the moneys that were received for certain offences were disbursed to organisations that support victims of those specific offences. We have to question whether such effort would be, or could be, proportionate.To put the situation into perspective, in 2011-12, there were 3,357 persons with a charge proved under section 41(1A) of the Police (Scotland) Act 1967, and 193 persons with a charged proved in respect of all emergency workers under sections 1 and 2 of the Emergency Workers (Scotland) Act 2005. Splitting down those 193 offenders into categories according to type of emergency worker—there are 12 categories in the act—will produce very low returns. In the two years from January 2010 to February 2012, fines worth £330,000 were levied in respect of the offence in the Police (Scotland) Act 1967, which has been replaced by section 90 of the Police and Fire Reform (Scotland) Act 2012. The Scottish Court Service advises, on the other hand, that there was no fine income at all in 2011-12 and 2012-13 from the charges under the 2005 act because those sentences were all dealt with by community payback orders or imprisonment. It is clear from that that the sums that would be raised from fines arising from assault on emergency workers would struggle to cover the cost of administration.If it were broken down into the dozen or more funds that might prove to be necessary, such a provision would be far more likely to be an administrative cost rather than offer any benefit. It is open to the courts, where appropriate, to impose a compensation order to benefit a specific victim, which includes emergency workers and other people in public-facing roles, just as it is open to the court to make individual compensation payments to police officers in such circumstances. Although to some extent I recognise—I think that we all do—the justness of Alison McInnes’s argument, the practical implications mean that although we can deal with section 41(1A) of the Police (Scotland) Act 1967 on charges because we have volume, crime and a beneficiary, for the other offences we have limited numbers and we do not know who we are dealing with or to whom we would send the compensation—that is even before we consider the costs that we would impose on organisations to administer the fund.I invite the committee to reject Alison McInnes’s amendments.

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Justice Committee 19 November 2013

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