Meeting of the Parliament 19 November 2015
On behalf of Labour members, I thank the committee clerks, the Scottish Parliament information centre, the witnesses who gave oral evidence and those who gave written evidence.
The bill will replace the current system of eight regional community justice authorities, or CJAs—there are lots of acronyms in this subject—with 32 community justice partnerships, one per local authority, and will establish a national organisation to be called community justice Scotland.
As Christine Grahame said, serious concerns were raised about the performance of CJAs in the Angiolini report on women offenders, which identified a lack of strategic leadership and accountability, short-term funding, inconsistency of service and a lack of throughcare for offenders, and by Audit Scotland, which in 2012 criticised the CJAs for the number of organisations that were involved and for having no nationally agreed measure of performance. Audit Scotland also said that there is a lack of strong leadership, that statutory partners are not accountable to CJAs and that they have limited capacity to undertake their full range of work. Therefore, it is clear that revision is required.
In December 2012, the Scottish Government published a consultation paper that included three options—an enhanced system of CJAs, a local authority model and a single service model—but there was no consensus on any of them, other than a preference for a model that involved local delivery. A further consultation on the model that is proposed in the bill was undertaken in 2014 and it received a generally favourable response. What was proposed in the consultation differed from the measures in the bill—in particular, the consultation proposed that community planning partnerships would be central to local delivery of community justice services. Reference has already been made to those differences.
Other current policy developments will interact with the bill; the committee had questions about that. John Finnie proposed that we should have some sort of flow diagram or schematic that showed how all the different initiatives link together. Among the policy developments that will interact with the bill are the implementation of the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015, which places duties on community planning partners to carry out community planning in each local authority area; and the current consultation on the presumption against short-term sentences, which seeks views on whether the current presumption against sentences of three months and under should be extended, or a more radical review of short-term imprisonment, including remand, is required. The Government has also been consulting on changes to the configuration of the female prison estate, which many of us hope will lead to an increase in the use of community disposals over criminal disposals.
The bill will require the Scottish ministers to publish a national strategy. As the minister said, the Government is consulting on that and the national performance framework. I was one of the people who attended the strategy consultation day in Dumfries. I believe in giving congratulations when they are due: I thought that it was a very good example of local engagement and I found it to be extremely informative. The feeling that I got from the other participants was that they, too, appreciate the opportunity to contribute to the discussion on what should be in the national strategy and the performance framework. The bill is an enabling bill, and details of how it will work in practice will be set out in the national strategy and performance framework and the associated guidance, so it is important that such local engagement takes place.
Witnesses who gave evidence to the committee generally agreed that improvements to the current community justice arrangements are required, although the community justice authority conveners disagreed. However, there are still questions around whether the bill strikes the correct balance between national leadership and local flexibility.
As the convener stated, the definition of community justice is much narrower than that in the 2014 “Future Model for Community Justice in Scotland” consultation. The definition no longer refers to the prevention of offending and is restricted to people who have already offended. That change was not consulted on, and there is no explanation in the policy memorandum for why the definition changed. We in the Labour seats agree with the majority of witnesses who appeared before the committee, who were of the opinion that the definition should also include desistance, prevention and early intervention. I am pleased to hear that the minister is considering amendments along those lines.
Some witnesses objected to use of the term “offender”, because they considered it to be stigmatising. That concern was discussed at one of the events that I attended. The problem lies, however, in deciding what other word we should use. Although “offender” may attract stigma, it is difficult to see how we could describe people in a less stigmatising way.
Other witnesses were concerned that the bill does not refer to the interest and involvement of victims in particular, and of the wider community more generally. Community justice alternatives to imprisonment will be accepted by the general public and by the judiciary in sentencing only if they are demonstrated to be effective in keeping the public safe and in changing individuals’ offending behaviour. Services such as the 218 centre in Glasgow and the willow service in Edinburgh, which support women in the criminal justice system, are widely praised.