Hansard

I congratulate Bill Butler on that exposition of what Parliament is about, with which of course I entirely concur. I also congratulate Rhoda Grant on introducing the bill, on her tenacity—which has certainly been required—and on her pragmatism in adopting the changes that were forced on us.

On amendment 4, which we earlier introduced into the bill, I think that the minister got it right when he suggested that paragraphs (a) to (d) of subsection (2) of the new section will, as a matter of ordinary statutory interpretation, be put together as a group and that paragraph (d) will be read in the context of paragraphs (a) to (c). However, if he is wrong, then it is worth putting on record, certainly from my perspective as a member of the Justice Committee, that we did not envisage the important definition in paragraph (d) covering family members.

Robert Brown reminded us that the bill covers the situation where men are victims. We have begun to learn about that issue in my time in Parliament over the past four years. We have now as a Parliament, and perhaps as a civil service, come to understand that the victims of abuse are not automatically women and children. I am not sure that we have really got that into the institutional mind yet, but I think that we are making progress.

To refer to a point that Bill Butler and others made, criminalising breach of an interdict should be very effective. As I think Robert Brown said earlier, that measure seems overdue. It is an obvious way to deal with problems where civil law breaks down. The courts will have told someone what to do, but they might not be prepared to do it. If there is an interdict, why should the breach of it not be a criminal offence? We might increasingly ask ourselves that question. If contempt of court is not an effective sanction, we might need to think about generally criminalising breach of interdict. I mention that merely in the by-going.

Some further issues emerge from the revised financial memorandum to the bill. As the last back-bench speaker in the debate, I did not think that I would have much competition from people who had previously considered what was in the financial memorandum—it is not an area where we normally go. Time does not allow me to draw much to the attention of the Parliament, save to note that almost every paragraph of the memorandum says something along the lines of, “We don’t really know, because we don’t have enough information.” I think that that is indeed the case. It is a little sad, however, that for something so relatively simple and specific, the Scottish Legal Aid Board was not able even to distinguish between pursuers and defenders, and a good number of other bits of useful information were simply not available. Given that almost everything is computerised these days, one has to wonder why that was the case. People need to address a general question in that respect.

Paragraph 42 of the financial memorandum says:

“Finally, it is worth noting that the cost of domestic abuse to the Scottish public purse has been estimated to be as much as some £2.3 billion.”

In that context alone, it is clear that this entirely worthy bill has got to be worth the small costs that might accrue in other places.

16:02