Meeting of the Parliament 19 November 2015
Indeed.
I return to the subject of funding, which Audit Scotland brought up in its November 2012 report “Reducing reoffending in Scotland”. Its recommendations state:
“The Scottish Government should ... improve arrangements for funding community justice to ensure that ... the money is targeted towards effective approaches to reduce reoffending”,
that
“there is more flexibility to meet local needs and priorities”
and that
“allocations are more responsive to changes in demand”—
and so say all of us for any area of funding in public life. I add that we should eliminate short-term funding as far as possible. I have yet to meet an organisation or individual in any area of life that is helped by repeatedly having to go back for money; that just means that they spend their time looking for money instead of doing the job.
On the subject of money, I want to pick up on Dr Elaine Murray’s comment about the fixed costs of prisons. We must not kid ourselves that, in the short term, we are going to get anything back from expenditure on prisons. It is only when we are actually closing prisons wholesale that we will get some reduction in the budget.
I come back to the structure and the need to get from where we are to where we are going. There will clearly be a transition. That exercised a number of those who made written submissions, including Police Scotland, Fife Council and the Fife partnership, the NHS in Scotland and the Scottish working group on women offenders. I do not have time to read out the submissions, but they all commented on the transition and they all said that the new structure provides an opportunity but brings with it a risk and a threat. I am sure that, if the national body has charismatic leadership—I use that term for want of a better one—and provides real people leadership, the new structure will succeed.
Equally, the 32 community justice partnerships, however they are ultimately configured, will need leadership. The bill is rightly silent on who should lead, but the issue will come down to individual people putting their heads above the parapet in meetings and saying, “Hey, guys, how are we going to do this?”