Hansard

What a difference a couple of years makes. No other Government bill has taken this long to get through Parliament and no bill has undergone such a dramatic and crucial transformation.

At the stage 1 debate, the then Cabinet Secretary for Justice won the vote but lost the plot, attacking opponents of abolishing corroboration as a unionist cabal intent on

“selling out the victims of crime.”—[Official Report, 27 February 2014; c 28376.]

More worrying than that was that the justice secretary revealed his contempt for this Parliament by recklessly promoting what he knew by then to be seriously defective legislation. We know that he knew that, because he had belatedly and hurriedly appointed a 17-strong panel of distinguished minds who were expected to patch things up after the bill was passed. The newly appointed dean of the Faculty of Advocates described that approach as asking MSPs “to buy a pig in a poke.”

Let us not forget that 64 MSPs in this chamber, including the current Cabinet Secretary for Justice and the current First Minister, were happy to do just that. I think that that was a low point for this chamber and the Parliament because, whatever members’ views about corroboration, it became a matter of how Parliament legislates. As a business manager, I believed that our Parliament’s credibility was at stake.

In the absence of any willingness to remove the offending section of the bill, I took a different tack and urged the Government to put the whole bill on ice. Thankfully, at the 11th hour, the Government agreed to my request to suspend the bill, allowing time for Lord Bonomy’s corroboration review. His report not only vindicated that approach; his findings exposed the willingness of ministers to jeopardise the integrity of Scotland’s justice system on the basis of scant evidence and blithe assurances to this chamber.

As I said, what a difference two years makes: there is now cross-party support for the bill. Perhaps there is a wider lesson here for us on how our unicameral legislature operates, as more time between stage 1 and stage 2 for reflection and mature discussion can radically improve the quality of legislation. There is now a great deal to welcome in the bill. It will help to ensure that arrest and custody procedures are fairer, more transparent and compliant with the European convention on human rights. My successful stage 2 amendment means the introduction of codes of practice governing how the police identify suspects and conduct interviews, which is akin to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984—PACE—codes that have existed in England and Wales for decades.

For months, ministers told Willie Rennie and me that they were comfortable with so-called consensual stop and search. I am therefore, of course, delighted that the Scottish Liberal Democrats’ campaign for its abolition will conclude today and that that discredited, intrusive and, frankly, illegal tactic will cease. It is a tactic that has damaged the relations between the police and the communities and young people they targeted; and it is a tactic that was dogged by scandal and deployed hundreds of thousands of times a year without justification.

I hope that the whole chamber will join me in thanking those who offered expert opinion and thoughtful, evidenced interventions on the issue, not least John Scott and Dr Kath Murray. However, it remains galling that the Scottish National Party Government’s reaction to Dr Murray’s landmark stop and search findings was to engineer a delay in their publication in an effort to pre-empt and discredit her research.

It is similarly worrying that the Parliament has paved the way for the creation of a search power for something that is not illegal—the possession of alcohol. Elsewhere in the bill, ministers have failed to protect children by permitting their being held in custody for 24 hours and shelving plans—for a third time—to raise the age of criminal responsibility. This Government speaks a lot about human rights, but its actions are timid.

Speaking of unfinished business, what next for corroboration? Irrespective the future of corroboration, Parliament must continually strive to improve reporting and conviction rates, particularly for sexual offences and other crimes that occur behind closed doors. Therefore, I am disappointed that the Government did not support amendment 90 in Margaret Mitchell’s name. The cabinet secretary is obstinate on the matter, but I can only conclude that he has been ill advised. There is no doubt that an individual has a locus on the narrow point, and the amendment was not about banning access to any medical records but merely about giving victims a voice at the time when those records are sought.

Lord Bonomy provides a starting point on measures that are worth while regardless of the future for corroboration. As I said, it is disappointing that we have not taken the opportunity to allow people to be represented in court.