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Justice Committee 26 January 2016

26 Jan 2016 · S4 · Justice Committee

Item of business

Community Justice (Scotland) Bill: Stage 2

Murray, Elaine Lab Dumfriesshire Watch on SPTV

If these amendments were agreed to, a number of consequential amendments would be required. It did not seem to me to be a good use of the committee’s time or, indeed, the legislation team’s time to go through every single one of those when the amendments might not be agreed to in the first place. Obviously, there will be a job of work to be done if they are agreed to. Again, the suggestions are from COSLA. The amendments look at what sort of partnership the community justice partners would be involved in. Amendment 72 would insert into the bill a new section that would place a duty on community partners to establish a Iocal community justice partnership and would place local partnerships in a community planning context. Amendment 93 would require all community justice partners to co-operate at both the local and the national level, and would require that to be demonstrated. Local community justice partnerships must have a robust footing so that partners can be properly held to account for community justice services at a local level. In COSLA’s opinion, the bill does not offer that and there is no obligation for a partnership even to be established. COSLA’s proposed solution is a specific amendment to the bill that requires local community justice partnerships to be formally established and to have a clear relationship with local community planning arrangements. The bill would also be amended to ensure that the duty on partners to co-operate must be demonstrated at a local level. That would allow community justice partners to be locally accountable, with locally elected members playing a key role, and would achieve a balance between protecting local flexibility and ensuring that partnerships are placed on a robust footing. That would make it more likely that individual partners would take the matter seriously and be willing to pool resources, and less likely that community justice could be seen as a discretionary area of activity. For those who have been involved in the journey of the redesign of community justice, it is assumed that community justice partnerships will be established along local authority lines or, in some cases, across local authority boundaries. Amendment 72 would ensure that partnerships are established on a legal footing. 10:30 Amendment 72 would also place partnerships in a community planning context, which was the original intention of the redesign and was a concern of the Justice Committee at stage 1. The cabinet secretary said in 2014: “The new model is designed to harness this commitment and passion as much as possible by encouraging a collaborative approach to local service delivery through Community Planning Partnerships (CPPs).” There must be adequate resourcing of the partnership arrangements to ensure that community justice partners are effective. COSLA has a commitment from the Scottish Government that conversations will take place in that regard. The intention is not for amendment 72 to preclude partnerships being formed across local authority boundaries. COSLA welcomed the proposals in the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 to improve community planning by requiring all statutory partners to participate equally and fully in the process, and thought that the bill should replicate that approach. Amendment 93, which would amend section 30, would guard against a national partner being able to discharge its duty to co-operate simply through its activity at national level, by requiring each statutory partner to demonstrate its commitment at local partnership level. At stage 1 the committee considered the idea of appointing a lead partner, which was rejected, for understandable reasons. The provision in amendment 72 for local partners to appoint a chair would go some way towards resolving the issue. In its report, “Reducing reoffending in Scotland”, Audit Scotland asked for “clear accountability and a mechanism to promote collective responsibility for reducing reoffending”. A duty to form a partnership, with a chair who is ultimately accountable to the community, is one way of providing that. I move amendment 72.

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Justice Committee 26 January 2016

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