Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 10 June 2021
I welcome the cabinet secretary, Jamie Greene and Maggie Chapman to their new roles and Pauline McNeill back to her old stomping ground. She will find that many of the issues have not moved on a great deal since she was last on the justice brief. It feels strange to be the lone survivor on the brief from the previous session, but I look forward to working collaboratively across the Parliament on the pressing issues that affect our justice system, some of which have been identified in the speeches so far.
We are at a critical juncture. Everywhere we look, the pandemic has exposed and exacerbated existing weaknesses. In justice, the weak seams were already close to giving way: victims often said that their experience of court was worse than the experience of crime, and the court case backlog was a source of real concern more than 12 months ago. Pre-Covid, Scottish Liberal Democrat research found that more than 50,000 cases had breached the 26-week target from caution or charge to verdict—that is about one in three cases.
Against that backdrop, it is no great surprise that 2025 is perhaps the earliest we can expect the current backlog to be dealt with. New thinking and new ways of doing things are needed, including in the Crown Office. The system is not working for anyone—it is not working for victims, for witnesses, for those who offend or for the people who work in it, despite their best efforts.
We need to be honest about the problems that we face, and my amendment speaks to just one area that is crying out for reform. As we have heard this afternoon, members recognise that the current system of fatal accident inquiries is not working. In 2019, Scottish Liberal Democrats revealed the extent of the FAI backlog. We found an outstanding inquiry into two deaths that had been waiting for eight years and another, which was completed in 2014-15, that was carried out 10 years after the death. I said at the time that for anyone to have to wait a decade to learn the circumstances of a loved one’s death was scandalous.
Since then, reports of decade-long delays have kept on coming. The inquiry into the deaths of four in the Super Puma helicopter crash off the coast of Sumburgh in Shetland in 2013 was completed just last year. The inquiry into the death of Stanislaw Bania in 2010 concluded in August 2020. The inquiry into the death of Boguslaw Kopec, who died in March 2011, concluded in March 2021. Meanwhile, the inquiry into the deaths of John Yuill and Lamara Bell in 2015 in that tragic crash on the M9 is yet to begin.