Meeting of the Parliament 15 January 2025
That is a very important point, which goes towards what the bill will achieve. As I set out at the start, there are areas in which I think that the bill is far from ideal. Just this morning at the Criminal Justice Committee, the PIRC candidly admitted that it is unclear at this stage what the extent of the extra workload that it will be required to do will be. It acknowledged that it is running at full capacity already. Although it will, of course, do its best to meet all the objectives that are put on it, it will require adequate resource. At this stage, it is not in a position to say what additional costs the bill would impose. That is in a situation in which the PIRC has already said in its annual report that it is having to request additional funding for staff costs and temporary funding for legal fees.
Its uncertainty is understandable, given that, as Katy Clark highlighted, the financial memorandum’s projections for the bill from last summer were at least £4 million lower than was necessary in order to meet the obligations as they existed at the time. The Government admitted at the Finance and Public Administration Committee that it had failed to take account of inflation and pay rises, and that it was using scenarios and figures that related to September 2022—yet the bill was being discussed in 2024. Of course, we have a new financial memorandum that was published in November last year, which the Government will say is authoritative. However, a whole raft of new features and requirements have been added to the bill, such as vetting and other items that will be developed as a result of the bill. My general position of having little, if any, confidence in the Government’s financial projections has not changed.
Finally, like Pauline McNeill, I am deeply uncomfortable that something that is as important as vetting was introduced at stage 2, which means that it has not been subject to the usual call for views or consultation process. There is a wider point about how we legislate in the Parliament, which is for another day.
The fact is that we have heard in the past couple of days significant concerns from the SPF about those changes to the vetting process, as Jamie Greene flagged earlier. Those concerns worry me because, from listening to the amendment debates and reading the SPF’s concerns, I think that it seems more than possible that there is something to them.
As MSPs, we have done our best to amend the provisions, but will the amendments address the concerns? Will they head off the unintended consequences? It is difficult to say, because the provisions were introduced only at stage 2 and lack detail. Perhaps the cabinet secretary can in closing set out her response to the federation’s concerns and, I hope, allay them, because that is the issue.
Given all the good things that the bill will bring in, I will vote for it at decision time. However, as with so many bills emanating from the Scottish Government, it is far from perfect. I hope that the cabinet secretary will make the case that it is good enough for now.
17:30