Meeting of the Parliament 25 June 2026 [Draft]
There are many things that we need to do to tackle poverty and inequality. If Stephen Kerr agrees that poverty is an underlying factor, I hope that he will agree that, for example, the Scottish child payment is transformational. If he listens to the rest of my speech, he will hear about that.
On average, families of people in custody spend £180 a month on supporting that person. Only yesterday, we found out that one in five families are left with just £12 a week after outgoings—those are the families living with the highest levels of poverty. Those families are disproportionately more likely to be impacted by incarceration and are also more likely to be unable to afford to visit and support incarcerated family members. We have to break that cycle.
Prison still very much has a place. We need our communities to be safe. However, when prison is not necessary, and when a community sentence or home detention can be used instead, the benefits are huge. It keeps families together, keeps people rooted in their communities and makes it much less likely that the person will reoffend—because, at the end of their sentence, they are not ejected back into society without a life to return to. I am glad that, this year, the Scottish Government is investing £169 million in community justice. That is how we break the cycle.
A huge part has to be about how we prevent young people from getting caught up in the criminal justice system. That includes using peer mentoring projects, such as the turn your life around project, to help young people who may not have the role models that they need in their lives; restorative justice, which empowers victims and survivors while helping offenders to understand the impact of their crimes on other people; or trauma-informed community custody units such as the Bella centre and the Lilias centre, where women on low supervision can rebuild their lives.
We also need to take a whole-life, whole-society approach. When we consider investment in social justice, the Scottish child payment, social housing, mental health services, youth work, keeping the Promise and any other measure that reduces inequality and makes our society fairer, we must also consider that to be tackling the root causes of crime, bringing down our prison population and making our communities safer. Those are the outcomes that we all want to achieve—I hope that we can agree on that.