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Some of the stuff is happening anyway, some of it can be done in organisations through cultural change and some of it might require legislation.

It might be worth asking about the possibility of an online action tracker, so that individuals involved in the report, people in the professions and members of the public could see where we are on each of the 200-plus recommendations. Would you support that, or have you asked for that? Has there been any discussion of that?

Good morning, Professor McKay. Your report is six months old. By my count, it makes 205 recommendation over 115 pages, and many of those recommendations have sub-recommendations—for example, recommendation 8.10 has 11 specific asks. It is a huge piece of work, which I had not appreciated as I had no real involvement with or knowledge of it.

The report makes reference to an implementation gap. There is an understanding that what the Government seeks to do and how that is delivered might be two different things. Six months after delivery of your report, can you give me a sense of the Government’s position on those asks? Do you have a general sense that some of that will never see the light of day? Has there been a favourable reaction to the recommendations? Roughly, where do you think that the report has landed?

There could be a traffic-light system to show that something has happened, like we in the committee do with reports.

I begin by noting the irony that the minister responsible for trying to curtail fireworks is now putting on such an entertaining display as she seeks to become First Minister.

There is a lot in Elena Whitham’s letter, and it is quite concerning. We should remember that the legislation was rushed. Collectively, we felt that there was not the appropriate and necessary time for all the scrutiny that was required. We were told that there was nothing to worry about and that the details would be filled in later. Here we are with a letter that, frankly, fails to do that.

Jamie Greene has touched on some of my points already. In the bullet points at the bottom of page 2, the minister talks about

“A slight delay to implementation of the licensing system”,

which is one of the central planks of the legislation. My understanding is that the system should have come in this year, but it will now not be in place until next year “at the earliest”. That seems a bit open ended.

Even more vague is the final bullet point, which concerns the restriction on days of supply and use. The committee will recall that those provisions related to specific cultural and religious events and so on. The letter says that the provisions have been

“paused to a future financial year”,

but it does not say which year, even as a guess. It would be nice to know whether ministers could give us some indication as to which one they are working towards. Is it—as in the previous point—2024, or will it be even further down the line? Might it even, as Jamie Greene suspects, not happen at all?

With regard to all the implementations, we warned about the confusion around what is being brought forward. I think that the confusion will now be even greater, given that the public will be getting this stuff coming in piecemeal.

The plan was to bring in the proxy purchasing provisions and the aggravation for emergency service workers in year 1, and then to bring in all the other stuff in year 2, which is this year. That is now not happening. The situation was already confusing, and it will now become even more confusing.

Anyone who reads the letter would think that everything was all perfectly fine, but it is far from it. It is clear that there are big problems around delivery, as we warned that there would be. We need to drill down as much as possible into what the timescales are and why the delays are happening.

I would like to ask about the SPS review, which is a work in progress. The report was initially due to be published last summer, I think. This is a two-pronged question. Would there be any value in, or are you considering, publishing the report as a draft document initially, in order to give various bodies the chance to feed back and respond to it, or will it be published as a final work?

Secondly, given that the report has already been delayed, will it be delayed further until the new First Minister is in post? Will that have any bearing on it?

From recollection, the update report was in March last year, then there was a follow-up around October.

I absolutely welcome the fact that this issue is being talked about. However, the Scottish Police Federation makes some quite worrying points about the position of Police Scotland, which it describes as

“defensive, in denial and suggests ‘nothing to see here’.”

That chimes with my experience of trying to raise a number of cases of suicide of police officers, where we have established that none were the subject of fatal accident inquiries. Police Scotland does not record the numbers of deaths, let alone carry out any form of inquiry into them. In their responses, Police Scotland and the SPA still do not seem to be addressing that.

I know that it is uncomfortable, but the officers and former officers who have come forward to me who have either considered taking their own lives or attempted to take their own lives, or the families of those who indeed have taken their own lives, all draw direct links to the officer’s experience of the lack of support from the police. We are talking about issues that are due to what police officers have experienced or, even worse, to protracted regulatory or disciplinary processes that they feel were unfair or unjust to the point at which they were in such dire straits and such a desperate mental state that they believed that suicide was the only option.

As shocking as that is, in many of these cases, the individuals made their feelings known to Police Scotland. If we think back to when the issue first arose at the committee a couple of years ago, the responses from Police Scotland and the Scottish Police Authority set alarm bells ringing. For all that they appear to say all the right things about consideration of the wellbeing of officers, which is great, they are falling well short of acknowledging the scale of the damage that has been done, which could yet cause serious problems.

On action plans, we have a response from the Crown Office explaining that none of the cases has been subject to a fatal accident inquiry. Is there any mechanism that we can explore to give an officer who has died from suicide the same rights as someone who has died in custody and who is therefore automatically subject to a fatal accident inquiry? In the cases that I am aware of, such an inquiry would highlight serious issues about the pressure that those officers were under. I do not want to point fingers or lay blame, but I want us to realise how serious the situation is and learn from it. If we do a superficial exercise, nothing will change.

I have a slightly different point to raise on the remand issue. The box on page 13 begins by saying that

“Remand numbers are not falling significantly”,

but it ends by saying that

“the number of people held on remand has fallen by 9%”

within 12 months. Arguably, that is a significant fall. Perhaps the opening line could be reworded to be a bit less subjective. “Remand numbers remain steady” or something like that might be better.

Okay. The reason why I think that my question is relevant is that it goes to the heart of where we are now. The Prison Service is conducting a review. If senior politicians in the governing party all give different answers to a very basic question about this particular offender, that is germane to the issue. Cabinet secretary, if you are not prepared to answer the question, that is fine and I can move on, but I can give you another opportunity, if you like.