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In essence, you have covered the internal changes that Police Scotland can make to the operating model. I would like to explore that a bit further. In some circumstances, those changes will relate to working practices and approaches to the management of the estate. Am I right in concluding that there is, within the design of that model, a recognition that we are living in a society that has, relatively speaking historically, a very low level of crime? I accept that that has to be continually suppressed and prevented, but the nature, level and character of crime, with the best predictions that we can make about the contents of the approach, should inform the construction of the police force that we require for the future.

Do you have the right climate and are you getting the right response to the effort that you are pursuing? Are partners responding in a helpful way?

That helpfully gives the committee a sense of how you will proceed on issues in connection with Police Scotland. I am interested in your earlier evidence about your interactions with other bodies that have an effect on the operational efficiency of Police Scotland, and I am interested in understanding how you intend to pursue those questions, because they strike me as falling into different categories. In relation to the welfare of vulnerable citizens, for example, there is interaction with the health service and the third sector on how the mental wellbeing of individuals can be supported more effectively in order to try to reduce the crisis intervention of calling the police. I have seen that at first hand in my constituency experience, and that has been appreciated. There will also be examples of, frankly, your officers having their time wasted by the inefficiency of the court system.

I am keen to understand how blunt your conversations with others are about how they must get their house in order to help you to improve efficiency in the police service. What is the dialogue like with other parties—the Crown, the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service and health boards—to ensure that a combined public sector resource is used to its maximum level of efficiency, which can help to reduce the budget asks of Police Scotland in the years to come?

If you do not mind, I will write to you after the committee meeting with a suggestion of a venture that you might wish to visit in my constituency in the city of Perth, which absolutely ticks the box that you just set out. However, I am interested in how you are pursuing a systematic conversation, because that will involve local authorities, third sector providers and health boards to ensure that that actually happens on the ground and in a more systematic way, rather than having the occasional island of excellence, if I can put it that way.

That would be helpful. In the communities that I represent, there is a particular proposal on the co-location of police and local authority services, which I am keen to encourage. I will use my opportunity at the committee to try to nudge that along a little bit, convener. There are significant opportunities for the release of sites that could be of enormous strategic importance in, for example, the fulfilment of social housing objectives that many of us would want to be taken forward. Therefore, that analysis would be very helpful.

That takes me to my final point, which is about the urgency and necessity of advancing the agenda. I have read too many submissions in my time—some have come to the committee in the short period during which I have been a member of it—that basically say, “We cannot possibly make any more savings, because we are absolutely up against it. We need to have more money, because we have exhausted all the savings”. However, today, I have heard that Dalmarnock is 20 per cent occupied. The exercise that you are going to do, which I welcome, will probably throw up quite a lot of data of a similar nature.

I simply come back to where I started, which is about the necessity of viewing this year as one that has given the police service the time and space to redesign. To be frank and candid, the idea that the only answer to the challenges is more money is just not going to fly in the years to come, because public finances are under such pressure. I hope that the exercise will help to inform public debate about some of the realities that must be confronted.

Forgive me, but there is also an important point about partnership in this exercise. Our view might be that all of those solutions have to be found from within the police capital budget, but the dynamics of budget changes will never provide for that.

At the same time as Police Scotland is getting whatever its capital budget is—£64.6 million—I would think that local authorities will be getting ten times that in capital budgets. It is fundamental to this exercise that we try to find some ways through this by collaboration with local authorities. It has to be thought through in a broader context than by looking only at the police capital budget and asking how we can enhance it.

I will move on to the position on the estate. The statistic that horrified me the most this morning was the 20 per cent occupancy level of the premises in Dalmarnock. What information can you share with the committee about the level of occupancy and utilisation of police premises around the country? Can you give us a figure? Can you say, for example, “We think the police estate is X per cent occupied”?

Chief Constable Farrell, you have been very candid with the committee about the fact that your budget ask was essentially met by the Government. That rather surprised me, given the intensity of pressure on the public finances. I think that we should acknowledge and recognise—as you have done—the significance of the financial settlement that was delivered.

I am interested in your comments in response to Sharon Dowey about the budget giving you the time and the space to redesign. I would like to explore that, because the assurance that I seek is that, when it comes to further budget rounds, Police Scotland will be in a position in which it will not have to make the significant asks on the public purse that have been met by the Government on this occasion. As you rightly say, the pressures on the public finances are not going to abate in the forthcoming years in any shape or form. How confident can we be that the budget represents an opportunity to give you the time and the space to redesign?

What I am driving at is the potentially unsatisfactory nature of how people are left after a not proven verdict. If I follow the rationale of the arguments that you have just deployed, individuals who were accused and then acquitted following a not proven verdict might have some stain on their character because it was, to use the terminology, a “measured means of acquittal” or a conditional acquittal. From the perspective of complainers—the victims—they are likely to feel dissatisfied with a not proven verdict, because the outcome that they believe that they should have achieved was not achieved, but there is a question mark over the verdict. I am just probing in order to determine whether anybody ends up in a good position as a consequence of that verdict.

The faculty’s position is therefore that, if we are going to have the potential for an eight to seven decision in a jury, we have to have the reassurance of an option such as the not proven verdict. We can design an alternative that gets rid of the not proven option, but we will have to take account of the variables that come about as a consequence.