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You successfully pre-empted where I was going with that question about the contradiction between what Ash Regan told the committee on 25 June about not necessarily needing women’s evidence and your suggestion in your opening submissions. You referenced specifically the situations in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Is the matter of whether people in prostitution need to give evidence the only evidential challenge that has been faced there, or have you seen other evidential challenges that cause you concern?

Yes, it does—thank you. I am going to press you, Dr Forbes, simply because your submission specifically says that the Crown Office is “mindful of the challenges” in enforcing the legislation in Ireland and is

“concerned that ... prosecutors in Scotland will face similar evidential barriers”.

What are those evidential barriers that you might face that would be similar? I am trying to understand that.

You heard me earlier talk about the capital side of things. The SPA submission says that

“underinvestment in the police estate and technology remains one of the most pressing investment issues for policing”

and that the move to the single force has exacerbated that. The submission suggests that Police Scotland requires an increased capital investment of £93.9 million

“to deliver the basic rolling replacement programme of fleet, systems and policing equipment”,

which does not include some other things that would ideally be done. Again, this begs the question what would not receiving the increased investment mean for that basic programme, and what are the practical implications for policing?

I am very grateful, convener. Good morning. Chief constable, in your written submission, you set out that, should you not receive the additional £113.4 million funding requested for strengthening the front line, workforce modernisation savings will have to be identified. Can you put numbers on that in terms of officers? What would be the practical implications for policing, should you have to make those savings?

Cabinet secretary, in your opening remarks, you talked about the continuing rise in, and complexity of, the population. That is acknowledged, but that was all entirely predictable and has been known about for years—for example, as this place has been legislating. The measures to address this that you spoke about in your opening remarks clearly are not working to prevent overcrowding. In fact, in the submission that we heard about earlier, Victim Support Scotland said that the early release schemes

“are not effective in reducing the prison population in the medium or longer term.”

Therefore, how can the public be assured that, having previously endured the early release scheme and facing the release of a further 1,000 prisoners between now and, I think, April, we will not simply find ourselves in this situation again post-April?

That begs a further question: given that we are in this early release situation for short-term relief and that there have been previous early releases, what other solutions to provide short-term relief were considered in this situation that were perhaps different from last time?

I shall.

I will ask two questions and will give each of our witnesses an opportunity to respond, starting with Dr Vuolajärvi. I want to pick up on the point about evidence that you raised during your opening remarks. What does the evidence tell us about the impact of the Nordic model—the criminalisation of the buyer—on the number of people who are involved in prostitution; the experience of those people of safety, stigmatisation and access to support; and the involvement of organised crime, including trafficking, in prostitution?

Thank you very much for that. You will probably be asked about how it can be made better going forward.

I will bring in Professor Phoenix by asking a straight question. If this bill comes in and criminalises buyers, what will the impact of that be, based on the evidence that you have seen?

There is clearly an emergency, but, as I said in my remarks earlier, the situation was not unforeseeable. It has been entirely foreseeable over many years. As I have just said, there is simply no evidence that the Government has taken the steps that are required to prevent an emergency happening. I am certainly not saying that the solution is to relentlessly build our way out of the problems; the solution to the prison population is to examine the justice system holistically and to consider how to address the prison population. That has not been done.

The cabinet secretary’s remark—if we build it, they will come—is simply not coherent, because it is not the availability of prison space that impacts the size of the prison population; it is the wider context of the justice system.

Yesterday, I put a point to the cabinet secretary about the new buildings—HMP Glasgow and HMP Highland—and the cabinet secretary said to me that another reason why there would be no new building was the cost. The Glasgow and Highland projects are massively delayed and are subject to massive cost overruns, and it surely cannot be correct to found on the Government’s inability to deliver infrastructure on time and on budget as a way to avoid dealing with overcrowding.