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That response is welcome. We will come on to the issue of training—other members have questions on that. In the scenario that I painted in which it is 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning on a Saturday going into Sunday, what is the likelihood that someone who has had that robust and comprehensive training will be at hand in a local police station in the middle of nowhere? Such a station might deal with these incidents only a couple of times a year. Is it more likely that people will get that trauma-informed approach in our large cities, where the volume of cases is higher or where you simply have more staff on duty, than in rural environments or small towns?

DCS Faulds wants to come in.

That is helpful. Thank you for that. I know that we are tight for time, convener. Do I have time for one more question? I will then be happy to pass on to others.

My question is short but it might be difficult. In 2019-20, around 2,300 rapes were reported to police in Scotland, of which around 300 went to prosecution and 130 were successfully prosecuted. We all know that everyone wants to improve that ratio. What role can the police play in that? The taking of an initial statement is only one part of the process. More evidence must be gathered and robust cases must be given to the Crown to improve prosecution rates. What more could the police do to improve that ratio in the coming years?

Good morning. I want to follow the same line of questioning. I will not elongate it too much, because you have covered a lot of the ground.

There seems to be a general acceptance that things do not always go well 100 per cent of the time and that every case that does not go well is unfortunate. However, what struck the committee was the scale and volume of the negative feedback that we heard. We do not seem to be talking about isolated incidents. The whole experience of reporting such offences seems to be traumatic.

What improvements could be made to the environment in which crimes of this nature are reported? We have heard that they tend to take place at certain times of the day and on certain days of the week—at weekends, during the night or early in the morning. Some witnesses or victims might be intoxicated or under the influence, voluntarily or otherwise. During the night, officers at the front desk or on the front line might not be as trauma informed as officers would be at other times of the day. Could the police do more to ensure that that first contact is not as traumatic and scary as it seems to be for many victims? That is directed at anyone who wants to respond.

Absolutely. There will be resource implications not only for the SCTS and the Crown but for the defence sector. If more cases per day are run than is currently the case, we will obviously have to provide sufficient resources to ensure that people are represented.

The concept of a specialist court is not new, and I hope that we can learn from the integrated domestic abuse courts. We accept that, if a large number of crimes are of a similar nature, they can be dealt with in a similar way in a central place, for example. What feedback has there been on domestic abuse courts from the Faculty of Advocates, the Law Society, the police, victims organisations and the third sector? Those groups will have had to interact with specialist courts in the past, so have any learnings—positive or otherwise—come from that?

Good morning, cabinet secretary and guests. The central question with regard to specialist courts is whether they are intended to be used instead of, or as well as, existing infrastructure. The fundamental issue, which is still unclear, concerns what would be taken away from other court mechanisms in order to specialise in those dedicated courts.

Would we be taking things away from existing mechanisms or simply adding to the capacity of the courts in order to clear the backlog? We need to clear the backlog—nobody disagrees with that. Each of those approaches creates its own set of very different issues, and I think that the committee is struggling with that. There is a top-level recommendation from Lady Dorrian, which seems to have a lot of positive elements to it, such as the importance of taking a trauma-informed approach. However, the devil is in the detail. What will the Government present to the committee and the Parliament, so that we can work through the detail? There will clearly be financial and resource issues in relation to how specialist courts might work in the future.

I am happy to leave it there.

Are findings and learning from pilots and trials arising from initiatives such as the UK rape review, which is the underlying principle of some of the reforms to the way in which sexual assault cases are tried in England and Wales, shared between SCTS and Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service or the Ministry of Justice? What conversations take place in that regard?

You will be relieved to learn that I am not going to ask you to comment on the Moorov principle. Those matters are for other judicial partners, as you have said. However, it is clear that there are two sticky areas in the Scottish system—first, the use of three verdicts and the issue of corroboration, and secondly the complexity of navigating things such as the Moorov principle. Our initial questions were about whether jurors really understand the intricacies of all of that and the consequences of any decisions that they might make, which is an issue that arose as a result of evidence with regard to a case where that aspect was not clear to the jury.

With regard to the comments about responsibilities, I presume that the judge or sheriff has a duty to counsel and advise jurors from the day that the jury is picked. Danielle McLaughlin mentioned the Judicial Office, by which I presume she means the one at St Andrew’s house—in other words, in the Scottish Government. The ultimate responsibility therefore lies with the cabinet secretary for justice, not the Lord Advocate or the Crown. Who would have overarching responsibility for making any reforms?