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The point is that someone who has been bailed has been neither tried nor found guilty of any offence. Therefore, any restriction is a by-product of the bail conditions; it is not part of their sentence.

As you have rightly said, there is a big difference between someone who has been bailed with some form of supervised or enhanced restrictions or parameters around the bail—in other words, the bail is conditional on certain activities or restrictions—and someone who has been remanded into custody and is awaiting trial. At the moment, the law takes the latter into account in sentencing—and rightly so. Somebody could have been stuck in prison for a year and a half because their case has been endlessly postponed and delayed. When they get their day in court—and if they are found guilty of the crime—the sentence might well be less than the time that they had already spent in custody, and they will walk free from court that day.

However, that is an entirely different matter. My point is that section 5 tries to conflate two issues: the idea that electronic monitoring could be useful in enhanced bail, which is the point that Ms Stevenson has made and which I agree with, and the issue that Pauline McNeill has highlighted of the time that people spend in custody on remand and the loss of liberty in that respect, which should absolutely be taken into consideration, too. However, the sole focus on this entire section is the time spent on electronic monitoring as part of a person’s sentence.

That is why I think that the section needs to come out—and perhaps be replaced, which is something that we can work constructively on. The section cannot be amended in any meaningful or feasible way that provides a solution that we might all want and that we might, surprisingly, agree on.

I will end my comments there.

Will the cabinet secretary give way?

Yes.

Yes, in one second.

Giving the Crown more information in advance of that point in the proceedings would mean that it would be up to the judge or the sheriff, as is rightly the case. The way to do that is to better inform the Crown agent; the way to do it is not to restrict the parameters by which judges make such decisions.

I was not sure whether we could speak to the group before the amendment was moved. That is the normal way to do it.

I move amendment 67.

Perhaps I can use the opportunity to speak about the rationale for that.

I will take both interventions in a second. I want to make my point first.

If you want to put that provision in the bill, which is about bail, not sentencing, there are other mechanisms for doing so. Whatever your views are of the Scottish Sentencing Council, it exists. Other directions can be given to judges for when they consider sentencing.

The provisions in section 5 do not lie within the parameters of what the bill is all about. Part 1 is about changes to the bail test—we have had a full conversation about that—and part 2 is about what happens when someone is released. The bill is not about sentencing; it never has been. I do not know where the idea came from, but I think that it is quite bonkers. I am happy to have a proper chat with other members about it.

I am trying to get my head around something. The bill clearly wants to offer the court as much information as possible, and it proposes to do that by allowing criminal justice social work to be given a bigger role in providing information about the offender.

All the amendments in this group are also trying to give the court as much information as possible, but about the complainer or the victim, and yet the Government has rejected every amendment that seeks to find a way to do that.

My question is simple. If there is a mechanism in the bill to allow more information, from whatever source, to be given about the offender’s situation, how on earth do we get more information about the victim or the complainer to the court, given that there is no mechanism for doing so?

Any reduction is, of course, welcome. I am happy to find the provenance of the statistics that I have used for the benefit of the Official Report. Perhaps a link can be provided to that. I suspect that the figures in my briefing are off the back of some published reports. In any case, by the time that I have finished speaking, someone from my office will have texted me about that.

My point is that, clearly, there is a problem, because people on bail are going on to commit further offences. Within that number for 2020-21, there were serious offences, including seven homicides, and a number of serious rapes and domestic abuse incidents. That perhaps underlines why there was nervousness about the proposals: would increasing the cohort of those who are released on bail necessarily lead to an increase in the number of offences that are committed by those people while on bail?

Over the past few months, we have heard from victims organisations about people who are on bail under enhanced conditions but who continue to retraumatise their victims either through direct and overt breaches or through other means, including ways that are technically outside a bail breach. In those latter cases, the police really struggle to charge somebody and bring them back into custody.

That can be as simple as standing at the end of the victim’s street, which means that they are technically not on that street, and being a menace to the victim. We have had a lot of anecdotal evidence about that, so I hope that the Government is looking at that live issue.

There is one other thing that is missing from the reporting requirement, and that the Government might be open to dealing with via an amendment. Reporting is helpful and data is useful, but what happens as a result of that? It would be useful to have an amendment on that at stage 3, which could be as simple as saying that, as a result of the above information, the Government will take any actions that it considers appropriate to achieve a remedy. In other words, if, after the legislation is passed, we see an unfortunate pattern that nobody wants to see, there would be a commitment from or a requirement for the Government to take action to remedy that without necessarily going back to the start of what the bill proposed. That might be helpful and would save the Government from having to repeal major sections of the bill. No one wants to see that, but there is clearly some nervousness that that might happen.

I will, in a second.

The judge will decide on sentencing using the range of factors that are available to them when they are making that decision.

Okay. I am just checking my statistics. Over which period was that?