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Parole Board for Scotland: CORPORATE PLAN 2002
FOREWORD
This is the Parole Board's third Corporate Plan, covering the financial years 2002-05. Both previous Plans have referred to the difficulty involved in planning the future for a body whose workload is determined by other parties, whose methods of working have been subject to continuing review and whose very existence has been under threat at some times. Since the publication of the second Plan, the Human Rights Act 1998 has prompted yet more changes in our working practices, not all of which are yet fully quantifiable. This Plan, therefore, reflects our best possible estimates of what will be required to enable us to perform our task effectively, efficiently and with due regard to natural justice and the protection of the public.
Our task remains that of deciding if and when, and subject to what conditions, long term and life sentence prisoners should be released from custody once they have served the minimum part of their sentence required by law. We are also responsible for considering the recall and re-release of prisoners and for monitoring those on extended sentences. In all of our work, we rely on reports from many different bodies and persons - prison staff of all grades, social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, voluntary organisations, the police, the Scottish Executive Justice Department, judges and the Crown Office. In order to perform our work satisfactorily in the interests of the public and parole candidates, we need good reports and we need them on time. In this Plan, and in future Annual Reports, we propose performance targets for ourselves which are genuine indicators of the Board's performance. We shall continue to monitor our performance and our practices to ensure that we make the best possible decisions in the most efficient way.
Performance indicators in previous Plans have related mainly to time frames within which decisions should be made and communicated. In the last year, research has been commissioned into the quality of the Board's decisions. While there are clearly many methodological difficulties with such research, it seems crucial to us that we should know how good we are at predicting how prisoners will respond when they are released. We would hope on the basis of this research to be able to develop both better understanding of the factors which might affect re-offending and performance indicators which measure the Board's ability to make correct decisions.
The major change in recent times affecting the Board's work is the introduction of Tribunals to determine the release of all life-sentence prisoners. The arguments in favour of this move were well rehearsed in the Scottish Parliament during the passage of the Convention Rights (Compliance) (Scotland) Act 2001, and the Board welcomes the new system. The exact implications for the Board's work will not be known until each existing life sentence prisoner has a "punishment part" set, since this punishment part will determine when the case is referred to the Board. It is clear, however, that the increase in workload will be substantial. In anticipation of this, the numbers of staff and members of the Board have been increased. We shall need to keep under review the number of Board members to ensure that we do not ask each individual, all of whom are part-time, to perform an unreasonable number of days work in a year. The nature of the work is very demanding, as is now made clear in all recruitment materials, and it is necessary to treat all members properly to maintain their high levels of commitment and enthusiasm for the work.
The Convention Rights (Compliance)(Scotland) Act also made changes to the appointment system for Board members and introduces a new system for their dismissal. This is in order to stress the independence of the Board. In furtherance of this independence, the Board has also been required to appoint its own legal advisers. This has now been done, under the normal procedures for competitive tendering. The full cost of this service cannot be accurately predicted; the level of resort to judicial review of Board decisions is likely to be the major determinant of such cost.
Our Corporate Plan thus represents the best estimates we can make of the costs of our work for the next three years. Throughout that period we shall strive to improve our working practices to make the best possible decisions in the interests of the public and of all persons in the criminal justice system, and to do so with maximum efficiency.
James J McManus
Chairman
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