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SECTION 7 - A SAFER AND STRONGER SCOTLAND
A Safer and Stronger Scotland - Help local communities to flourish, becoming stronger, safer places to live, offering improved opportunities and a better quality of life.
A strong economy must be underpinned by safer and stronger communities: communities that people are proud to belong to; communities where people feel safe and have confidence that justice and fairness will prevail; communities that allow people to realise their ambitions; communities where the standard of living is improving, especially for the most disadvantaged; and communities where people take responsibility for each other and for their own actions.
Since May 2007 we have made significant strides towards a safer and stronger Scotland, including:
- Working with police forces to have 1,000 additional police officers available in Scotland's communities by 2011;
- Strengthening controls on sex offenders by implementing the National Accommodation Strategy for Sex Offenders;
- Introducing the Sexual Offences (Scotland) Bill to reform the law on rape and sexual offences;
- Prioritising child protection, through a new child protection phone line, rolling out the framework for a new vetting and barring scheme and strengthening child protection committees;
- New intensive support and supervision measures for young people at high risk and investing in improving the secure estate;
- Establishing a taskforce to spearhead and co-ordinate the fight against serious organised crime;
- Putting the proceeds of crime back into communities and improving the lives of young people, providing over £5m for free football and rugby coaching and arts and culture activities;
- Strengthening support for the most vulnerable families, including working with local authorities to provide an allowance for approved kinship carers of looked after children on an equivalent basis to foster carers, with a dedicated service to all kinship carers to be provided in the near future by Citizens Advice Scotland;
- Meeting Scotland's long-term needs for high quality housing of all tenures by setting a national goal to increase supply to at least 35,000 new homes a year by the middle of the next decade;
- Providing £25m to kick-start a new generation of council house building, the first of any significance in decades; establishing the LIFT - the Low-cost Initiative for First Time buyers - to help more people achieve sustainable home ownership; and announcing a Homeowners' Support Fund to help those threatened by repossession as a result of the credit crunch;
- Helping to transform some of Scotland's most deprived communities by investing in the Riverside Inverclyde, Irvine Bay and Clydebank Rebuilt Urban Regeneration Companies and in the Clyde Gateway project to regenerate the East End of Glasgow and neighbouring parts of South Lanarkshire;
- Introducing legislation to safeguard the rights of people who develop pleural plaques after being exposed to asbestos as a result of an employer's negligence;
- Launching the Scottish Sustainable Communities Initiative in June 2008; and
- Carrying out a review of community penalties, which we reported in November 2007.
This is just the start of a much more fundamental programme of reform to deal with some of Scotland's most serious problems. In many cases this will require a long, hard look at existing policy and practice; informed and wide-ranging discussion and debate; and the courage to take a new direction. We will not shrink from that responsibility and have already taken action by:
- Establishing the Prisons Commission to look at the purpose of prison in a modern Scotland. The Commission reported in July and we are giving priority consideration to its 23 challenging recommendations;
- Taking forward an independent, public judicial inquiry into the Shirley McKie case to restore public confidence in the criminal justice system;
- Asking Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of the Constabulary to review the roles and responsibilities of police forces in Scotland. His independent report will make recommendations by the end of the year;
- Developing and launching Scotland's first drugs strategy for almost a decade;
- Piloting drug treatment and testing orders for less serious offenders;
- Developing and launching a partnership framework for youth justice, strengthening early and effective intervention with young people at risk, and committing to legislate to keep children out of adult prisons;
- Consulting on reforms to the children's hearings system to strengthen intervention and support for our most vulnerable children and families;
- Pressing the UK Government to transfer responsibility for firearms legislation to the Scottish Parliament and, in the absence of their agreement, hosting a Scottish Firearms Summit as a first step to building a consensus for action; and
- Supporting those who do not wish to buy their own home through reforms to improve the supply, quality and affordability of social housing, and through encouragement of the private rented sector to play a greater role in meeting housing need.
The Road to Recovery - Scotland's Drugs Strategy |
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Scotland has a long-standing and serious drug problem compared to other similar European countries, including England. It is a significant driver of economic underperformance, crime, risk to children and health inequalities costing Scotland £2.6bn per year. Over the last 18 months the groundswell of expert opinion that fundamental change is needed has been reflected in a number of influential expert reports. The Road to Recovery draws on those reports and sets out a vision for a new approach to tackling problem drug use, based on promoting recovery. It describes how the Government will work with partners across the field to translate this into reality (in the context of the Government's Purpose, the National Outcomes and the wider reform of public service delivery). The strategy was well received by experts and practitioners in the field and approved unanimously by Parliament. The emphasis now is on delivery, in particular considering how to embed planning and delivery of drug treatment services in Single Outcome Agreement structures, and to ensure services have a recovery focus. The Government looks forward to a report from the expert group set up to consider these issues, as well as the report on drugs and alcohol expenditure from Audit Scotland, as key factors for implementing change for 2009-10. |
Going forward, we will build on these actions and modernise the Scottish legal system so that it deals more efficiently and appropriately with crime and disorder and provides a supportive environment for business:
- We intend to implement the Judiciary and Courts (Scotland) Bill to modernise the organisation and leadership of Scotland's judiciary.
- We will introduce a Legal Profession Bill to provide for alternative business structures, giving consumers more choice. The Bill will deliver the first significant reform of the legal profession since 1980 and will make it possible for legal services to be delivered in new ways and allow Scottish law firms to compete internationally, while ensuring strong regulation to protect the public.
- We will identify ways to streamline and improve the operation of tribunals in Scotland, in light of the review being led by Lord Philips.
- We will respond to Lord Gill's fundamental review of the civil justice system.
We are taking action to make sentences served in the community more robust, immediate and visible, as set out in the report of our review of community penalties. Drawing on the findings of the Prisons Commission we will also drive forward reforms and initiatives to prevent offending and reduce re-offending - focusing especially on early intervention, providing positive opportunities for young people and keeping them out of prison. We will work to achieve a flexible and coherent penal policy that ensures prison remains the right disposal for serious and violent offenders with measures to deliver interventions, support and appropriate restrictions for the entire length of the sentence. A priority will be to ensure that criminal justice works as intended to protect victims and witnesses and to ensure appropriate sentencing. We will bring forward a Criminal Justice Bill to tackle some of these issues.
Over the coming year, we will consult on draft legislation to safeguard Scotland's stock of social housing for future generations and to ensure that the stock is managed to deliver improved value for tenants and taxpayers. Our draft Housing Bill will outline provisions for achieving these objectives by ending Right to Buy on all new social housing and by modernising the powers of the Scottish Housing Regulator. Subject to the outcome of our current policy review, the Bill could also contain provisions for a wider reform of our Right to Buy, when it is introduced in 2009-10.
In all of the above, our approach is to work with and listen to interests and communities across Scotland and, where necessary, to take bold and radical steps to address deeply ingrained problems.
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