Sheriffs Under Fire Over £1.2m City Custody Bill

Glasgow sheriffs have been accused of unnecessarily remanding young criminals in custody – costing council tax payers more than £1million a year.

City council social work boss David Comley plans to raise the problem with law chiefs and will try to persuade the Scottish Executive to pay the bill.

Between April and November last year, 24 people aged 16 or under were placed in secure care by the courts on remand before a hearing or while awaiting sentence for a serious offence.
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Offences leading to remand were murder, sex offences, theft, violence, drugs, carrying offensive weapons, breach of curfew and bail and breach of the peace.

Although the council is not involved in the decision, it has to pay. The Executive meets the cost of secure care for those young people once they have been sentenced.

By April, it is expected 30 young people will have been remanded at a cost of around £1.2million over the past financial year.

Mr Comley says there is likely to be a further 25% increase in the number remanded by the end of the 2006/07 year, increasing the cost to the council.

The average age of those remanded is 15, while the average stay last year was 49 days.

Recently, the Executive agreed to increase the number of secure beds in Scotland from 98 to 130.

Mr Comley said: “Currently, sheriffs are unable to remand all the young people they request secure care for, due to lack of beds, and tend to remand to prison or to bail young offenders to the community.

“So there is a significant financial risk to the council that the overspend in secure care may be increased as the secure bed numbers increase and sheriffs use these for remand.

“In some cases, we believe sheriffs are remanding young people to secure care when that is not an appropriate action. We would certainly like to meet sheriffs to discuss other options, including bailing young into the community.”

Glasgow Tory MSP Bill Aitken backed the director’s call for the Executive to fund the cost of keeping teenagers in custody.

But he added: “I am satisfied sheriffs’ decisions on remanding youngsters are in the public’s interest and in the interests of the child.”