During November 2022, the Scottish Parliament Criminal Justice Committee took evidence on prison budgets as part of its Pre-Budget Scrutiny work. The proposal was that SPS should receive a flat cash budget for the next 4 years. The response to this was (unsurprisingly) negative. As just one example, Teresa Medhurst, SPS Chief Executive, stated that “there is no or at most, very limited, opportunity to the scaling back of our operations without significant risk to health and  welfare support, reputational damage, the loss of services and the risk to operational stability across the estate.” A corresponding scrutiny report was published by the Criminal Justice Committee on 9 December 2022.