THE recent Holyrood exchange on the housing of transgender women in Scotland’s women’s prison estate illustrates how easily parliamentary debate can slide from safeguarding into symbolism.
Some readers of The National Conversation may already feel weary of this subject. I genuinely sympathise. I would much prefer it were an utterly settled, procedural matter that rarely troubled headlines or parliamentary time. Until it is handled with clarity, consistency, and adequate resourcing, however, it will remain contentious by default, and I will feel obliged to challenge arguments that fuel conflict rather than offer resolution.
READ MORE: Scottish Labour MSP fails to show face as paedo pal scandal deepens
By naming three prisoners convicted of murder, Douglas Ross invited the public to imply a generalised risk to women from trans women as a class. That move is rhetorically effective, but analytically unsound. Prison safety is not managed through symbolic categorisation; it is managed through individual risk assessment, behaviour monitoring, staffing levels, supervision, and therapeutic intervention. That is already how the Scottish Prison Service operates for all prisoners – including, it’s worth remembering, cis women guilty of murdering other cis women.
It is also worth noting that the victims in the cited murder cases were cis men. That does not diminish the seriousness of the crimes, but it does undercut the insinuation that these cases demonstrate a sex-specific threat to women. Risk cannot be inferred from biology alone without abandoning the very assessment frameworks that exist to keep prisons safe.
The reported assault by Paris Green on a female member of staff has likewise been framed as inherently gendered violence. Yet anyone familiar with custodial environments knows that assaults on staff frequently arise from hostility to authority, boundary-testing behaviour, or institutional stressors rather than sexual or gendered motivation.
READ MORE: Steph Paton: Trumpism is one T gender-critical campaigners can support
These presentations require specific management rather than parliamentary grandstanding.
This points to a more fundamental issue. How individual prisoners are managed is not, and should not be, the business of MSPs naming cases across the chamber. That is an operational matter for prison professionals.
What is properly the business of parliament is whether prisons are adequately resourced to manage complex, high-risk individuals safely and humanely. On that question, the debate has been conspicuously thin.
UK-level cost-cutting of public services over the past decade has had a direct knock-on effect on the funds available to the Scottish Government. Criminal justice has faced the same structural squeeze as healthcare: rising complexity of need, higher safeguarding expectations, and shrinking real-terms budgets.
Improving prison safety is not achieved by changing labels or imposing blanket bans; it requires properly funded staff levels, training, specialist units, and infrastructure.
READ MORE: Graham Norton and Alan Cumming call for conversion therapy ban
John Swinney is right to say that prison policy involves balancing competing rights and risks within legal obligations. That is not evasion; it is governance. What undermines public confidence is not complexity, but the pretence that it can be eliminated without investment.
By focusing attention on three named prisoners rather than on systemic capacity, critics are overreaching into individual case management while falling short on the harder question of funding and provision.
Safeguarding cannot be legislated by anecdote. It depends on boring, procedural, properly resourced systems. Someone should inform Mr Ross that panto season is over.
Ron Lumiere
via email
THERE is a housing shortage, and homelessness is a problem in all parts of the UK. Scottish Government figures for 2024 state that 31,500 household were “owed” settled accommodation. The problem is a huge drain on public funds, since sheltering and providing support for one homeless person can cost taxpayers upwards of £35,000 a year.
Holyrood’s own figures for 24/25 give the average price for a new-build semi-detached house to be £257,000 and that for similar existing properties £195,000. Meanwhile, in the UK the average rent paid by renters is in the order of £15,000 per annum. It is no surprise that many cannot afford to buy and some cannot even afford to rent.
READ MORE: Kate Forbes: Rural communities to benefit from the Scottish budget
Why I mention these facts is that a casual browse on the likes of Amazon will show that multi-room modular homes, which are fully insulated and come with fully fitted kitchens and bathrooms, are available for a price of £10,000-15,000. If these ready-to-use units pass the requirements that allow them to be used as accommodation, one wonders why they are being ignored by the authorities?
I appreciate that site preparation and installation of utilities may double that price, but it is still less than it costs to support one homeless person for a year. It sounds like an obvious solution to the problem and it would put the topic of rent in the hands of the government rather than the private sector.
David J Crawford
Glasgow
Share