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A New Chair, an Old Problem: Scotland's Parole Board and the Rehabilitation Gap That Undermines Meaningful Review

The appointment of a forensic psychologist to lead the Parole Board for Scotland arrives as official records confirm that programme scarcity—not risk alone—is keeping people in prison longer than necessary.

AuthorBeyond the Curve
Published2026-11-02
ReviewSource checked
Sources9 sources

This article is public commentary and advocacy analysis published after automated source, claim, structure, and legal-boundary checks.

parole reviewmeaningful reviewsecond chances

What Happened

Verified source summary

On 12 October 2026, the Scottish Government appointed Morag Slesser as Chairperson of the Parole Board for Scotland (PBS), succeeding John Watt, who had served in the role for fourteen years before stepping down in early 2026. Ian Bryce, the Board's legal vice-chairperson, served as interim chair during the recruitment period administered by the Judicial Appointments Board for Scotland.

Slesser brings a distinctive professional background to the role. She is a forensic clinical psychologist whose most recent substantive post was Head of Psychology at The State Hospital, Carstairs, and she has served as a General Member of the Parole Board for Scotland for the past eight years. According to the PBS's own announcement, she has played a leading role in developing research-informed approaches to assessing and managing the risk posed by people who have committed serious offences.

The appointment is not merely a personnel change. It arrives at a moment of active institutional scrutiny. The Scottish Government recently conducted a public consultation on parole reform—titled "Voices in Justice"—focused on transparency, communication, and the experiences of people in custody, victims, and their families. The Board itself has welcomed that consultation and signalled its readiness to work with justice partners on any resulting recommendations. The Parole Board (Scotland) Rules 2022, which came into force on 1 April 2023, modernised the procedural framework governing how cases are heard, including new reconsideration procedures and expanded victim-participation provisions.

What Beyond the Curve Sees

Beyond the Curve lens

The appointment of a forensic psychologist as chair carries genuine symbolic and practical weight. Slesser's stated commitment to a parole system that is "safe, fair and transparent for prisoners, victims and their families, and the wider public" reflects the dual mandate the Board is legally required to hold. Her background in risk assessment and her eight years as a Board member mean she arrives with direct knowledge of how decisions are actually made—not merely how they are described in policy documents. That is a meaningful credential.

The institutional counterweight is real and should be stated plainly: the Parole Board for Scotland operates as an independent tribunal, its decisions are independent of Scottish Ministers, and public safety is its stated top priority. The Board considers whether an individual has addressed the factors that led to their offending and whether they can live in society without posing an unacceptable risk to the public. These are not arbitrary standards; they reflect a considered legal framework designed to protect communities while preserving individual rights under the European Convention on Human Rights.

Beyond the Curve's analysis, however, identifies a structural problem that no chairperson appointment alone can resolve. The Board's independence is procedural. Its ability to direct release depends on the evidence placed before it—and that evidence is shaped by what happens inside prisons before anyone reaches a hearing. An Audit Scotland review of Scotland's criminal justice system noted that the Parole Board is sometimes limited in its ability to grant parole because of the lack of availability of rehabilitation programmes in prison. This is not a fringe observation. The Scottish Sentencing and Penal Policy Commission's recent report, drawing on a call for evidence, found that markers of rehabilitation and progression within prison are perceived to have become conflated with programme and course attendance, despite the fact that access to accredited, evidence-based programmes is not uniform across the prison estate.

The Scottish Government's own analysis of consultation responses to the parole reform process identified that programmes are so oversubscribed that participation before a parole hearing is sometimes unlikely, that relevant programmes are simply unavailable at certain prisons, and that a lack of prison transport prevents people from reaching establishments where programmes are offered. These are systemic failures that sit upstream of any hearing. A Board that cannot see evidence of change because the system has not made change possible is not conducting a fully meaningful review—it is ratifying a gap that was created elsewhere.

This is the structural issue beneath the headline: the incentive architecture of Scotland's prison estate does not yet reliably produce the conditions under which the parole review it mandates can function as intended. Slesser's stated intention to develop strong links with the agencies and services involved in assessing, managing, and supporting people in custody and in the community is precisely the right instinct. Whether that intention translates into institutional pressure on programme availability is the question that matters.

What The Official Record Says

Verified record

The Parole Board for Scotland is a tribunal non-departmental public body established in 1967. It operates independently of the Scottish Government, and many of its decisions are binding on Scottish Ministers. When carrying out its parole decision-making functions, it acts as an independent tribunal and operates as a court for relevant human-rights purposes.

The procedural framework governing the Board's hearings is set out in the Parole Board (Scotland) Rules 2022 (Scottish Statutory Instrument 2022 No. 385), which came into force on 1 April 2023. Those Rules apply to every case referred by Scottish Ministers to the Board on or after that date. The Board's Guidance for Members confirms that the framework takes into account the changes introduced by the 2022 Rules and that the Board's decision-making focuses primarily on the risk to the public of a further offence.

The Board's own published data for 2024–25 records that it held 1,003 mandatory oral hearings, 485 discretionary oral hearings, 153 recall and ad-hoc meetings, and 51 preliminary hearings, in addition to 121 casework meetings to consider offenders for release and recommend licence conditions to Scottish Ministers. The Annual Report 2023–2024 records that of the 479 life sentence mandatory oral hearings that took place, the Board directed release on 54 occasions—a release rate that the Scottish Government's consultation analysis describes as approximately one in five at a first appearance, a figure that one respondent to the Commission's call for evidence described as a "shocking indictment."

The Scottish Sentencing and Penal Policy Commission's report, published by the Scottish Government, documented that availability and capacity of programmes in Scottish prisons have been raised as an issue for years, and that a lack of access to programmes has hindered prisoners' ability to prove progress and readiness for release. The Commission recommended consideration of whether the limited remit of the Scottish Advisory Panel on Offender Rehabilitation misses an opportunity for broader focus on rehabilitation beyond programme accreditation.

The Scottish Government's "Voices in Justice" consultation analysis confirmed that individuals with experience of custody and their families found that getting parole was difficult, that the conditions for getting parole were not clearly explained or understood, and that it was difficult to access the programmes and courses that might help people get parole. There was widespread agreement among respondents that more joined-up services should be available in the community to assist rehabilitation and reintegration.

Why It Matters

Public accountability

Victims and survivors have a legitimate and legally recognised stake in parole decisions. The 2022 Rules expanded victim-participation provisions, and the Board's public-safety mandate exists precisely because the harm caused by serious offending is real and lasting. Nothing in this analysis diminishes that. The question is not whether public safety should be the Board's priority—it should be, and the law says so. The question is whether the system that feeds into the Board's hearings is giving that priority a fair chance to operate on accurate evidence.

When a person cannot access a rehabilitation programme because it is oversubscribed, unavailable at their prison, or unreachable due to transport failures, the parole hearing that follows is not evaluating their actual progress. It is evaluating the absence of an opportunity. That distinction matters for victims, who deserve decisions grounded in genuine risk assessment rather than administrative accident. It matters for people in custody, whose liberty depends on a process that the official record shows is sometimes structurally compromised before it begins. And it matters for public accountability, because a system that incarcerates people beyond the point at which risk has been addressed—not because of ongoing danger but because of programme scarcity—is not delivering on its own stated purpose.

Morag Slesser's appointment as the first forensic psychologist to chair the Parole Board for Scotland is a concrete development, not a symbolic one. Her background in research-informed risk assessment and her stated intention to build stronger links across the agencies that assess, manage, and support people in custody and in the community position her to engage directly with the upstream failures the official record has documented. Whether the new chair uses that position to press for programme availability as a precondition of meaningful review—not merely as a desirable aspiration—is the specific accountability question that the verified record now makes it possible to ask.

Sources

Justice Advocate note: Public commentary and advocacy analysis only. No legal advice, private case facts, deadline calculation, filing recommendation, or outcome prediction.