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Scotland's New Parole Chair Inherits a System Where the Hearing Exists But the Pathway Often Does Not

Morag Slesser's appointment as Chairperson of the Parole Board for Scotland arrives as official records confirm that rehabilitation programme shortages routinely prevent prisoners from demonstrating the very progress the Board is required to assess.

AuthorBeyond the Curve
Published2026-11-01
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, according to the Board's own official announcement. Slesser is a consultant forensic clinical psychologist who has served as a general member of the Board for eight years and previously held the role of Head of Psychological Services at the State Hospital in Carstairs. The appointment was made by Scottish Ministers on the recommendation of the Judicial Appointments Board for Scotland, the formal process set out in the Chairperson role description published by that body.

In its announcement, the Board stated that its primary responsibility is public protection and that it makes decisions independently on the evidence in each case, operating as an independent tribunal for relevant human-rights purposes. Slesser indicated her intention to develop strong links with the agencies involved in assessing, managing, and supporting people in custody and in the community.

The appointment comes at a moment of active institutional scrutiny. The Scottish Government recently conducted a public consultation on parole reform, titled Voices in Justice, and the Scottish Sentencing and Penal Policy Commission has been gathering evidence on release from custody. The Board's own published statistics show that during 2024/25 it held 1,003 mandatory oral hearings, 485 discretionary oral hearings, 121 casework meetings, and 153 recall and ad-hoc meetings — a caseload that reflects the scale of the decisions being made and the volume of lives affected by how the system functions.

What Beyond the Curve Sees

Beyond the Curve lens

The appointment of a forensic clinical psychologist to the Board's top role is a meaningful signal. Slesser's professional background is in research-informed approaches to assessing and managing risk — the precise discipline the Board's decision-making is supposed to rest on. If that expertise shapes how the Board engages with the agencies that prepare prisoners for review, it could improve the quality of evidence considered at hearings. That is a genuine institutional counterweight worth acknowledging.

But Beyond the Curve's analysis of the verified record identifies a structural problem that a change in leadership alone cannot resolve. The Scottish Sentencing and Penal Policy Commission, drawing on its call for evidence, found that progression toward parole is generally linked to a requirement to attend rehabilitation programmes as the way to demonstrate reduced risk — and that access to those programmes is not uniform across the prison estate. Programmes are oversubscribed. Transport to prisons that offer relevant programmes is sometimes unavailable. In some cases, programmes are so oversubscribed that participation before a person's parole hearing is effectively unlikely. The Commission received evidence that a lack of access to programmes has hindered prisoners' ability to prove progress and readiness for release.

This is not a fringe concern. The Scottish Government's own analysis of consultation responses to Voices in Justice found that individuals with experience of custody described getting parole as difficult, citing specifically the difficulty of accessing the programmes and courses that might help them qualify. The same analysis noted that the conditions for getting parole were not clearly explained or understood, and that a more flexible and individualised approach was needed.

The structural issue is one of institutional incentive misalignment. The Board assesses risk reduction. Risk reduction is demonstrated primarily through programme completion. Programme availability is controlled by the Scottish Prison Service, a separate institution with its own resource constraints. The Board cannot direct the Prison Service to make programmes available. The result is that a prisoner may face a hearing having been unable to complete the very steps the system treats as evidence of change — not because they refused, but because the opportunity was never provided. Beyond the Curve regards this as a form of review that is procedurally present but substantively incomplete: the hearing exists, but the pathway to passing it has been structurally obstructed.

Victims and survivors have a legitimate stake in this analysis too. The parole system exists in part to protect the public, and victims have a voice through written statements and, in certain cases, the ability to observe hearings. A system that releases people without adequate preparation — or conversely, one that detains people beyond the point at which risk has genuinely reduced because programme access was denied — serves neither victims nor the public well. Accountability requires that the system function as designed, not merely that hearings occur.

What The Official Record Says

Verified record

The Parole Board for Scotland's statutory functions are largely set out in the Prisoners and Criminal Proceedings (Scotland) Act 1993. The specific procedural rules governing the parole process are set out in secondary legislation: the Parole Board (Scotland) Rules 2022, a Scottish Statutory Instrument made on 20 December 2022 and in force from 1 April 2023. Those Rules apply to all cases referred to the Board from that date and make provision for the conduct of parole proceedings, including confidentiality, the sending of documents, and the format of hearings.

The Board's own Guidance for Members states that in assessing suitability for early release, the Board focuses primarily on the risk to the public of a further offence. The Board does not decide guilt or innocence; it evaluates risk. Victims have a voice through written statements and, in certain cases, by observing hearings under Rule 30 of the Parole Rules.

The 2022 Rules also introduced, for the first time, a provision specifying that failure to disclose a victim's body is a matter the Board may take into account when deciding on release — a change the Scottish Government described as reflecting its commitment to putting victims at the heart of the justice system. The Rules additionally created a new procedure allowing the Board to reconsider cases under certain conditions where a decision has been made not to release a person.

An Audit Scotland review of Scotland's criminal justice system, cited in the Wikipedia entry for the Parole Board for Scotland, noted that the Board is sometimes limited in its ability to grant parole because of the lack of availability of rehabilitation programmes in prison. This finding is corroborated by the Scottish Sentencing and Penal Policy Commission's published report, which recommended that the Scottish Prison Service must articulate and publish its approach to rehabilitation for the purposes of reducing reoffending — an indication that no such published framework currently exists. The Commission also 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 Board is required by law to submit an Annual Report to Scottish Ministers, who present it to the Scottish Parliament. The 2024–25 Annual Report is publicly available on the Board's website. The Board's governance framework also includes a Memorandum of Agreement with Scottish Ministers, updated in October 2025, which governs the relationship between the Board and the Scottish Government.

Why It Matters

Public accountability

The appointment of Morag Slesser matters because leadership shapes institutional culture, and the Board's culture — how it weighs evidence, how it engages with agencies, how it communicates with prisoners and victims — has direct consequences for people whose liberty and safety depend on it. A chairperson with a clinical psychology background and eight years of Board experience is well positioned to understand the gap between what the system promises and what it delivers.

But the gap itself is structural, and it will not close through leadership alone. The Scottish Sentencing and Penal Policy Commission's evidence record shows that release from custody in Scotland is sometimes delayed not because of ongoing risk or new offending, but because of inaccessible programmes, rigid parole criteria, and institutional bottlenecks in progression — a characterisation submitted to the Commission by the Scottish Prisoner Advocacy and Research Collective and reflected in the Commission's own findings. The Commission's analysis of annual reports found that life prisoners have approximately a one-in-five chance of being released at their first Parole Board appearance.

For the families of people in custody, each delayed hearing or failed review carries concrete costs: continued separation, financial strain, and the psychological weight of a system that appears to move slowly and without clear explanation. For victims and survivors, the legitimacy of the system depends on its decisions being genuinely evidence-based — which requires that the evidence the Board needs to assess actually be available to generate.

The Scottish Government's Voices in Justice consultation acknowledged that there was widespread agreement that more joined-up services should be available in the community to assist rehabilitation and reintegration, with employment, housing, substance misuse, and mental health services identified as particularly important. That acknowledgment is a starting point, not a resolution.

What the verified record demands is a specific institutional response: the Scottish Prison Service must ensure that rehabilitation programmes are available, accessible, and not so oversubscribed that prisoners cannot complete them before their parole hearings. The Parole Board's new chair has stated her intention to build strong links with the agencies involved in supporting people in custody and in the community. The test of that commitment will be whether those links produce measurable changes in programme access — and whether the Board's future annual reports reflect a system in which review is not only formally conducted but substantively meaningful.

Sources

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