In 2016, my constituent’s daughter, Ms Webster, was charged with an offence by Police Scotland. It took six months for the prosecutor to identify that Ms Webster has informed the police, at the time of the charge, that exculpatory evidence was available. In the further investigation that followed, neither she nor her lawyer was contacted—indeed, I was told by the Lord Advocate that that would have been inappropriate. Two years after that, the case was dropped, within days of the exculpatory evidence being passed to the Crown Office.

Can the Solicitor General not see that an independent review of that case could help to identify errors and improve practices, processes and decision making? Given that the Lord Advocate has, so far, declined that, is there any other mechanism by which such a review could be secured?