Hansard

When the Police and Fire Reform (Scotland) Bill went through the Parliament earlier this year, Labour and other parties raised a series of concerns about the legislation itself and about the ways in which the creation of a single Scottish police force would be implemented. Above all, although supporting both the principle of the bill and the bill itself, we raised serious concerns that many hundreds of loyal and hardworking members of police staff would lose their jobs in order to balance the books and that, as a result, many hundreds of police officers would be taken off the front line to backfill civilian jobs in the new service.

The Government amendment today highlights an increase of 65 police staff jobs across Scotland over the last quarter compared with the previous quarter. I fear that police staff will simply despair at such a superficial defence from a Government that fails to acknowledge a net loss of more than 900 civilian staff jobs over the past two years.

Mr MacAskill laughs as if his defence is a significant one. More than 900 jobs have been lost over the past two years; there is a prediction by the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland that a further 3,000 jobs will be at risk over the next three years; and Mr MacAskill comes to the chamber and asks members to regard an increase in one quarter of 1 per cent of the workforce as a significant difference from the pattern that he has set.

We return to the central issue of staff jobs but in a context that I suspect few would have anticipated when the Police and Fire Reform (Scotland) Act 2012 was passed. The most immediate issue that is confronting police staff is not what cuts will be made but who will make those decisions in the first place. When the chairman of the Scottish Police Authority and the chief constable of the police service of Scotland gave evidence to the Justice Committee last week, their failure to agree on who was responsible for what was there for all to see. The First Minister described that last week as “creative tension”. However, from the point of view of those whose jobs are most at risk, it was a lot more serious than that. These were more than differences of personal or professional opinion; they were also differences of legal opinion so important that both Vic Emery and Stephen House resorted to taking external advice at public expense on the proper interpretation of the new force’s founding statute. That quite remarkable situation deserves to be brought to the attention of the whole Parliament. After all, it was Parliament that passed the act, including exceptional provision that the Parliament should keep the new arrangements under review and provide regular reports. What the act means, what was intended by it and how it should be interpreted are matters that concern us all.

The 2012 act establishes a single police force by amalgamating eight existing police forces and two existing national bodies. However, that amalgamation creates not one new national body, but two—a new police service and a new Police Authority board. The issue is which of those bodies should be responsible for what.

The 2012 act provides that the forensic service should be delivered by the authority in order to keep a sterile corridor between police officers and forensic evidence. As Stephen House told the Justice Committee last week, as chief constable he has also conceded control to the authority over a number of important areas, most notably information and communication technology. He is not so willing to give up day-to-day control of police staff or of police finance—for good reason. Direction and control of police staff are the responsibility of the chief constable. They have to be, if he is to take operational responsibility for policing in Scotland. That is clear in the act, in the responses of ministers and in the Government’s amendment today.

However, the chairman of the board, Vic Emery, has formed a different opinion on the basis of the legal advice that he received. He told the Justice Committee last week:

“The police staff will always be employed by the SPA, but before they become police staff, they are staff. When they get allocated to the police service of Scotland, they become police staff; and when that happens, they come under the direction and control of the chief constable.”

Stephen House gave the Justice Committee his own interpretation, again based on the legal advice that he received:

“In effect, the board loans the police staff to the chief constable on a day-to-day basis”.—[Official Report, Justice Committee, 27 November 2012; c 2127-8.]

Then they come under his direction and control.

Those statements require clarification—that is where the Government has a responsibility to clearly express its own view. The statement

“before they become police staff, they are staff”

is a proposition that does not appear to be supported by the 2012 act.

People who are currently police staff with existing forces are about to become police staff of the single national force. It must surely be a matter of concern that the authority that is to employ them appears to believe that there is a point in that process at which they are not police staff at all. Equally, the idea that staff are on loan to the police service does not seem to provide a secure basis for the conduct of their day-to-day duties, as staff who are on loan between organisations on a day-to-day basis could presumably be there today and gone tomorrow.

The Justice Committee invited Mr Emery and Mr House to share their conflicting legal opinions, and both have done so. The committee has not yet seen fit to publish those opinions. I hope that it will revisit that decision in the interests of transparency, but it is clear that that is a matter for it to decide.