Meeting of the Parliament 21 May 2014
A motion of no confidence is a very serious matter and not one that the Scottish Conservatives take lightly. After careful consideration, we will be supporting calls for Alex Neil to resign, for the simple reason that we believe that it cannot be acceptable for a minister to come to the chamber and allow Parliament to be misled.
We have all seen the evidence, but it is worth going over once again. On 26 September 2012, Alex Neil told Parliament that he believed that NHS Lanarkshire was revising its plans on mental health services at Monklands. A few hours later, he announced that he would be removing himself from the formal decision-making process surrounding the plan, because of his constituency interests.
That was all accepted in good faith but, thanks to a freedom of information request, we now know that, five hours before addressing Parliament, Alex Neil’s private secretary had emailed a civil servant in the health department. That email could not have been clearer. Sent to health officials in the Scottish Government, it declared that Mr Neil was clear that the mental health facilities should be retained. It concluded:
“The Cabinet Secretary has asked that you seek agreement from NHS Lanarkshire to reconfigure their plans accordingly.”
Astonishingly, even Michael Matheson was copied into the email. So, in the morning, he was made aware that the decision to retain Monklands had already been made by his superior yet, that very afternoon, he was told that the decision over Monklands was being delegated to him.
It is of course the right of every member of the Parliament, be they a minister or not, to oppose decisions that affect their constituents, and we do not disagree that, as a newly appointed minister, Mr Neil was within his rights to reconsider decisions that his predecessor had taken. However, the issue here is not about the rights and wrongs of closing medical facilities at Monklands, and nor is it about Mr Neil’s competence in his job. The issue at hand is a cabinet secretary who ordered his officials to do one thing in the morning and then decided consciously not to reveal that fact to Parliament in the afternoon.
I suggest that this is a sad instance of a minister deliberately allowing an untruth to gain credence in order to avoid difficult questions about his position. Mr Neil should have told Parliament that afternoon that he had just told NHS Lanarkshire to “reconfigure their plans”. That he did not do so was not just a dereliction of duty; it now looks suspiciously like a tacit admission that he knew that he was doing something underhand and wrong—it is as simple as that.
The fact is that the investigation that the First Minister carried out into the case failed utterly to address that point. The First Minister said that the health secretary acted “perfectly properly”. His defence of Mr Neil goes on to note that Mr Neil was concerned over a conflict of interest, but nowhere in the First Minister’s letter exonerating Mr Neil is the key point raised—that, by the time that Mr Neil raised his concerns about a conflict of interest, his wishes had already been made clear to NHS Lanarkshire. Nowhere is there acknowledgement of the fact that Mr Neil made the decision and then tried to wash his hands of it. Now, by refusing to sack his health secretary, the First Minister is putting politics above the Parliament.
The whole episode is symptomatic of the SNP’s disregard for the Parliament, particularly in the run-up to the independence referendum. It gives us in the Conservatives no pleasure to conclude that, in this instance, the cabinet secretary deliberately ensured that Parliament was misled. As he clearly did so, we can no longer have confidence in him in carrying out his duties, so we support the motion of no confidence.