Hansard

I thank Dame Elish Angiolini for her “Independent Review of Complaints Handling, Investigations and Misconduct Issues in Relation to Policing”. It is a sobering and, at times, shocking read. It tells us this: the Scottish National Party’s system of police complaints and governance has been broken since inception.

Dame Elish’s forensic analysis has been described as a “watershed moment” for policing in Scotland, and fixing the SNP’s apparatus is vital in order that we can repair and enhance public confidence. However, the SNP got the report, issued a bland press release, then disappeared, which is why the Scottish Conservatives have called for this debate in Opposition time.

The debate is also about supporting and protecting the thousands of police officers to whom we all owe an immense debt of gratitude. Those men and women selflessly keep us safe every day, and nothing that will be said by Conservative members—or, I am sure, by members from all across the chamber—will question their commitment, ability or professionalism. They deserve to know that the complaints process is efficient, transparent, proportionate and fair.

Yesterday, Douglas Ross and I met a group of women from different parts of our policing community. They included a former constable, a firearms officer, a senior officer and a former Scottish Police Authority board member. They had all experienced injustice that was, thanks to the structures that were implemented in a rush by the SNP, the starting point for something worse. When they engaged with the complaints process, they were let down. Not only were careers ruined, but some of those people suffered ill health and life-changing financial loss.

Karen Harper spent 22 years as a constable in Lanarkshire and Dumfriesshire before being forced to retire through ill health. Later, she won her sex discrimination claim. Ms Harper describes the report as an

“exoneration for myself and many other officers betrayed by the fundamentally unfair system”.

What angers Ms Harper most is that the corrosive saga that has consumed her life for five long years could have been prevented at the outset, if only the system had been fair. She tried everything. In 2015, she even contacted the First Minister. She began by saying that writing was a “last resort”. However, all she got back was a brief and impersonal letter from a junior civil servant, which did not address any of the serious and specific issues that she had raised.

The Cabinet Secretary for Justice will, no doubt, remind me that it is not politicians’ place to meddle in processes or to influence public bodies in discharging their duties, but what happens when the systems that have been put in place to protect the public and police officers fail?

Since the creation of Police Scotland seven years ago, there has been a relentless flow of troubling revelations around the complaints process and governance. I spoke with Moi Ali, who is a former member of the Scottish Police Authority. Ms Ali resigned over concerns about lack of transparency, which was contrary to the public interest and good governance, and she spoke out—but nothing substantive has changed.

I also spoke with Angela Wilson, who is a former assistant chief constable in Tayside. She bemoaned the “deafening silence” from the Scottish Government on the report—and she was surely right to do so. Ms Wilson believes that major change is necessary for Scotland to achieve a diverse police service that truly reflects those whom it represents. How do we do that?

Dame Elish has made more than 100 recommendations in her preliminary and final reports. We do not have time today to give proper consideration to the relative merits of each recommendation, but we can, in this debate, focus on some of the most fundamental ones, including the need for the Police Investigations and Review Commissioner to be truly independent and to be given the power that it needs in order to become an effective watchdog. Dame Elish has also rightly stated that PIRC should no longer be answerable to ministers, but to the Scottish Parliament.

Dame Elish has recommended that the Scottish Police Authority be stripped of its power to investigate senior officers. She cited possible perception of bias due to their close working relationship.

Another recommendation is the need for serious misconduct proceedings to continue against officers even if they resign or retire. On that point, Dame Elish urges the Scottish Government to work with the United Kingdom Government to adopt good practice from England and Wales by extending barred and advisory lists to Police Scotland. Those lists are public databases of officers who have been dismissed for gross misconduct or who left while being investigated.

There are numerous other areas in which Dame Elish urges the Scottish Government to learn something about transparency from our friends in the rest of the UK. They include the holding of police gross misconduct hearings in public, as happens in other professions, and allowing for accelerated misconduct hearings in cases with apparently incontrovertible evidence of guilt.

Some of those things require amendment of existing legislation or new laws; others need structural, procedural or even cultural changes within Police Scotland, the SPA or PIRC. All of them need ministers to act.

What has been notable—worrying, even—has been the response so far from the SNP. Dame Elish’s 150,000-word 500-page publication was made public two weeks ago today, and was on ministerial desks prior to that. The SNP’s response has been a bland press release that contained little more than vague platitudes and completely lacked any firm commitment to act. Hiding behind the defence that the SNP commissioned the report in the first place is rendered meaningless by inaction. We need action.