Hansard

Yes, I will in a minute, but I want to make some progress first, because I want to make a wider point.

It is very difficult to legislate in such areas because, in effect, we are saying that we want to make changes or further improve the ethics and code of conduct of our police force. In doing so, we acknowledge the hard work that it currently does. However, as legislators, we have a duty to protect the public and to ensure that there is a constant process of revising and reviewing whether those things are working. The Angiolini inquiry report was very good at identifying many areas where those things are not working.

However, we also have a duty to protect police officers themselves, and we must be careful about the tone and language that we use in debates such as this. Other colleagues have mentioned the incredibly difficult circumstances in which many of our police officers work. We have all been to the SPF awards at Dynamic Earth, across the road from this building, and have met some of the hard-working officers. We know about some of the difficulties that they face.

However, this review is important because, as we have heard, the current complaints processes are met with a number of responses. Words that were used in evidence to the committee with regard to those processes include “clumsy”, “cumbersome”, “complex”, “off-putting” and “takes too long”. Those are all big red flags that something needs to be addressed. All MSPs will have dealt with casework involving people who are finding it very difficult to make complaints about the police to the police.

We also have a duty to improve practices that root out individuals who have somehow failed to be identified by the vetting process. That is inevitable, given that, between its commissioned and civilian staff, Police Scotland is an organisation of more than 23,000 people. It is a big public sector body and, in any large organisation, people will fall through the cracks and there will be bad-faith actors. However, it is important that the public has confidence that we are addressing that situation, which comes back to the other point about the public’s faith in processes, because policing by consent is necessary and necessitates robust codes of conduct and on-going review of how effective they are.

My final point in that regard is about protecting officers themselves, because malicious complaints can and do happen, and the processes that are in place to deal with those complaints must be effective. Much of the work on those processes has come about over the past few years as a result of well-publicised and horrific situations in which serving members of various police forces have committed horrific crimes, the most famous being the case of the Metropolitan Police officer Wayne Couzens.

I was struck by the response of the Met to this wider societal debate in comparison with the response of Police Scotland. The Met immediately introduced a number of changes, which I found to be very welcome. There was an immediate independent review of its culture and practices. There was a review of all current investigations into sexual misconduct or domestic abuse in which the accused was a police officer. Sampling was done of cases from the past 10 years, there was a root-and-branch review of its recruitment and vetting processes and, more importantly, there was an increase in the number of investigators employed to deal with the timescales and the backlogs—which still exist here in Scotland.

We might say, “That’s the Met. They’ve had issues for a long time. How is that relevant to us?” I get the distinct impression that, with the exceptionalism that we often have, we think that we do not have problems on that scale because we have not had the types of high-profile attack that have happened south of the border. However, that does not negate the problem here. In Scotland, nearly 2,000 complaints remain unsolved, of which 1,200 are yet to be allocated to an investigator and 684 have been allocated to an investigator but are yet to be concluded. I suspect that they are taking a very long time.

In the limited time that I have remaining, I want to address the duty of co-operation or duty of candour. The Government has implied that the duty of candour in section 3 is simply different in terminology from the duty of co-operation that was proposed in the Angiolini report and that has been introduced in England and Wales. I hear that some amendments may be lodged in that regard and I will read them with great interest, but at present it is unclear whether there is a belief, particularly on the part of the PIRC, that the duty of candour goes far enough to meet the requirements of a duty of co-operation.

A number of sections seek to make sweeping reforms of the PIRC’s powers. The thing that struck me most strongly in the PIRC’s response to the stage 1 report was that some of the powers are unwanted. The commissioner, Michelle Macleod, stated that the PIRC would be carrying out the preliminary investigation and the assessment, making the decisions and presenting the case, and that there would perhaps be a perception that there were no checks and balances in that process. That is an important point of feedback. A legal representative said that their biggest criticism of the bill was that the vast majority of complaints would still be made to and handled by the police and that there might be a perception that there was not enough independent or autonomous investigation.

In the interest of time, I will not rehearse the arguments about finances, but a financial memorandum that is £4 million out at stage 1 really needs some serious consideration. The Finance and Public Administration Committee will certainly have words to say about that. Government ministers, but also the senior civil servants who support them in relation to financial memorandums, need to have a serious think about some of the charges that are laid against them in that respect.

I will close where I started. In this country, policing is done with the consent of its citizens but, for the police to have that consent, they must maintain the public’s respect and confidence. That has been rattled in recent years, but we can fix that. The bill will go some way towards doing that, but I question whether more could be done here and now while we wait for the bill to be passed. I think that the answer is yes.