Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee 28 January 2025
I will wind up on the amendments.
I think that we are all trying to push towards a similar outcome in this debate, which is that there should be a process early on in the system to weed out complaints that are viewed to be
“frivolous, vexatious or without merit”
and that there should be a robust definition of that.
I point to the view of many stakeholders—not least the Law Society, which is of the view that the proposal in the bill to remove the existing eligibility test is concerning. That is because it has been an important test that has helped to do exactly what we have been debating this morning, which is to take out those unmerited complaints at an early stage. The test has been used extensively by the Scottish Legal Complaints Commission and other bodies since it was created in 2007, with almost 100 complaints rejected in 2023-24 alone. As a committee, we are obviously interested in how the processes in the bill ensure access to natural justice and ensure that people’s complaints can be heard. However, I think that we are clear that there has to be a process.
The Law Society’s view is that the removal of the early test goes against the objective of making the system simpler and ensuring that genuine complaints are dealt with quickly. That view is in contention with what the minister suggested, which is that we would achieve that objective by moving the test to the SLCC’s rules-based procedure. The Law Society’s view is that keeping the test in the legislation is the best way to ensure that the system moves quickly and that things do not become, in its words in material that it has provided, “choked off”.
My closing point is that we are talking about the same words and the same legal definitions, and about consulting broadly with a range of people to retain the processes around the
“vexatious, or totally without merit”
test. My concern is that I do not understand how taking the test out of legislation and putting it into rules retains the objective of speeding up the process. I do not see why we would move it into a rules-based system that is far more flexible if we were not going to change the definitions.
On that basis, I press amendment 557.