Meeting of the Parliament 06 January 2026
I thank those who have contributed to this debate.
Section 9.1 of the code of conduct, on the enforcement of the rules, states:
“Members must not disclose, communicate or discuss any complaint or intention to make a complaint to or with members of the press or other media prior to the lodging of the complaint or during Stages 1, 2 and 3 of the procedure for dealing with complaints”.
The reason for the reference to the intention to make a complaint is that, as I read out from the session 5 committee’s report, if a member is protected in saying that there is an intention to make a complaint about another member, damage can be done to that member, and they have no ability to answer that without that being in the public domain.
Members may have concerns about the actions of other members of this Parliament, and procedures are available and open to them if they wish to pursue those. We received from the complainer a specific complaint about the breach of publicising an intention to make a complaint. The committee concluded that
“any objective reading of the letter, covering emails and social media post would be that there was, at the very least, an intention to make a complaint about the conduct of Maggie Chapman”.
In our discussion of what the sanction should be, we considered a number of factors with regard to the appropriate period for the exclusion, taking into account the fact that the member was sponsoring a bill. The discussion included consideration of whether there were any mitigations that could be taken into account, and we found none. Therefore, unanimously, we proposed the sanction that appears in the motion today.
I urge members to reject the amendment and support the committee’s motion.