Official Report 792KB pdf
The next item on our agenda is to take evidence on the Ethical Standards Commissioner’s annual report for 2023-24. We are joined by Ian Bruce, who is the Ethical Standards Commissioner. Welcome to the meeting. I begin by inviting you to make a brief opening statement.
Thank you, convener and members, for the invitation and for the opportunity to talk to you about the work of our office. I will keep the statement brief, to allow as much time as possible for questions. I trust that you have reviewed our most recent annual report, alongside the briefing papers that were provided to you for today’s meeting, and that that will have given you an indication of the continuing progress that we have made as an office since I last gave evidence to the committee in December last year.
As the committee will be aware from evidence that I have provided previously, I prefer to rely on external independent validation of my work. The missing piece of the jigsaw is Audit Scotland’s report on the 2023-24 reporting year, which was published just last week, so it was too late for inclusion in your papers for today. I have provided a copy to the committee clerks, in case the details are of interest to you.
Audit Scotland again conducted a wider-scope review to provide assurance on our governance and other aspects of our work that had previously been of concern. The headline findings were that the commissioner’s office operated within its approved budget for 2023-24. Appropriate medium-term financial planning arrangements are in place, which demonstrate how services will continue to be delivered. A new strategic plan with clear objectives for improvement and a more strategic-looking senior management team are in place. Open and transparent governance arrangements are operating effectively. The vacancies that we were carrying have been filled, and increased capacity is making a difference. Complaints handling performance is improving and positive developments have been implemented to tackle the waiting list.
Additionally, Audit Scotland found good evidence that our arrangements demonstrate best value, as required by the ministerial guidance to accountable officers for public bodies and the Scottish public finance manual. I am pleased to say that, for the second year running, the auditors had no recommendations for us.
I was also provided with additional assurance this year by our internal auditors, who reviewed our cybersecurity arrangements and assessed our controls as substantial. We managed to obtain cyber essentials plus reaccreditation this year. Our financial arrangements were rated as strong. The auditors also reported positively on our work on implementing their prior recommendations.
I trust that that is of interest to the committee, and I am happy to answer any questions that members may have.
Thank you very much for giving that statement and highlighting the key points. There are quite a lot of different bits to keep track of in the work, not just on what you are doing but the backbone administration and cybersecurity aspects.
We have a number of questions to tease out a bit of detail, and I will begin. During 2023-24, the number of complaints about councillors more than doubled when compared with the previous financial year—it was 344 versus 156. What are your thoughts on the reason for that rise? Should we be worried about ethical standards in local democracy?
Goodness! I will answer the second question first. I think that we should all be worried about ethical standards in local democracy. Some of this might appear to be anecdotal but, clearly, we have the numbers that sit under it. Yes, it concerns me. I have been in this post for a year and a half as commissioner and for two years as acting commissioner, and the impression that I get is that standards are not great and that certain issues are certainly driving up complaint numbers.
It might be of interest to the committee to know that even geopolitical events—things such as the conflict in the middle east and political commentary on it—drive up complaint numbers, even though those are not necessarily directly relevant to local communities. Perhaps a bit closer to home are debates on contentious matters. A good example is the debate that continues in respect of the rights of those who identify as transgender and those who hold gender-critical views. That drives a fair number of complaints to our office.
Over and above that, other matters that are perhaps more local to particular areas also drive up complaint numbers, such as contentious planning decisions. The financial constraints that councils face and some of the very challenging decisions that they are having to make, given the financial climate—for example, decisions on cuts to services—drive up complaint numbers as well.
Your response that we should be worried is quite strong, and it is good to hear some of the reasons for that at global level but also at local level, such as planning decisions.
Many of the complaints relate to the councillor code of conduct. In what ways could awareness of the code of conduct be raised among non-politicians, which could stem the flow of inadmissible complaints that you receive? I think that something like 80 per cent of complaints were inadmissible.
In the main, the issue lies with members of the public, as most complaints continue to come from them; they made up about 80 per cent of the complaints in the reporting year that we are considering. In the same year, possibly significantly, we also saw a rise in councillor-on-councillor complaints, with the share of those complaints rising from 10 to 17 per cent. The Standards Commission for Scotland, which you will hear from later, does a very good job in education and guidance, and works alongside the Improvement Service to help councillors to understand the provisions of the code and when it applies and does not apply. In the main, our issue is with members of the public.
We are doing more to improve awareness levels, because quite a lot of complaints are inadmissible. The sorts of things that people tend to complain about—I do not know whether raising their awareness would preclude them from complaining about these issues but we will certainly have a go—are to do with council decisions, the service that they receive from their local councillor, how frequently councillors respond to emails, whether they respond to emails and whether they are doing exactly what the constituent wants them to do. Those are the sorts of things that tend to be inadmissible, so the code simply does not apply in those cases.
The Standards Commission came up with a very helpful piece of guidance that councillors can use in discussions with their constituents. That is about when the code applies and about helping constituents to understand that such issues are not conduct issues but performance issues. For our part, we have just drafted three new easy-read guides, which we are about to publish on our website and which explain in the simplest terms what people can and cannot complain about. We hope that that will make a difference.
Over and above that, we have just refreshed our communications strategy, following the publication of our new strategic plan. Our intent at the moment is to put more accessible information into the public domain via LinkedIn and YouTube—short videos and so on—to help the public to understand what our role is, what the ethical standards framework is and when the code does and does not apply to the work of councillors. There is definitely an education piece involved in that.
I must mention social media. As you will have seen from the annual report, in 2022-23, 20 per cent of complaints related to social media commentary, and the figure has gone up to 25 per cent. Sometimes, the code is engaged in relation to that and sometimes it is not, but it can be quite an unpleasant environment. If a councillor raises their head above the parapet and engages in debates, that can certainly generate complaints from members of the public.
That is interesting detail. Can something be done on that when we move towards local authority elections? Maybe your guides could be sent along with the information that comes from the Electoral Management Board for Scotland, or there could be QR codes or something. However, it is not for me to come up with those solutions—that just popped into my mind.
It is a helpful point. It may be helpful to point out that the Standards Commission and I wrote collectively to the leaders of all political parties in the run-up to the most recent election to remind them of the importance of adhering to the provisions of the code. We had anticipated that there might be a spike in the numbers of complaints just prior to the election, but that did not materialise. Perhaps that letter made a difference—it is hard to tell.
Thanks very much. I will bring in Willie Coffey, who joins us online.
Thank you for your opening remarks, Ian. My question is in the same area. Why do so many councillors complain about one another? When might you expect to see the fruits of the guidance being embraced and adopted by our local authority councillors? Will you also say a bit about whether awareness of conduct issues rather than performance issues, as you described, is a mandatory part of councillor training? Will you give us a little flavour of that to widen the discussion a bit?
In answer to your first question, one of the key issues that is driving the situation is the very challenging financial circumstances that local authorities find themselves in. Councils are having to make very difficult decisions about service provision, which leads to debates that, on occasion, are becoming personalised. We see, for want of a better expression, hotspots across the country, where councillor-on-councillor complaints are very prevalent, and those drive up the numbers. I would not say that it is across the board, as I do not think that it is. By and large, conduct is fairly good, but the numbers speak for themselves: we have seen that increase.
When very difficult decisions have to be made and there are political disagreements, things can become quite fractious. That is wholly understandable. Where it becomes problematic and where the code becomes engaged is where discussions lapse into personal attacks, as opposed to attacks or challenges on policy positions that particular councillors have to take. It is very important for councillors to realise that key distinction. By all means, criticise the policy positions of your political opponents, but please do not personalise it.
As to whether training should be mandatory, I am sure that one could make a case for that. I have been running training in all sorts of areas for a long time and, in my experience, the people who tend not to need it tend to be the ones who are most keen to come along and participate. There is potentially scope to make training mandatory. We know that practices vary from local authority area to local authority area. How one would ensure that it sticks is another matter.
If you were going to go down that route, consideration should perhaps be given to whether one assesses the extent to which people have taken on board the training that they have received. For example, some training is available to people online and they can tick a box to say, “I have watched that presentation”, but whether that will moderate their behaviour in the future is a different question. I hope that that helps.
09:15
It certainly does.
Do you spend a lot of your time basically dismissing complaints that do not fall within the scope of the code? Could you give us a flavour of the amount of work that you do in simply dismissing things that are not relevant?
It is a considerable amount of work. It was in the region of 60 per cent in the previous reporting year and it is sitting at roughly that level again. It depends—it varies from complaint to complaint—but some complainants, because they are fundamentally unhappy, deluge us with a considerable amount of material. That can run into hundreds and sometimes even thousands of pages, and we need to review all of that to assess whether there is any merit to the complaint.
We have to be thorough, because we have an obligation, to complainers and respondents, to properly assess the concerns that they bring to us. However, at the end of the process, we sometimes find that there is actually no merit to a complaint. So, yes—a fair amount of work is involved.
You will be aware that the committee recently agreed to support the Scottish Local Authorities Remuneration Committee’s recommendations on councillor pay. Might there be an opportunity to take that further to include more mandatory elements in the councillor training regime, particularly on this issue? Could we put more into that mandatory bag of training for local authority councillors in return for that salary uplift, should it be awarded?
I have assisted the Scottish Local Authorities Remuneration Committee with its work. Representatives of that committee came to our office to ask whether, alongside the level of remuneration, conduct represents a barrier to people entering political life. We assisted that committee to an extent with the research that it was undertaking. It came up with what I think are excellent recommendations, and my understanding is that the Scottish ministers have accepted them. I anticipate that the implementation date will be January next year. From my perspective, that is all positive news.
To answer the second part of your question, anything that we can do collectively to drive up standards in public life can only be a good thing. I mentioned that some conduct inevitably represents a barrier to more diversity in public life, and that is not a good thing. We should do anything that we can to improve diversity, and if that means improving conduct at local government level, that is to be encouraged.
Thank you for that—it is much appreciated.
Good morning. My first question is about waiting times, which, as the annual report outlines, reduced in 2022 and 2023. That, of course, is welcome, but how long are current waiting times from the beginning to the end of the process and what is being done to further reduce the length of time it takes to conclude a complaint?
We monitor this regularly. We have a senior management team in the office, and statistical information has to come to it every month from the team that handles complaints. Last year, the average wait for the first stage—that is, admissibility—was 4.6 months; currently, the wait time is about 4.9 months. That is the average time for reaching a decision on whether a complaint should go forward to investigation.
Investigation times have come down this year, which is a very good thing, but we feel that we need to do more about the initial waiting time. As you will know, the volume of complaints has been increasing, and that pattern has not changed in the current financial year. We are relatively close to where we were this time last year. Clearly, we have a limited resource, and we need to dedicate it to whatever we feel our stakeholders find most important. You do not want an investigation to last particularly long, but similarly, you do not want to have to wait to get an initial decision from us, either.
We are piloting a couple of new measures. The complaints allocation plan, which has been running for the past five months, is a much more formal way of triaging complaints. We are now giving every complaint a red, amber or green—or RAG—rating and allocating them to the team of investigating officers, so that they all have a fair and balanced case mix and a proper understanding of how quickly they need to get through each stage of each of their cases. Their line managers discuss that with them every week to ensure that they are making good progress. The pilot seems to be working very well; we will assess its effectiveness at the start of the new year, but all things being equal—and if the staff feel that it is working well for them, too—it is likely that we will maintain it.
Because we feel, based on the figures, that we need to bring down waiting times, that means that we have to dedicate more resource to that end of the process. That might have a knock-on effect on investigation times, which might go up a wee bit—it is a balancing act for us. To that end, we have introduced a new duty investigating officer role, which rotates around the entire team. It started just this week, following a fair bit of consultation with the staff—after all, if we do not get buy-in from them, it is not going to work particularly well. We always take their input. What happens is that any new complaints that come in are immediately triaged, when, before, that was the sort of thing that tended to happen on a monthly basis.
We identify complaints on which we need further information, and we go out and contact complainers immediately so that the evidence is still fresh. We say, for example, “We need this additional information”, or “We need you to properly articulate your complaint, because we will not be able to put this to a respondent at this point.” We also need to identify the complaints that are out of scope, so that they can be dismissed immediately. Clearly, that will bring down average waiting times overall, because the quick dismissals are allocated on a cab-rank basis to the entire team, and their role is to get back to the complainant and say, “This complaint is not admissible.” As I say, it should bring down the overall waiting times.
We will continue to monitor the situation. We know that it is an issue, and an area that we definitely want to improve on.
Thank you.
I have a brief follow-up to that. Do you think that, with the influx of social media related complaints and the amount of councillor-on-councillor crime—or, I should say, complaints—that we have just heard about from Willie Coffey, waiting times could increase again, despite all the good incentives that you are putting in place?
They could, which is why it is incumbent on us to constantly look at ways of improving our own performance. I recently attended some Global Government Forum training on improving productivity in the public sector, because that is the only place that we can go. I certainly feel that we have sufficient resources to deal with what is in front of us, but that has to be a factor. We do need to improve on productivity.
It might be worth reminding the committee that a large proportion of the team is relatively new, including myself, as far as the office’s complaints-handling function is concerned. Over time, all of us collectively are getting better at what we do and that will increasingly be the case. Between those two things, I think that we can handle and manage increases. It is certainly our intention to do so.
My final question goes back to the annual report, which states that of the three directions issued by the Standards Commission for Scotland, two have now expired or have been rescinded, and the remaining direction, which
“relates to reporting on all investigations’ outcomes ... has an expiry date of 31 January 2025.”
How confident are you that that outstanding direction will expire as planned, or do you think that there is a risk that it might not?
I do not view it as a risk, to be honest with you. My previous workforce planning was predicated on a few assumptions, such as complaint volumes and complexity staying relatively steady. Clearly, though, volumes are rising a bit. Another assumption was that the directions would remain in place.
The convener and executive director will be able to talk about the two that have lapsed or have been rescinded, as that was their decision, but my understanding is that they were happy to remove them. However, we wrote them on to the face of our manual—our procedures—and we operate as though they were in place. It is certainly my intention to continue to report to the Standards Commission in the future, whether or not that outcomes direction remains in place in January. If it is assured by my statement in public to that effect, I expect that the direction will probably be lifted, but, to my mind, it does not matter either way.
That is great. Thank you very much.
Thanks very much, Meghan. I call Alexander Stewart.
Good morning, sir. It is good to see you again.
I am delighted to see strong financial management being talked about in relation to the organisation, but within that, there are cost implications and increases. We are now looking at £1.5 million of expenditure in 2023-24, compared with £1.04 million in the past. That is quite a significant increase of more than 50 per cent over the year. We know that your workload has increased and that you are required to get rid of the backlog, as we have discussed at other committees that I have sat on, but can you explain the reasons behind the rise in costs and provide assurances that the increase, once again, represents value for money to the taxpayer?
Yes, of course. To paraphrase, it is best for me not to mark my own homework, but, as I have indicated, the auditors are happy that we are delivering best value, and that was with that budgetary increase.
I do not necessarily wish to dwell on the past—you have the papers before you and you know what the office’s circumstances were like—but, going back to the recommendations of our prior auditor, Deloitte, I would just point out that it identified some significant issues in the office. I would remind members that the entire investigations team under my immediate predecessor left, and a proportion of the new staff who came in under my immediate predecessor left, too. That is what I inherited. Staff turnover over that two-year tenure sat at 133 per cent—and that is head count. Our budget was predicated on the number of staff that we had in the office at the time, and clearly it was low, because we were carrying a number of vacancies. One of the auditor’s very urgent recommendations was that we needed to fill our vacancies, which I did as a matter of urgency as soon as I took up the acting commissioner post.
However, another of the auditor’s key recommendations was that we needed to do some workforce planning, because it did not think that we had the resources that we needed to fulfil our statutory functions. At the same time as I was looking to recruit new people, I was conducting a really comprehensive workforce planning exercise, on the back of which I had to produce a compelling business case for consideration by the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body.
09:30The workforce planning exercise was completed in May 2022, and the business case was submitted to the SPCB at that time. That was the earliest opportunity that I had to discuss it with the body, and it was in person. Believe me—I had a very robust discussion in front of all the members of the SPCB to justify the additional resources that I felt the office needed. It was a very comprehensive business case; yes, it related to investigations, but it also related to corporate services, because the auditor identified that we had issues with governance.
As I was the acting commissioner, we had a live vacancy on the public appointments side of the office that we had been carrying and which needed to be filled, too, and we also got some administrative support. The additional resource amounted to 7.6 full time equivalent staff; the SPCB agreed that we absolutely needed those resources, so the business case was approved. We went on to recruit from December 2022 and filled the posts by May 2023.
That was quite a complex explanation, but the knock-on effect is that that is where the increase in the budget comes from. It might be helpful to highlight that 80 per cent of my budget is staffing costs. We spend very little money on anything else, so inevitably, because of that increase in resources, the budget went up.
You have touched on the public appointments section of your office. It has once again needed beefing up, and you have put in an additional three full-time members of staff to support it. It might be good to get a flavour of why that had to happen, the additional impact that they are going to have and whether it has tackled the work-life balance issue in the organisation. As you have said, it was struggling to cope with day-to-day running but, at the same time, there needed to be some flex in that respect. It would be useful to have a flavour of that, too.
By all means.
Actually, we have not increased the complement in public appointments that much. We were carrying a vacancy, because I was the acting commissioner and had previously been head of public appointments. That post had to be filled. I was at grade 5, and there was also a grade 4 post. We filled the grade 4, and the person who was acting for me ended up filling the grade 5 post. All that we have in addition is admin support—that is, one admin support person to support the work of the public appointments team.
As part of our bid, we had looked for another public appointments officer, because, clearly, we had a backlog in public appointments, too. We were so underresourced there. Moreover—and you will know this from your work on the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee—we had plans to refresh the “Diversity Delivers” strategy, which had not been looked at since 2008, with a view to improving board diversity. We think that that is vital work; it has been happening incrementally, but we think that more progress needs to be made.
We had sought to fill a post permanently to take that work forward. After discussions with the team, I have concluded that we can surrender that post and get a contractor in to help us for a two-year period. After all, the SPCB has said to all office-holders, “If you can make savings, please do”, and we have found a way of doing that by relinquishing that particular post. Therefore, there has not been a great increase in resources on the public appointments side of things.
As for the work that we have been able to take forward, I would just note that surveys of applicants had lapsed; we have resurrected surveying board chairs on the effectiveness of their new people when they come on board; we are producing good practice guidance for panels again; and we are doing more training and outreach activity. All of those things, which are probably more than just nice-to-haves, have been resurrected and are making a difference to the appointments system.
Good morning. The annual report states that you were required to examine the appointment practices of one board during the year, and that resulted in a report of non-compliance with the code being made to the Scottish Parliament. Will you explain a bit more about that? It was the first case of that type since 2011. Will you give us a bit more detail on that instance?
I am very happy to do that. Funnily enough—although that is perhaps not the appropriate expression to use—it was in relation to appointments to the Scottish Local Authorities Remuneration Committee. It is not the selection panel that makes decisions on whom to appoint and whom not to appoint or decisions about the criteria for selection for particular positions that have to be filled. Those decisions rest with the Scottish ministers. They put together a selection panel and, depending on a number of factors, I decide whether to appoint a representative from my office to sit in as a member of the panel for the entire recruitment process.
In this particular case, they went out looking for people who had knowledge and experience that was relevant to the work of the SLARC, for obvious reasons. Given the nature of the work that it does, they were looking for people who had experience of serving as local authority councillors. A local authority councillor applied in good faith for one of those roles and went through the entire process, and the panel found that individual suitable for appointment, as one of the most able people. At the far end of the process there was, in effect, a change in policy position, which was that, if you are a serving councillor, you have a conflict of interest and you cannot serve as a member on that particular board.
If the Scottish ministers had made that decision at the outset of the process and it had been included in the pack, which had said that serving councillors were disqualified, I would have had no issue with that whatsoever, because that is the prerogative of the Scottish ministers. However, the fact is that that was not done. Somebody went through the entire process in good faith and was considered to be the most able person for the role, and then right at the end of the process they were disqualified. To my mind and in the eyes of the code of practice, which I publish and which officials are meant to follow, that was fundamentally unfair to that individual. That is why I concluded that the code had been breached in a material regard.
However, as you observed, such instances are relatively rare. Officials work very hard to comply with the code and I certainly see the role of my office as being to support them in doing so.
That is really helpful. Thank you for expanding on that and giving us that update.
The next area that I want to touch on is the survey that you talked about last year, which you were planning to roll out to complainers and respondents. Your annual report says that, because the return rate was so low, you found it difficult to provide a robust analysis of the findings. Are you planning to continue that survey? Do you have any plans to try to boost the return rate?
Those are really good questions. The response rate is one of the things that I have found most disappointing. We are monitoring it, but the return rate this year has been really low as well. It is very disappointing. I am discussing with the senior management team what we can do to improve the rate. I am really not sure why it is so low. We have been running similar surveys on public appointments for a good many years, apart from during the hiatus that I described to your colleague Alexander Stewart, and response rates there are about 30 per cent. The response rate for the complainers and respondents survey is nothing like that. At the moment, we are looking at a return rate of 1 per cent in the current financial year. That is clearly not good enough and we need to find ways of improving it.
The reason why I find the low response rate so disappointing is that we get an awful lot of feedback from both respondents and complainers directly to our office and to the investigating officer. Recently, at a hearing in person, I got really positive feedback from a respondent about the way in which we had handled their case. We need to try to find a way of translating that into getting people to fill out the survey. We are considering some options. At the moment, there is a link to the survey in the closure letters that we send people. We are thinking that we might try some of the things that commercial organisations do, such as putting a wee button into the email that we send people and giving them an opportunity to link through to it in that way. Another option is to gather up some of the feedback that we get from people in emails and other correspondence and include that in the annual report.
Maybe no news is good news, but it may help to provide assurance if I note that we also track formal complaints about us. Everyone is entitled to make a formal complaint about us as an office, alongside the other complaints that they can make. In the previous financial year, we had two of those, and in this financial year, we also had two. In all four cases, there was really not much substance. By and large, I think that people are happy with the way in which we treat them, but I understand that we should do more. Another reason for that is that the surveys gather demographic data, which is of real interest to me. Do women and people from a minority ethnic background who come into contact with us feel that we are treating them differently? Based on the current return rates, we cannot draw any conclusions.
We have touched on councillor-on-councillor complaints, and we know that they represent about 17 per cent of the total. The committee has been looking at barriers to elected office and we have heard that female councillors face much more hostility and toxicity in the council environment. It would be good to get a flavour of whether female councillors are submitting more complaints than male councillors. Have you seen such a trend? Do you want to express your views on that?
That is a very good question. I have said to the committee previously that we definitely plan to do research in that area, and that is potentially something that we could do relatively quickly. I will take a note to look at that and come back to you on it, because it is a very good question.
My particular quandary at the moment is that, as I explained to your colleague Meghan Gallacher, far and away the majority of our resource genuinely has to be dedicated to complaint handling and bringing down waiting times. That is important to people. Once we have done that, it will give us sufficient spare capacity to do the sort of research that I genuinely want to do. I think that it would be relatively straightforward for us to look at the gender split.
My impression is that there is a feeling out there from new, young female councillors in particular that they are entering a misogynistic environment. There is certainly anecdotal evidence of that. Whether they are all complaining about that is a different matter. Some of that conduct can be quite low level, and I have heard that people perhaps feel reticent about complaining. Relatively recently, I attended a monitoring officers workshop that was set up by the Standards Commission for Scotland, and I think that the views of monitoring officers are particularly relevant. The committee might wish to pursue that via the Society of Local Authority Lawyers and Administrators in Scotland to get its impression of what is going on on the ground.
The point that I need to come back to is that, even if it feels like relatively low-level conduct, that sort of thing can and will wear people down over time. As an office, following a referral, we can look at a course of conduct, as can the Standards Commission. If people feel that there is a lot of low-level stuff going on and it is undermining them, they should continue to keep a note of those things to form the basis of a course of conduct complaint, which we can look at.
There is sometimes a level of toxicity. I see behaviours that I feel are inappropriate, and those things are certainly barriers. I previously referred the committee to some research in this area, and recommendations have now come out from the Local Government Association following that. Most recently, in May, it produced a toolkit for councils to assess themselves on how well they are doing. It was the “Debate not Hate” research, as members may recall. The LGA is continuing to do work in this area, as is the Improvement Service.
09:45I highlight that I was recently interviewed by Talat Yaqoob for Elect Her. I know from other work that the committee is doing in this area that members will be familiar with the work of Elect Her. It is conducting research on whether there are barriers to women entering political life. Interestingly, this time, it is taking an intersectional approach in that research. It is not just about whether you are female; it is also about whether you have a disability, a minority ethnic background and so on. I said to Talat Yaqoob that the committee will definitely be interested in the findings and recommendations that come out of that, and she has undertaken to be in touch with the committee once that research has been completed. We all recognise that it is an issue.
I saw that, when the committee wrote to all the political parties, one of the questions that you asked was whether toxicity in the debate is having an impact on people’s willingness to come forward and to stay in public life. From what I can see, the extent to which political parties police their own codes of conduct is patchy, and it also varies from council area to council area. My particular concern is about the lack of support for people who feel that they are not being supported and that they are exposed, some of whom are finding it very difficult to fulfil their roles. All that they are doing is trying to do their best for their constituents, but they are being subjected to conduct that they should not be subjected to.
Emma Roddick has a supplementary question. She can then continue with her other question.
As a former female councillor, it is really good to hear about the willingness to look into whether women are making more complaints. Could that work also cover whether women are more often complained about, including where the complaints are found not to be admissible under the code?
Yes—absolutely.
Fantastic.
The commissioner and the Standards Commission for Scotland have written to the Scottish Government asking for changes to legislation, and one of the requests is for the inclusion of explicit powers for the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body to remove or replace an incumbent SCS member or the Ethical Standards Commissioner in the event of a serious performance, conduct or attendance issue. Will you discuss why that request has come forward now?
Sure. Again without wishing to dwell on the past, I think that it is important that, in the event that a commissioner—either me or a member of the commission—is operating ineffectively, everyone understands that there is a mechanism in place for their removal and that something can be done about it quickly. I would expect guidance to accompany that. It benefits no one if someone remains in post because there is a lack of understanding of what the mechanism is or how one might move quickly to ensure that the individual involved no longer fulfils the role.
Fundamentally, the Standards Commission and I are guardians of the ethical standards framework. I suggest that it is terribly undermining to have someone in such a post who does not exemplify the values that are anticipated from people operating in public life, so the request is important.
That brings us to the end of our questions. We very much appreciate your giving your time to come and join us this morning and allowing us to ask for more details on the report and the work that you are doing. It has been great to hear about the improvements and innovation that you have introduced over the time that you have been in post. I very much appreciate that. It is also great to hear that you have a full raft of people who are all busy working through the process. I really like the innovations that you talked about with regard to the RAG rating, triaging and getting back to people more quickly once you understand whether complaints are admissible or not. It is really important to remove the need to wait from people’s experience, so it is great that you are doing that. Thank you.
Thank you, convener and members. I appreciate the opportunity again.
I will suspend the meeting briefly to allow a changeover of witnesses.
09:50 Meeting suspended.