Seòmar agus comataidhean

My colleague Sharon Dowey has asked me to point out that the Government supports three of her amendments in this group. In the earlier part of her speaking notes she identified eight. I do not want to spoil any future revelations, but five of them are in the next group. I say that for the record, so that there is no confusion. The three of her amendments in this group that are being supported by the Government are amendments 12, 13 and 14, and I am speaking to amendment 57, in my name.

Amendment 57 would give the power to the chief constable to dismiss an officer whose conduct is considered to amount to gross misconduct, even when there are on-going criminal proceedings against that officer. It is important that the chief constable is able to do so where it is irrefutable that the officer should be sacked—if they have acted in a way that is inarguably incompatible with continued employment.

As we all know, especially on this committee, criminal proceedings can move very slowly, and there is no reason why an individual should not be dismissed, as in most workplaces, while there are separate and parallel criminal proceedings that will play out in due course. It seems sensible to introduce such a provision, which would prevent the very low number of guilty police officers from exploiting the system by remaining on full pay for prolonged periods when the evidence against them would result in instant dismissal in any other circumstances.

Convener, I do not know that I had the opportunity to respond to the cabinet secretary’s points. I thought that I had attempted to do so—

I think that this is the second-last group. I do not want to correct the convener, but I saw the clerks getting quite animated.

Yes—you were just trying to get our hopes up.

The reason why we are here is that Dame Elish Angiolini—or Lady Elish Angiolini, as she is now known—produced a 488-page report, with 111 recommendations, that identified weaknesses in the police complaints and regulation system in Scotland. One of her fundamental asks was that the Police Investigation and Review Commissioner should be answerable and accountable to the Scottish Parliament and its committees and not to the Scottish ministers, as is currently the case. My party agrees with that recommendation and believes that it should be reflected in the bill.

From our various correspondence with the cabinet secretary, I understand that she does not support the recommendation on the basis that she believes—if I understand her correctly—that the PIRC can already be held to account through the Scottish ministers, who are ultimately accountable to the Parliament. However, in order to provide consistency with what Angiolini has called for, I think that we should make the situation quite clear by changing the dynamic so that the PIRC is directly answerable to the Parliament. That relates to amendment 66.

Amendment 67 attempts to do that in a slightly different way. As things stand—let me try to phrase this correctly—ministers have the option to require all PIRC reports to be laid before the Parliament. Amendment 67 would remove that discretion so that, rather than ministers having the option to choose whether a PIRC report was laid before the Parliament, they would be obligated to lay it before the Parliament. In many ways, that might achieve the same thing that would be achieved through amendment 66, but I am happy to hear the cabinet secretary’s take on both amendments in the group.

I move amendment 66.

Yes.

I will speak to amendment 65, but I also note that I have formally supported amendment 41, which is where I will begin.

In the past couple of years, the committee has done some important work in respect of police officer suicides. When we first asked Police Scotland and the SPA about what had been a significant number of officers dying by suicide, it transpired that they did not even collect any data about it. I have been working with the families and friends of officers who have died, and they believe that the police complaints process to which those officers were subjected was a factor in the death of their loved ones.

For all that suicide is complex and those families were not assigning the complaints process as the sole reason for their loved ones’ deaths, I was struck—as, I think, other committee members were—by the fact that, when we asked Police Scotland and the SPA about the matter, not only did they appear not to record such data, but there was also what seemed to me to be a fairly strange lack of curiosity. That might be due in part to the sensitivities around suicide, which is perfectly understandable. However, I could not avoid the suspicion that it was sometimes to do with the fact that there were sensitivities around the way in which the protracted nature of the complaints process, the lack of transparency and so on may have been a factor, which would have reflected badly on those organisations.

Amendment 41 seeks to make it a statutory obligation for the suspected suicide of a police officer to be subject to a fatal accident inquiry. The cabinet secretary may argue that that would impinge on the Crown Office’s powers to decide when to instruct a fatal accident inquiry, but I would point to the fact that deaths in custody, of which there are far too many, are subject to statutory fatal accident inquiries—and rightly so—because they often yield important information about what has caused a death and how future deaths might be prevented. Police officers who die in these circumstances fully deserve a similar status and mechanism.

That speaks to a broader issue about sudden deaths in Scotland. Yes, the Crown Office investigates each and every one of them, but it is a private process. In England and Wales, there is a public inquest system, which is often a lot more transparent. If FAIs are not instructed by the Crown Office in cases of police suicide or other sudden deaths, significant and important information never reaches the public domain.

Amendment 41 might not be as clean or as competent legally as it could be, but does the cabinet secretary have sympathy for the sentiment behind it? Is she willing to work with the member to get it into shape for stage 3 or to have some form of discussion to that effect?

Amendment 65 is less specific, as it does not relate entirely to suicide. I propose that any sudden death of a police officer should be subject to a fatal accident inquiry, for the same reasons that I have put forward on suicide. An officer might have died through an accident or for some other reason—perhaps even a health reason—that is related to their service, or while on duty.

It goes back to the perception of there being a two-tier system whereby the lives of police officers who have died are not subject, in the main, to fatal accident inquiries. None of the suicides that we know of have been subject to fatal accident inquiries, although there is a statutory requirement to hold an FAI in other cases, not least for deaths in custody.

It is an important issue to address, and I hope that we are able to find a way of putting things right collectively.

Will Sharon Dowey take an intervention?

One thing that I did not say, which the federation told me this morning, is that it supports legislation that ensures the integrity of its workforce. That is in its interests and in everybody’s interests, but the legislation has to be fair. The amendments bring about a whole new ability for the chief constable to use vetting to arbitrarily dismiss officers who are deemed not to have passed that vetting, but it is only by way of regulation after the event that that will be properly defined.

Given that we have had three to four months of taking evidence on the bill and discussing it, this is extremely last minute. No interested party—not least the Scottish Police Federation or the Association of Scottish Police Superintendents—has had an opportunity to contribute to this part of the legislation, which has been introduced by way of amendments that were lodged only a week ago by the Scottish Government. It is sensible that we press pause.

We might all fundamentally agree that vetting needs to be improved and that there needs to be a mechanism whereby, if something arose through vetting, the police should have the ability to dismiss someone, but it all seems a bit slapdash and slightly irresponsible to do so on the basis of amendments that are a week old and which none of us have had any meaningful way of looking into.

In respect of whistleblowers, we have heard evidence from a lawyer who acts for a number of police officers, who says that, even now, with whistleblowing legislation being well established, in cases that she acts in, whistleblowers are not being treated as such and are not being given that protection. The legislation does address whistleblowers and helps to improve their rights, but there is a potential for the amendments to work against that or to change the whole dynamic.

I do not know whether the cabinet secretary does not want to press pause on a point of principle or whether there is some practical reason, but it seems entirely sensible to do so, given that we have had the amendments only for a week and we do not really know what they will do. There are genuine concerns, and there is the likelihood of cross-party consensus if we could just hold off for a short while. I again urge the cabinet secretary to reconsider.

I have dealt with cases in the past where there was sufficient evidence and a civil standard of proof of wrongdoing. I will give you an example. There was one police officer who was suspected of taking part in armed robberies with known criminals, going into the homes of elderly people, targeting them, tying them up, robbing them, and using police radios and fake police warrants. It was an extraordinary set of circumstances. That individual was charged with a criminal offence, and it went to the Crown, but nothing came of it.

The suspicion from some of the victims was that the embarrassment of what had transpired—that a serving officer could do that with police apparatus—was a factor in it not proceeding to court and in not having anyone criminally convicted.

Eventually, and ultimately, after many years of that officer being in receipt of full pay, he was finally dismissed on the basis of the evidence, under the civil standard of proof, being more than sufficient to rightly say that he could no longer be a police officer.

That is an extreme case, but if a police officer did something in the workplace or related to their conduct at work that was black-and-white wrong, and would result in dismissal in any other workplace, that should be allowed to happen. I do not think that it would pre-empt or prejudice any criminal proceedings, which would be wholly separate, so I think that it would still be the right thing to do.