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Will the cabinet secretary take an intervention?

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. Her three 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 Investigations 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.

Will Sharon Dowey take an intervention?

I understand the point that the cabinet secretary makes in respect of amendment 60, but would amendment 61 give the Scottish Government time to do that work properly?

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 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 might 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 might 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 Sharon Dowey 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.

I do not doubt that the cabinet secretary is acting in good faith—not for a minute would I suggest otherwise—and I have some sympathy with her position given that HMICS has come up with this reasonably late in the day. I have a couple of stage 2 amendments that are borne out of the representations of HMICS, but the difference is that they relate to existing procedures and structures, whereas a lot of what is proposed by these amendments on vetting will be done by way of regulation after the event, which is quite far reaching and significant.

I have genuinely seen enough cases of good police officers who have done nothing wrong and who have become whistleblowers under the legal definition of the word finding themselves subject to disciplinary proceedings that have, in some cases, destroyed their careers, health and finances. It would be irresponsible to push forward with these amendments without really knowing what their impact will be.

I have heard that the cabinet secretary does not want to press pause, but I think that it would be sensible to do so. We could look at the issue once we have had the benefit in the forthcoming weeks of the federation and others laying out in clear and articulate terms—rather than my trying to represent the position on the hoof with a week’s notice—why they believe that it is of concern. At that point, the Government could lodge stage 3 amendments, in all likelihood with the support of all parties.