Handling of Salmond complaints 'seriously flawed'
The Scottish government's handling of harassment complaints against Alex Salmond was "seriously flawed", a committee of MSPs has concluded.
The committee said women had been badly let down by the government.
And they said they found it hard to believe that First Minister Nicola Sturgeon was not aware of concerns about Mr Salmond's alleged behaviour before November 2017.
They also said Ms Sturgeon had misled their inquiry in her evidence.
Many of the committee's findings were unanimous, but others were divided along party lines - with the four SNP MSPs being outvoted by the two Conservatives, one Labour, one Liberal Democrat and independent MSP Andy Wightman.
Members voted by five to four that there had been a "fundamental contradiction" between Ms Sturgeon's evidence about her meetings with Mr Salmond and that of his team.
And they said they believed she had left him with the impression she might intervene in the complaints process.
They voted by the same margin that her written evidence was "an inaccurate account of what happened", and that "she has misled the committee on this matter".
The report also said members were "concerned" about how long it had taken Ms Sturgeon to inform the government's permanent secretary that she was aware of the complaints.
And it said it was "inappropriate for the first minister to continue to meet and have discussions" with Mr Salmond.
The committee has made a series of recommendations which it said would help ensure similar mistakes do not happen in the future, and ensure confidence in future complaints processes.
It was unanimous in saying that the government should have taken more time over the drafting of the new complaints procedure and should have included an independent system for reporting and investigating complaints.
The report said that the "multiple roles" fulfilled by Permanent Secretary Leslie Evans in the process "should have been seen as a significant organisational risk", saying this "places a question mark over the process".
And they were critical of the government's handling of the judicial review case brought by Mr Salmond, saying there was a "major flaw" and a "significant failure" in the failure to identify and hand over relevant documents to the court.
Members were split over Ms Sturgeon's role in the judicial review, but agreed by five votes to four that they were "concerned that the first minister decided to proceed with the judicial review despite clear advice that it would likely fail."
But they agreed unanimously that "the Scottish government was responsible from an early stage for a serious, substantial and entirely avoidable situation that resulted in a prolonged, expensive and unsuccessful defence" of the judicial review."
They said "this state of affairs is unacceptable by an organisation such as the Scottish government and that those responsible should be held accountable".
Committee convener Linda Fabiani, an SNP MSP, told the BBC's Good Morning Scotland programme that its inquiry had been frustrated by delays in receiving evidence from the government.
And she said the committee had to redact "a lot of information" from its report, and had been unable to publish some of the evidence it had received.
The redactions meant there were parts where "the full picture is not given", she said, but she insisted that these were "very small elements".
Ms Sturgeon has already been cleared of breaching the ministerial code by a separate independent inquiry headed by senior Irish lawyer James Hamilton.
She said last week that she stood by all of the evidence she gave to the committee during her marathon eight-hour evidence session earlier this month.
March 23, 2021 at 08:46PM
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-56494852
Labels: BBC News
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home