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Our first substantive item on today’s agenda is the independent review into racism in Scottish cricket. I welcome Gordon Arthur, the interim chief executive of Cricket Scotland, and Forbes Dunlop, the chief operating officer of sportscotland.
We have an hour for questions, and we have a lot of questions on the issues highlighted in the report “Changing The Boundaries—The Plan4Sport Independent Review into Racism in Scottish Cricket”, as well as issues that have been highlighted by the very brave individuals who have come forward. I am sure that anyone watching this will have seen that.
My question is for Gordon Arthur. When such things come into the public domain and hit the headlines, it is often the case that a number of people feel that they want to come forward. There was a great deal of work in engaging with people who had issues as part of the report but, since the report has been published, have more people come forward? What do you say to anybody who is involved in cricket in Scotland now if they have not come forward yet but want to raise issues to give them the courage to do so? How can they be confident that their concerns will be taken seriously and that they will not be subjected to some of the terrible things that we have heard that the people who came forward before were subjected to?
09:00
Sportscotland has kept the Plan4Sport helpline open since the report was published on 25 July, and I believe that further referrals have come forward in that time, although I cannot tell you how many. We have been concentrating on the 68 referrals that were passed over at that point, but I believe that more have come forward since then.
As I said on the day, the publication of the report was a very dark day for cricket in Scotland. The report laid bare an appalling picture. We cannot try to justify the scale of the issue or brush it off as a reflection of things that go on in society more generally, but we are looking at a societal problem through the lens of cricket. We cannot solve it on our own, but we are determined that we will solve it and make cricket a welcoming place for everybody in the sport. If there are people out there who still have evidence that they want to give and who feel that they have been treated badly in the past, I urge them to come forward. The more we understand the scale and depth of the problem, the better placed we will be to deal with it.
The action plan was meant to be produced on 30 September. One of the strongest and most upsetting aspects of what was reported was that when people came forward previously, many years ago, they were either ignored or there were no structures in place to support them. Will you outline what the action plan will do to ensure that when people are brave enough to come forward they are dealt with in a way that is supportive and investigates their claims and does not lead to any kind of adverse effects on those individuals?
Over the summer, we ensured that all the referrals that came in prior to the publication of the report and those that have come in since then will be dealt with through an independent process. We have partnered with Sporting Equals to help run that process for us to ensure that it is very thorough and that everybody feels confident in it.
The action plan has a small number of main strands to it. One of those is to put in place an anti-racism and equalities, diversity and inclusion strategy. That strategy has to deal with a range of issues, of which this is one. We need to put in place a method of collecting data so that we are clear about the people playing cricket in Scotland, what their backgrounds are, where they are from and a range of other data pieces that will enable us to track how our work is going in the years ahead.
We need to put in place a survey to update that annually, as well as education and training for the workforce in cricket in Scotland to make sure that everybody understands what needs to be done. We need to build a long-term and robust process to do exactly what you are asking for. That is, to ensure that the process that we have in place at the moment to deal with the issue temporarily is built into a long-term process so that people feel that they can come forward. Then, when people do so, we need to ensure that they can trust the process, that they will be listened to thoroughly and that their complaints will be dealt with appropriately.
I have a question for Mr Dunlop about the wider implications for sport in Scotland. As I said, the report has come off the back of whistleblowers and many complaints over many years that have not been dealt with appropriately. Things should not have had to come to a head as a result of the bravery of individuals.
What are your reflections on potential actions for other sports in Scotland? Cricket Scotland is in the spotlight, and rightly so, but there might be similar issues across sport in Scotland. What is sportscotland doing about that?
We have taken a number of steps. Prior to the cricket review and the publication of the report, we did a piece of work a couple of years ago with the other home countries’ sports councils and UK Sport that looked at race, racism and inequalities. An action plan was developed on the back of that work.
We now have the cricket report and the experiences that that has highlighted, and we will learn from that. We immediately met people from all other funded sports to talk to them about the report, and they have had time to read, understand, digest and reflect on it. We are working with them individually to understand where they are as a sport; what diversity looks like in their sport; and how their complaints and appeals processes are placed and the level of independence and scrutiny that is applied to them. Importantly, we are also considering the culture in the sport and, when something happens, how that is managed and dealt with.
We have a range of actions. As I said, some were put in place before the cricket report, but we have now built on and added to those. They all culminate under our EDI strategy, which we developed a couple of years ago. We have been doing a host of work over a long time, but, in the past two years, there has been a specific focus on race and ethnicity through the EDI action plan.
I have a question for Mr Dunlop. Earlier this year, sportscotland was proactive in commissioning the independent review into racism in cricket, but that was after allegations had emerged in public. What oversight and involvement did sportscotland have before that?
We have a range of tools and interventions for all the funded bodies that we are involved with. That includes independent audits of those organisations. We clearly did not know the depth of what was happening in cricket or the failings in the sport, but we had been working with Cricket Scotland on an EDI action plan. We were using some expert resource to work with Cricket Scotland, and plans had been developing and evolving. Quite rightly, those were shelved once we started to realise the size and scale of the issue at hand. We have had to reflect on our processes and audits so that we can get underneath those types of issues much earlier than we did with cricket. There is a period of reflection during which we will consider what we do and how we do it, and we will be making changes.
You knew about the issue, but not the size and scale of it.
We knew that there were some challenges, but we did not know that those were anywhere near the size and scale that were outlined in the published report over that period of time.
Good morning. I have a question for Gordon Arthur about the “Changing the Boundaries” review, which, as the convener mentioned, recommended producing an action plan by 30 September. I understand that the action plan has not been published yet and that it has been delayed because there has not been adequate anti-racism expertise—perhaps there has been none—to scrutinise the plan prior to publication. I am interested in your comments about the delay. What action is being taken to embed anti-racism expertise in the plan? When will the action plan be published?
The action plan is now out for consultation with Running Out Racism. It was first developed in the middle of August and has been in development since then. We have been reporting progress on the plan to Running Out Racism, but I do not believe that it had seen the plan itself until the end of last week.
The recommendations from the “Changing the Boundaries” report have been included in the plan. We have not changed those recommendations at all. They are exactly the same recommendations as were set out in relation to the things that Cricket Scotland and, indeed, sportscotland needed to address. Those recommendations have been put into the document.
The work falls into three main areas. First, we need to put in place a review process for referrals. That process started about two weeks ago. Secondly, we need to hold a governance review, for which we have agreed the terms and costings. That review is about to kick off and will be finished by the end of the year. Thirdly, we need to put in place an EDI anti-racism advisory group to run all of that work, and we have been recruiting people to that. A member of the Running Out Racism campaign will be part of that advisory group.
All the work that is done on the EDI strategy and everything that falls out of that will be done with the involvement of Running Out Racism and a number of other people from universities and other sectors who have a huge amount of EDI knowledge and experience. We hope that people with lived experience and people with other relevant experience from various organisations will be fully involved in all of that work in order to drive it forward.
The report was published in July 2022 and the action plan was meant to be published by the end of September. Has it just grown arms and legs and got bigger as you have uncovered issues that need to be dealt with? Have you therefore had to not exactly prolong the publishing process but take a more in-depth approach to tackling racism in Scottish cricket?
The tasks that need to be done are the same tasks that were in the original report. Since the report was published, we have spent most of the past two months putting in the groundwork and building the foundations for the real work to start. That has involved recruiting people to the new board, recruiting people to the advisory group that will run all the EDI work and getting agreement on how the governance review will be done. The past two months have been all about putting in the building blocks for the work that now needs to happen.
We did not see the report before it was published so, since publication, we have needed to understand what is involved. During that time, we have been working as hard and as fast as we can, and engaging as best we can, to get us to a point where everybody is happy, we are aligned and we have shared goals with the same long-term vision. That is where we want to be. Going through that process takes a lot of time, but I hope that the action plan will be published this week.
I go back to my earlier question about referrals. People obviously came forward during the writing of the report and since then. Is it fair to say that their cases have not been investigated yet and that that process is not under way? That seems to be what I am getting from you. You have talked about all the important actions that need to take place structurally, at a high level—the policies and governance that need to be put in place. Where are we with the actual nuts and bolts of investigating all the allegations that people have made? What communication has there been with the people who have come forward to let them know about the process that they will be involved in?
09:15
Over the summer, putting in place the independent process to review referrals took us through to 13 September. On that day, we announced what the process would be, gave more information about it and said that the first individual investigations had begun that week.
Two things are happening. At the front end, there is a triaging process to see which of the 68 referrals are the most important, the most urgent and the most serious, so that we can prioritise that work. Once that triaging process is finished, which should be in a week or two, we will have a complete plan in relation to the order in which we will look at things. Investigation of the first two or three cases has already started.
How is that being communicated to everybody who has come forward? Have they all been communicated with individually to let them know that their reports have been received and what process to expect?
I think that a letter went out to all of them on 13 September or the day before. I will need to check that, but I am pretty sure that that happened.
I will bring in Sandesh Gulhane, who joins us online.
I have been listening with interest, and I am really quite angry and upset. The publication of the report is not a dark day for Scotland; what happened was a dark day for Scotland. The idea of trying to hide behind societal issues is not good enough. I have a feeling that the issue is not being taken seriously enough and that things are not going forward at the pace that we want them to.
My first question is for Gordon Arthur. Where is the human resources officer? Why has a human resources officer not been appointed?
The “Changing the Boundaries” report recommended that we appoint four roles. One of those was an HR manager, which is a role that we are not sure that the organisation would ideally have in the long run. Our organisation is very small. If you take out the contracted cricket players, the development team and the team that runs international fixtures, you are left with a staff of about half a dozen people in Cricket Scotland, including me, the head of finance and an administrative assistant. Employing a full-time HR manager in an organisation the size of Cricket Scotland does not necessarily look to be the right way to go forward.
We have other ways of accessing HR support. We get a lot of support on HR-related matters from sportscotland. Its EDI officer helps us with all our documentation. All our job advertisements and job descriptions are supported by sportscotland, and the recruitment processes that we have run over the past few months have all been helped by it, using the same HR resources and EDI specialist resources that it has.
Internally, we are reviewing our entire staffing structure to try to make sure that the organisation, which is several members of staff short of where it needs to be to be a properly functioning organisation, has the resources in place to be a first-class governing body for sport. When I arrived in July, it clearly was not that.
We have not started the process for recruiting an HR manager at this stage because we are getting very good support from sportscotland in all the HR-related matters that we need support in. We will review all four posts as we go forward and, depending on what comes out of the governance review and the EDI strategy, we will be able to develop a job description that reflects the work that will be done for recruiting things such as our own EDI resource full time later on.
You have said that you do not need a full-time HR manager because there are only six of you, and you have talked about a full-scale review of all the people and all the things that you need to do. That does not seem to balance. What work is going into place now to ensure that there is greater diversity not just within Cricket Scotland but in your volunteers and in the encouragement to get players to play at the top level to make Scotland successful?
All of that work will come out of the EDI strategy. We have put in place the advisory group to help us with a lot of external expertise, and we are already working very closely with sportscotland. All our job adverts are put out through networks to try to make sure that people in the south Asian communities, for example, are aware of the opportunities. We would love to have more women involved in the administration of the sport. We have put out job adverts to various organisations to try to promote better diversity in our staffing across cricket in Scotland.
We have had a huge amount of success at the club level in Scotland in attracting people from very diverse communities. There are many examples throughout the country of clubs in which in excess of 75 per cent of their members are from south Asian communities. In some of the junior clubs, the numbers are way up into the 90s. Huge numbers of young people from very diverse backgrounds are playing the sport at the club level.
People ask why that is not reflected all the way through the age group levels and in the national teams. We will be doing work on that in the coming months. We hope that Paul Reddish from Running Out Racism will do a piece of work with us to look at equality throughout the entire journey, from people coming into the sport right the way up to the international level, and all the barriers that might exist in that journey, and to try to make sure that we have a process and a pathway that allow youngsters to go all the way through right up to the national team, with an opportunity that is equal to that of others.
A lot of work will be done to address those points. None of those bits of work is a quick fix—they all require a substantial change to the way that the sport has been organised in the past. However, I believe that they will make a huge difference to the sport in the years ahead.
Good morning. I want to pick up from where we left the previous question—at the grass-roots issue and the fact that young players from a south-east Asian background in particular do not progress to the national level.
There is a real feeling from the survey respondents about the challenges that exist. Fifty-four per cent of people from non-white backgrounds who responded to the survey said that they did not agree that there is a level playing field or a fair opportunity of access to the national level.
I appreciate what you said about the on-going review. However, I represent a community in which there are many young people from a south-east Asian background who play cricket, are passionate and enthusiastic about it, and are well supported by their families, and they do not seem to think that there is a prospect that they will be able to progress. What is your assessment of why that is?
I have been in Cricket Scotland since 18 July, so I have not been personally involved enough to have a long perspective on that. I have been told many of the facts that you are quoting to me, and I have heard a lot of anecdotal stories from people who feel that they have not been given a fair opportunity at the juncture from age 17 to 19 or from 19 to the full squad. There is a perception that people are not being given a fair opportunity to progress, and I see it as my job to get behind that perception, to test it out, to find out the reasons why people are not coming through the process, and to try to create a process that ensures that everybody who wants to gets a fair opportunity to get all the way through up to the international team.
I cannot imagine why anybody would want our international team not to turn out its 11 best players every time that it plays. The idea of excluding people because of their skin colour or because they live in a more remote part of the country and cannot compete, as they cannot get to big clubs that play in the top leagues, needs to be explored. Any reasons why people would be excluded need to be explored. As I have said, we need to build a process that gives people as much opportunity as possible.
You referred to people’s perception. I am not sure that it is a perception. I think that there is a real demonstrable challenge for people in being able to access the sport.
I represent and come from East Renfrewshire, which is a community with a large south-east Asian community and in which people are well supported. There are a number of clubs and school opportunities, for example. I would like to hear a commitment from you that you will go to those communities, speak to people—particularly young people who have had challenging experiences—and get a sense from them not of what the situation is perceived to be but of what the reality of the situation is. Will you give that undertaking? I appreciate what you have said about commissioning work to be done, but I think that you in your role and whoever continues the leadership of the organisation should go to those communities.
We need to talk to as many people as possible and make sure that we have a broad understanding of the grass-roots sport. Talking to members in different communities and different clubs is one of the best ways in which we can do that. I am happy to say that, when that work is on-going, we will be out there talking to everybody in the sport to try to understand.
I, too, have talked to people from south-east Asian communities, who have described to me why they stopped playing the game at the age of 19. They had a very good experience through the ages of 15 to 17 to 19. They were under huge amounts of pressure from their families to get professional qualifications—to go to university and become a doctor or lawyer, for example—and they stopped playing the sport. At that stage in their lives, the focus shifted away from trying to be an international sportsperson to becoming a professional person with a career and continuing to play sport at the club level.
There will be many reasons why people do not progress from the junior ranks into the senior ranks, regardless of their skin colour, and we need to understand what all those different reasons are. I have said this twice, and I will say it a third time: we need to have a thorough look at the whole journey and make sure that, if there are barriers, they are removed so that everybody gets a fair opportunity to progress through the system.
It is clear that we need to drill down. My point about speaking to those communities is absolutely vital.
I will move the discussion on slightly, because I am conscious of the time.
Is there a challenge for many people in respect of professional players setting an example and the players whom they play alongside not understanding some of the systemic issues, the deep-rooted nature of racism and the challenges around that, and very often not being aware of the challenges that other people face? To what extent has there been training for other professional players on racism and how they conduct themselves on social media and in various other spaces? Does that training currently exist?
Yes, it does. The men’s international team and, I believe, the women’s international team have had EDI training. That needs to be an on-going part of how we support the squads to make sure that they fully appreciate all the issues and that the understanding of those issues is as thorough as it can be.
09:30
I will go back to something before I ask my question. Earlier you said that you want to involve more women in administration. Could you clarify what that means, please?
I mean in the running of the sport. The Cricket Scotland board did not have women representatives on it until fairly recently. The volunteer base who run the sport at a practical level day to day are largely white middle-aged males. The women’s game is growing, so it would be great if we had more representatives from women’s cricket involved in running all of cricket.
Thank you. “Governance” is what you meant by administration.
My question is on the work that you are undertaking to improve transparency in player selection. Could you share that, please?
It became obvious to me fairly early on that Cricket Scotland, as an organisation, has not been particularly transparent about many things. It has just got on and done things; it has not explained to people how those things have been done and it has not published processes so that people can see how decisions are made. When decisions are unpopular with people and they cannot go back and see who was involved, why were they involved and what the process was, that feeds discontent.
Questions were asked earlier about international selection, which is a very clear case in point. Historically, selection meetings have taken place, teams have been picked and squads have been announced but there has been no information behind that. The men’s world cup squad are in Australia now preparing for the twenty20 world cup. We put a lot of work into trying to put together, describe, write down and publish a very clear process of how the squad was picked, who was involved in picking it and why they were involved in picking it. We talked to people about who would chair the selection committee. We have a new chair of the selection committee and we had a number of people advising, but not voting, on the selections, so we had different and much broader and more diverse inputs into the meeting than has happened in the past. That is a step towards having a permanent published selection process for the international teams.
My view is that we need to take that process down to the under-19s, the under-17s and the under-15s, where things are probably even less clear than they are at the top international team level. For the top international squads there has always been a chair of selectors, with the head coach, two assistant coaches and whoever else making the decisions. Further down the age groups it tends to be the case that the coach of the squad makes the decisions on their own. My view is that that is not transparent enough; we should not be relying on one person to do that. We are unlikely to improve diversity unless we have particularly focused individuals who are trying to make sure that diversity comes all the way through the various age-group teams.
There is a huge amount of work to be done on transparency in the organisation that I am now running; we need to bring a huge amount of transparency into all of our work. I am completely committed to making sure that that happens. In respect of the process for selection of the men’s international team it has been appreciated that we have done what we have done, which is an important stepping stone to better transparency in all that we do in the coming years.
Good morning to you both. What is sportscotland doing to support Cricket Scotland generally and in its record keeping, reporting procedures and complaints processes?
Since publication of the report, we have been working very closely with Gordon Arthur, in particular, and his small team. He has outlined some of the practical expertise that we can provide to cricket. Over the past two months we have been, essentially, helping Gordon Arthur to run Cricket Scotland daily. We are trying to be clear about jurisdiction, so that we do not make procedural mistakes in the changes that we are making, because it is important that cricket is reviewed then set up and structured in a way that is robust and transparent for the future. We are working closely with Cricket Scotland to put the changes in place, to provide the expertise and support that cricket does not have in this first phase and, importantly, to hold Cricket Scotland to account for the changes that need to happen.
We meet with a group that includes Cricket Scotland, sportscotland and representatives from Running Out Racism. We have established a monthly meeting so that there is checking and challenge by sportscotland and an opportunity for Running Out Racism to raise its concerns or questions about progress and the steps that have been taken. Monitoring is done through the group’s meetings.
Gordon Arthur has touched a number of times on the fact that we felt that it was very important to get the big building blocks in place first. It was important to make sure that the terms for the governance review were set and established properly and that the referrals are rightly prioritised, given the nature of those referrals and the individuals involved. It was also important that the board was recruited and appointed so that Cricket Scotland is in a place to make changes to its governance, to make decisions and to move forward as an organisation.
We have been working with Cricket Scotland daily to make sure that it has the expertise and we prioritise the right things in the right order, so that we get the big building blocks in place and can then address lots of the points that the committee has made this morning.
In sportscotland’s statement of 30 September it was noted that
“robust actions and genuine cultural change”
are needed within the sport. Can you offer us assurances today that that is what we will get? Given the progress to date, we do not see that now. Can you give us assurances that there will be real cultural change within Scottish cricket?
Yes, absolutely. When I talk about the foundations that we are putting in place, one of the most fundamental things is that the leadership, through the board of Cricket Scotland, understands the need for cultural change. That is embedded in the recruitment process for the chair and board members. Of course, it is our absolute commitment that cultural change will happen and needs to happen in a structured way. We believe that that happens through the board, the governance review and the EDI working group that Gordon Arthur is setting up. It happens by putting in place the types of people who are being invited on to that group, with their backgrounds and the expertise that they bring, which will deliver the cultural change that we all need to see.
It is clear that wholesale change is needed at Cricket Scotland. What funding is in place to support that change?
Sportscotland has invested in Cricket Scotland for a time. As we work through the steps and come to understand what the organisation needs to look like, there will be opportunities to invest in and support the organisation directly or indirectly, as we are doing now, through either our own expertise in sportscotland or expert research that we can contract in on behalf of Cricket Scotland. There are resources available to support Cricket Scotland.
In the first instance, the best way to do that is indirectly in the short term, because we still are not clear what the structure of the organisation needs to look like. It is right to give the new board time to come in and fully understand what is happening and for its members to have a say in that. In the longer term, there are resources that we can use if we feel that that is the right thing to do and that it would benefit the game of cricket in Scotland.
So, nothing has been ring fenced and nothing has been set aside yet.
No.
Has Cricket Scotland established a formalised method of communication for sharing updates and examples of good practice among regional associations, clubs and itself?
At this point, we have not done that. I do not think that the relationships between Cricket Scotland and the regions, the regions and the clubs, and the clubs and Cricket Scotland are particularly fit for purpose as they are at the moment. That is bound up in the history of the way the sport has been governed, but I hope and expect that the governance review will dramatically change that, so that we have better processes and more resources in place to manage certain big and important things more centrally.
One of those things is conduct and discipline, which has obviously been a big focus of the report. The processes and application of the processes that we have had in place have not always been consistent. In many areas, including safeguarding and child safety, and health and safety, we need a more consistent approach across the whole sport. That will require a resetting of the relationship between Cricket Scotland and the regions.
We have set the very challenging task of completing the governance review by the end of the year because I would like to be able to implement the outcomes of the governance review before the start of the next cricket season. That will quite possibly require changes in the articles of association of Cricket Scotland and maybe of those of the regions, which are all structured quite differently. Implementation of the recommendations, whatever they are, that come out of the review could take a little bit of time, but we are giving ourselves only three months for that, which I think will be a stretch. The things that we cannot do by the start of next season will probably end up having to wait until the start of the following season, which does not make me happy: anything that is important must be done and be put in place before the start of the 2023 cricket season.
We need to reset the relationship in some areas quite significantly. From my early conversations with people in the regions, I think that that will be welcomed. I am meeting with the new chair of Western District Cricket Union on Friday. You might be aware that the entire western district committee resigned and there were elections in early September. The relationship between Cricket Scotland and western district will be crucial, bearing in mind the volume of issues that came out of the “Changing the Boundaries” report that related to that district, which was singled out as being an area that needs a lot of attention. An important and significant cultural reset between Cricket Scotland and the regions and clubs needs to happen this winter.
Given how important it is to communicate a lot of the work that is going on at national level to the clubs and the regional associations, what time frame do you expect that you need to formalise a new way of communicating with the regions and the clubs?
I would love to have that in place already. We do not have a communications person in our very small staff in Cricket Scotland. I believe that we have not had a proper communications person since the early part of this year, when the person doing that left but was not replaced. We have just been through a recruitment process to try to bring in a new head of communications and we had one very good candidate come out of that process. Sadly, they have been persuaded by their employer to stay where they are, so we need to restart that recruitment.
09:45My background is largely in communication, so I completely understand the need for us to overcommunicate now. The reality is that since I came into this job I have been working six or seven days a week doing 10, 12 and 14-hour days. There is only so much that we can do in the very short term. We need to get more staff into the organisation: that comes back to the points about sportscotland helping us and the need to identify the structure and roles and get those roles in place.
We are working in a recruitment environment in which prospective candidates are now worried about coming to work in Cricket Scotland because of everything that they have read and seen. I have spent days of my time talking to potential candidates about what we are doing and what our ambitions and commitments are, to try to ensure that they understand that the sport is going to change for the better and that it is going to change in a very significant way. That is to give them confidence that they would be coming into an environment that they want to be part of. It is not easy, but we have to keep pressing as hard as we can.
Formalising of communications with the regions, clubs and all participants in the sport is very important. I hope that we will make progress on that in the coming weeks, and I would love to have a new head of communications in place to drive all that work. Sadly, we are not quite at that point.
Do I have time for one more question, convener?
Yes.
This question is more for Mr Dunlop, I think.
In the debate on this issue that Kaukab Stewart brought to the chamber earlier in the parliamentary session, it was widely recognised that the issues raised with regard to cricket might not be unique to cricket. Obviously it is important that we take this opportunity to look towards the future and help ensure that such situations do not happen again anywhere in sport and that we provide an opportunity for good-practice sharing.
Given that, would sportscotland consider forming, at an appropriate time, a representative working group to look at the findings of the independent report and to prioritise actions that can be taken to help all governing bodies of sport be fully inclusive? Such a working group could include governing bodies themselves and a representative body in the form of the Scottish Sports Association to ensure that sports are involved in all discussions and that resulting actions and developments are done with sports, not just to them.
We would absolutely consider doing that—indeed, those types of conversations are very live now. Even before the cricket report came out, a lot of work was being done on getting the right level of support and expertise to help sports, with the sports themselves, and on how we balance that with interventions when things do not go right, people do not make good decisions and cultures go wrong. As I have said, those conversations are live, and we are working with a range of partners, including governing body representatives, to ensure that we take all the learning from the report and the work we were doing before it, bring them together and strike the right balance of having a package of support and help for sports and intervening when they do not get things right.
I call Paul O’Kane, who has a specific question about regional associations.
As someone who represents the West Scotland region—and going back to my previous remarks about my own community—I am keen to understand what the particular issue is in west district. We have heard about the resignation of the board and its replacement, but it seems to me that there is a particular challenge in that part of the country. Gordon, do you want to elaborate on that?
I am not sure that I can elaborate any more on the issue than what has been reported in “Changing the Boundaries”. West district was one of the referrals; indeed, it was singled out in the process. We need to understand through the governance review where the discipline process has not been working effectively, and we need to ensure that the processes that are put in place work effectively everywhere, but I am not sure that I can add an awful lot more to what is in “Changing the Boundaries” about the proportion of issues that came out of west district.
Do you have anything else to add, Forbes?
No, that is essentially it. A number of the referrals relate to west district’s handling of discipline at district level. The Plan4Sport team said that that issue needs to be looked at and that piece of work is on-going.
Am I right in saying that a new board has been appointed in the west?
In west district, yes.
Are you confident that it looks set to undertake a complete culture change?
Gordon Arthur mentioned that he is meeting the new chair on Friday, but I have not met the new west district committee yet. It is certainly more diverse than it previously was, and I know that the special general meeting that it held attracted a much wider group of member clubs, which have taken great interest in the running of cricket in their district. It is still very early days, but that sort of culture change is what we are hoping for.
I was at the special general meeting, which was held via videolink, and saw a lot of new people coming forward. The next day, I asked one or two people about their feelings about the new committee, and Running Out Racism and others felt positive about the changes in personnel involved in WDCU. That, to me, is an encouraging start.
I will go back to Sandesh Gulhane, and then bring in Stephanie Callaghan.
Having listened to what has been said, am I right in saying that, essentially, no changes have been made? You say that you are looking to do things or are thinking of doing things, that this is sort of where you want to go and that you have a governance review, an EDI strategy and so on. However, the evidence that I have heard suggests that, right now, the processes and structures have not really been put in place.
Which processes and structures do you mean?
Gillian Mackay has asked about timescales, and Paul O’Kane has talked about going in and speaking to communities. We are looking at structures and processes for increasing diversity, for new appointments and so on. Despite all the issues that have arisen, I am not getting the sense that you have done these things or that all of this has happened already. Instead, I am getting the sense that you are just looking to do them.
Thank you for that clarity.
I can say that with the recruitment that has been done over the past two months, for example, the process has changed. We have had input from an EDI perspective on job descriptions and advertisements; we have sent them out to community groups that have not received these opportunities before to encourage people in those communities to apply and to broaden the diversity of the population of people who come forward; and we have had a complete reset of the selection process and have communicated those changes. Things have been going on and we have been making changes, but the really big changes to the long-term culture in this sport will come out of the pieces of work that will be done over the next two or three months. However, where there are things we have been able to do in the short term, we have been taking those opportunities in order to improve transparency and opportunities.
I call Stephanie Callaghan.
I thank the witnesses for coming along this morning.
These are extremely challenging times—and not just for cricket. Gordon Arthur has a lot on his plate, too. I also noted Forbes Dunlop’s comments about having the right level of support and expertise, and I do not know whether any additional support could be brought in to help with that.
With regard to developing communication strategies, are there specific examples of good practice from other sports that could be adapted and applied to cricket? That question is for Forbes Dunlop.
We certainly do have good practice, and not just within Scotland; as we mentioned in last week’s update, over the past six months we have been developing a new partnership with a UK-based organisation called Sporting Equals, which has done a lot of work with English and UK governing bodies. One of the reasons for developing that partnership, which happened before the cricket report came out, was to bring in a range of expertise that Sporting Equals had and which we felt that we did not have in sportscotland. With the combination of that expertise and the many communications experts that we have, there is certainly some good practice that we can learn from and we are working with Gordon Arthur and his team to make sure that that is in place.
Not having different sports reinvent the wheel is certainly a good idea.
Lots of local clubs and regions have strong links with their communities, and there is some good work going on there. Are you thinking about ways in which you can tap into that and involve some of those people more? That is probably a question for Gordon Arthur.
I have already engaged with a number of clubs that have programmes that have been incredibly successful in bringing in youngsters from all communities. A good example of that is Drummond Trinity Cricket Club in Edinburgh. Having met the chair of the club, I know that about 93 per cent of its cricketers are from a south-east Asian background. A few years ago, it was struggling to put out two cricket teams at the weekend; now it is putting out five, and its membership is fantastically diverse. A lot of great work is going on in lots of cricket clubs across the country, and in the process of developing the right culture for the sport, we must learn as much as we can from the pockets of success that are out there already.
So—
Two more members want to come in, Stephanie, so please make your question a short one.
Are you looking to create opportunities or positions for such people who can really influence the ethos of and culture in sport?
Yes. A big part of what will come out of this governance review is how we structure ourselves going forward. Historically, the Cricket Scotland board has run the sport and the Cricket Scotland council has nominally been the body that governs the day-to-day running of the sport. That board and council structure has not worked as a governance methodology for the past however many years it has been in place—I am not sure exactly how many, but it is perhaps eight or 10. In the council, you had representatives of clubs and regions, while the board tended to be made up of non-executive directors with a commercial or governance background or what have you.
As part of the process of organising things from the top of the board right down to ensure representation and opportunities for people to have an input, I would love it if the sport held a conference at which everybody—players, coaches, umpires and other officials, clubs and regions—could get together once a year and talk about the big issues facing the sport and how we take things forward. I have a completely open mind on the different ways in which we can do that, but we need to ensure that we have really good information flows right from the clubs through to the board of directors who run the sport.
We are rapidly running out of time, but I will take very short questions from two other members.
I should say first of all that I was an HR professional for more than 30 years.
I just want to consider the optics of your remark about being deeply disappointed at not being able to hire a communications professional. I note that you do not see not hiring an HR professional, even part time, as a serious or major issue, but the fact is that most organisations that want to bring in serious organisational change put HR at the forefront. When I was preparing for the meeting, I was appalled at and saddened by some of the examples. Why are you making comms a higher priority than HR?
10:00
That is primarily because we can get good-quality support on the HR front in the short term. The fact is that we need to overcommunicate with our audiences at this point in time and to be in control of that communications environment. We can get a lot of HR support from different places, and that will give us time to assess whether we need a full-time or part-time resource, what the important skills in the HR mix might be and what skills we can get from other places on a long-term basis. If we go and recruit people now, they will be permanent employees of the organisation, and if we find in a year’s time that we have recruited somebody on a full-time basis who was only needed part time, we will not be able to change that.
I would challenge that. I think that you should reconsider and put in place even part-time or specialist HR resource.
We are running out of time. I call Evelyn Tweed. Please make it short, Evelyn, because we must end this session.
Okay. You have talked about a reset but when that happens, who will be responsible for making sure that we do not get into this situation again? Where does the buck stop?
The buck stops with Cricket Scotland, which needs to carry out its governance review and appoint a board and a council—whatever the dynamic might be—that have scrutiny and leadership of the sport. The role of sportscotland will be to monitor that, make sure that the changes are in place and look at our own interventions so that we can confidently say that the changes that we all wanted to happen have happened. It is important that, ultimately, Cricket Scotland and the board of directors are responsible for the sport and the organisation.
With that in mind, we might bring you back before the start of the next season just to see how far you have come. I thank both witnesses for their time this morning.
We will have a short suspension before we move on to our next panel.
10:02 Meeting suspended.