Chamber and committees

Fiona McQueen, in your opening statement you said that the bill possibly does not go far enough and that not all of Lady Elish’s recommendations have been met. I have two questions. First, do you think that the process would still be overly complicated, despite the bill, because of all the different layers of bodies dealing with complaints, such as professional standards, the SPA and the PIRC?

Secondly, the previous chief constable and the current one have stated publicly that the force is institutionally racist and discriminatory. Do you think that the bill will go any way towards helping in that regard? What steps has the SPA taken to try to address that?

Okay—thank you. That was helpful. Would anyone else like to comment?

We have a completely different set of figures, which might be to do with timescales.

You have answered some of my questions there, Nicky, but you have also talked about introducing the wraparound support. We have heard from our witnesses that they did not receive that, quite honestly, so I want to understand the context and the timescale for that. When was it introduced?

Therefore, you will hold Police Scotland to account on any of those matters. If you hear about or see something happening that should not be happening, you will hold it to account.

Mr Johnston, are you aware of the use of non-disclosure agreements in complaints procedures?

When the police use them, are you made aware of that?

The other issue is transparency and lack of communication. People have just been left not knowing what is happening. That is operational as well, I guess.

I want to ask you briefly about vexatious complainers. The bill does not contain any reference to that, and the Government has said that it will monitor that and bring it in as secondary legislation if it is required. What is your view on that?

Two of the main issues that we have heard about from witnesses are the time taken to complete investigations and what they perceive as a lack of transparency in the system. One witness told us that the system does not work for police officers or members of the public, and another said that the time taken was a deliberate tactic used by Police Scotland to wear her down and make her simply go away. Will the bill do enough to tackle those issues?