Oral Answers to Questions
David Davis Excerpts(8 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Sir David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)
Three years ago, on 16 March 2021, we had a debate in this House on precisely the subject of this question. At the time, I was concerned that Nicola Sturgeon’s Government were covering up interference in the complaints process against the First Minister. Since then, in defiance of the Information Commissioner and of a court order, they have continued to cover up. Will the Cabinet Secretary look at whether the ministerial code and the civil service code have been broken?
Mr Jack
My right hon. Friend should write to the Cabinet Secretary and ask him to do that very thing.
The Prime Minister
The hon. Gentleman claims to be supportive of the North sea energy industry, but why has he opposed all the measures that we have taken to protect those jobs in Scotland over the past couple of years? He talks about tax in Scotland and England. I gently point out to him that, thanks to the actions of the Chancellor and this UK Government, everyone in Scotland has received a significant tax cut from January this year. In contrast to the Chancellor’s last Budget, the SNP’s budget put taxes up for working Scots. Scotland is now the high-tax capital of the UK, but this Conservative Government are going to keep cutting taxes for hard-working Scots.
Sir David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)
The Prime Minister
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to highlight the appalling impact that this miscarriage of justice has had on people’s mental health. As he acknowledged, our focus is on delivering justice for the postmasters, and that is why we will introduce legislation to overturn convictions and pave the way for the swift payment of compensation. I thank him for his long-standing campaign on mental health on this issue, and I assure him that the postal Minister is closely examining the issues he raises, is considering next steps and will keep my right hon. Friend closely informed.
SEND Provision and Funding
David Davis Excerpts(10 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Sir David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House calls for a review of funding for SEND provision.
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I will try my absolute best to stay inside your guidance. We have 24 applicants to speak in the debate, which I think is a record, so forgive me if I do not take interventions. Nearly 100,000 people signed petitions relating to these subjects and I am pleased to say that they will have their voices heard in the Chamber today.
The debate about how best to cater for those with special educational needs and disabilities is often dominated by hard numbers: money, places, headcounts and so on. That is obviously a vital part of the discussion, but the real heart of the matter is the human impact, and the children and families behind the figures. My part of the world, the East Riding, has the lowest per capita funding, which is about a third of the highest-funded areas.
I declare an interest, or more than an interest: a prejudice. I have a grandchild who suffers from something called SYNGAP-1, a genetic disease that makes her non-verbal and gives her daily fits and seizures, so she has a very high intensity of requirement. In the two years of covid, she missed 40 days of teaching, over and above lockdown requirements, because of a lack of resources. That is eight weeks of schooling lost, causing enormous distress to a child who needs continuity and stability. We can see immediately how that has an effect. Chloe has complex needs and meeting those needs is a daily challenge for her parents and teachers. For her to miss so much school is simply awful and puts huge pressure on Chloe herself and on the rest of her family.
As important as Chloe is to me, the point is that her case is not unusual. Many of her classmates had and continue to have the same experiences, as do thousands upon thousands of children across the country. Parents, teachers, teaching assistants, mental health workers, carers and a host of others do incredible work to ensure that children get as much help as possible, but they are struggling to provide adequately for everyone. At the moment, the resources are simply not there.
A bit of background here is important. Education, health and care plans—EHCPs, as they are known—were introduced in 2014. This was a well-intentioned reform that sought to provide holistic support for young people in need. But what the reforms failed to do was provide resilience in the system to deal with future changes to demand for services. In recent years, there has been a huge increase in that demand: population growth, better detection of conditions such as autism, and longer life expectancy because of medical progress all put pressures on the system. As a result, the total number of EHCPs and statements of special educational need has more than doubled since 2015. That is a rise of more than a quarter of a million cases, with large increases in every age group, but the funding from central Government simply has not kept pace.
Part of the answer is to update the funding formula. The existing allocation of funds is based on an out-of-date assessment of each area’s special educational needs. Of course, some level of differentiation of funding makes sense, as not every area has the same needs. For example, rurality has a huge impact, as staff, campaigners and families in my area know only too well. Those national pressures lie behind the call by the f40 group, representing local authorities with some of the worst rates of SEND funding, for £4.6 billion in additional annual funding from central Government. The figure is based on that huge growth in the number of EHCPs local authorities have to support, as well as significant inflationary pressures. Each EHCP, tailored to the specific needs of a child requiring additional support, costs the local authority cash, so the more EHCPs are needed, the more local authorities have to cough up and the greater the pressure on their already tight finances. We should remember that in the past two years, six local authorities have already declared themselves effectively bankrupt.
The impact of these pressures on SEND provision is clear for all to see. In 2022, less than half of EHCPs were issued within 20 weeks of application. In other words, one in two children waited more than five months. Given that 13% of children have special educational needs, that is a huge number of kids waiting for help, and many have to wait a lot longer to get the support that they need. In some cases children have to be sent to schools far away owing to a lack of local places, and families struggle, over and above their normal needs, to get appropriate support.
Parents and carers have supplied me with many illustrative examples. One, Jennifer, said that
“we have been on a waiting list for 22 months for my son to see a Speech and Language Therapist...The lack of SEN schools needs addressing as a matter of urgency”
as children are being
“let down and are suffering”.
Another, Esther, said:
“My son hasn’t had his EHCP met in four years in an SEN school... he has not had speech therapy for over three years, nor has he had his physio, occupational therapy, sensory or educational needs met...There is urgent need for more funding so that SEN schools can have appropriate class sizes with therapists and enough qualified and skilled support staff.”
According to one special needs specialist teacher, Louise:
“Services such as speech and language therapy have been reduced dramatically. In my Autism Spectrum Condition Resourced Provision class, we used to have three hours per week and now have three hours per half term.”
Another teacher, Catherine, said:
“We have large numbers of children who require specialist support to allow them to thrive and stay safe”.
Owing to a lack of resources, however, other children are
“receiving minimal support as we are firefighting, just to keep the children…safe.”
The financial impact of all this is, of course, enormous. The cumulative deficit in local authority high needs budgets is estimated to be £2.3 billion, and is expected to reach £3.6 billion by March 2025. There are more than 80 local authorities with large high needs deficits. Currently those deficits are being kept off local authority balance sheets by a statutory override, but the override is time-limited and will expire in 2026 if it is not extended. If and when it does expire, many councils will be bankrupted overnight, with huge implications not just for education but for all local services. That is why the f40 group considers the expiry to be a sword of Damocles hanging over the entire sector. Fifty-five local authorities have had to sign up to the Government’s Delivering Better Value in SEND programme and 34 have had to sign up to the Safety Valve programme—both set up to meet the challenge of dealing with the rising demand and costs—which means that nearly 90 authorities have already had to go to the Government for help.
Of course, it is also crucial that we are able to plan for future challenges so that we can meet them when they arise, rather than constantly firefighting with limited resources. To that end, there needs to be a substantial increase in capital funding to allow local authorities to invest in SEND projects. I say to the Minister that the recent announcement of £2.6 billion for that purpose is welcome, but more is needed. Without the start-up cash, we will simply find ourselves in another crisis in five years’ time. The numbers may sound big, and we all know that these are straitened times for the economy after covid, but in reality, failing to invest is a false economy. We might save some money in the short term, but the long-term costs, both to the budgets and to the children concerned, are huge.
Let us take an example. A child suffering from poor physical and mental health, suicidal ideation and poor school attendance spent a great deal of time refusing to engage at all. Special needs staff, having set out an action plan, gave him one-to-one mentoring support, thrice-weekly pastoral sessions, regular counselling and organised work experience. As a result his school attendance improved, he began to develop friendships with peers, and he was able to manage a full school timetable. His life was transformed.
The reverse scenario, however, happens all too often. As Mo, a speech and language therapist, put it:
“It is widely acknowledged that early intervention is key. However, due to a lack of funding, staffing levels and subsequent long waiting lists, we are unable to provide”
that intervention. A child might, say, have autism and anxiety, and might be struggling to get into school and struggling to cope with the day’s work. Without help, those things get worse. The children come to school less, they find it harder and harder to carry out basic tasks, their friendships suffer, and it is then more difficult for special needs staff to get through to them. Ultimately, they will need a much greater—and more expensive—effort to reintegrate them into schooling, and will require much more long-term care. Intervening early is transformative, and that requires resources to make it possible to act before problems spiral out of control.
A further problem is the severe workforce difficulties that SEND employers face. Specialist teaching assistants, for example, now cost employers about £24,000 each, up from about £16,000 10 years ago. However, the place funding has been not changed from £10,000 per child, so we are not matching that extra demand. Many SEND workers would be better remunerated in less skilled jobs, and in a challenging economic climate, they may be forced to vote with their feet. One therapist, Hayley, said that she had seen
“a huge decline in skills and knowledge of the workforce.”
That will not come as a surprise to anyone in the sector. Of course Ministers say they value the work that SEND staff do, but it must be backed up by funding. Otherwise the workforce will continue to dwindle, with dire consequences for those who rely on their support.
There are many other aspects that I should like to mention, but you wanted me to be sharp, Madam Deputy Speaker, so I will not deal with most of them.
These challenges extend to further education. Young people aged 16 to 25 make up 27% of those with EHCPs, and I know that some of my colleagues will want to touch on that. Moreover, as I have said, this is not simply a matter of funding. Just this week the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Mike Freer), recognised the need for “systemic reform” because families were waiting between nine and 13 months for a hearing after appealing against EHCP decisions.
I am sure that some of my colleagues will go further into these issues in their speeches, and will mention their own experiences of helping families in their constituencies. My right hon. Friend and neighbour the Member for East Yorkshire (Sir Greg Knight) cannot be here this afternoon because of a constituency engagement, but I know that he agrees with all the points I have made. Front Benchers who cannot contribute to the debate also have their concerns. I know that my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis) has, like many others, been contacted by numerous constituents about this subject, and has taken their worries on board. The same is true of other Ministers who did not particularly want me to mention them; I cannot think why!
The bottom line is this. The support that a society provides for its most vulnerable is a measure of its compassion, and, to my mind, a measure of its civilisation. That is the key. I am sure that the Government share those principles, but now we must find a way to deliver the change that is needed to make them a reality.
Sir David Davis
As we saw earlier this week, clear injustices induce an extraordinary unity of purpose across the whole House. We have seen a little of that this day, because we all want to give every child the best possible chance in life, irrespective of their circumstances when they are born and thereafter. To that end, we have had some formidable speeches from Members on both sides of the House. For me, the speech that crystallised the issue most clearly was that of my right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes), who said that in 2014 we set out with the EHCP system to try to stop tired, frazzled parents having a never-ending fight to get the right outcome for their children in our system. The EHCP system has not worked. It has not delivered what we wanted because of the massive increase in demand and in complexity.
The increasing costs have overwhelmed even the large increases in expenditure that the Government have provided. That is why we need the review of funding and of allocation, both individually and across regions. The House has heard about my council in East Riding, which is the worst off, but we have heard about the unfairness of the system for individuals too. On behalf of the support staff, who work harder than anybody I know, the teachers, the parents, who have the toughest job there is, and of course the children, who we are here to give a decent life to, I commend the motion to the House.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House calls for a review of funding for SEND provision.
BBC Local Radio
David Davis Excerpts(1 year, 11 months ago)
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Sir Mike Penning (Hemel Hempstead) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the future of BBC Local Radio.
I thank the Backbench Business Committee and the 100-odd colleagues from across the House who joined the application for this debate. For those who are watching and perhaps thinking that the Benches are a bit sparse, actually if everybody speaks for 10 minutes, we will fill the time perfectly. This is a great opportunity for colleagues across the House to send a message not only to the excellent Minister on the Front Bench, but to the BBC. I also thank the House of Commons Library for its excellent and balanced paper on the subject. I will try to explain to the BBC, with colleagues, where it has gone fundamentally wrong with the demise of local radio. Local radio provides a service to our constituents and our communities that commercial radio cannot provide. If the BBC is trying to compete with commercial radio in that space, then frankly it has lost the ethos of what the BBC is supposed to be about.
There is a tax on all our constituents who have a TV or a computer that is able to receive a BBC programme. It is called the licence fee and it is a criminal offence not to have it. It was put in place all those years ago so that the BBC could provide a service that people could trust was impartial and was not going to come from any other source.
Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that impartiality is right at the front of the BBC’s ethos, but that in practice many of us in this Chamber—certainly, I do—find that BBC local radio, in my case Radio Humberside, is far more impartial than any national programme?
Sir Mike Penning
My right hon. Friend hits the nail on the head. I will come on to explain the matter of trust and how local radio is not allowed a level playing field, when it comes to programmes such as “Newsnight” or the cost of some BBC presenters. During covid, my constituents were massively reliant on the information coming from Three Counties Radio. They trusted it, they understood it and the presenters were literally their voice of information about what was going on during the pandemic.
As the cold weather hits parts of the country—fortunately, although my part of the country is cold, the weather there will be nowhere near as difficult as the sort that some will have—there is no doubt that some schools will close. Where is the information that people can trust going to come from? Clearly, it will come from their local radio station. Some commercial radio stations will pick that up—that is fine—but actually that is the job of the BBC, because it takes the licence fee.
The BBC gets about £3.5 billion from the licence fee and a further £1.5 billion from other sources. It is not for this House to tell the BBC how to spend that money, but we can give it advice. Some of that advice has been brought to me by my constituents, who are literally in tears that some presenters on local radio stations in my part of the world have been given pre-redundancy notices before Christmas, telling them that they should apply for their jobs. In some cases, those jobs will not be there.
Let us look at what the BBC has decided to do. It is proposing to allow our local radio stations to go a bit longer in the morning, until about 2 pm, and then we will be regionalised.
Scotland Act 1998: Scottish Civil Service
David Davis Excerpts(3 years, 8 months ago)
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Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)
For the past few months, Scotland has been transfixed by the Holyrood inquiry seeking the truth of what went wrong with the investigations into the former First Minister, Alex Salmond. The inquiry is investigating matters of the most serious kind—serious for the proper handling of sexual harassment complaints in Scotland; serious for the accountability of those in positions of power, including the Scottish Government’s permanent secretary and Lord Advocate; and serious, if the former First Minister’s claims hold any water, for the future of the present First Minister’s administration of Scotland.
These matters are unquestionably something that should properly be dealt with in Holyrood, but Holyrood has great difficulties exposing what went on. The inquiry has come up against endless impediments in its efforts to fulfil its remit. Those difficulties can be traced back to the Scotland Act 1998, in which the British Government of the day and this House decided to devolve power to the Scottish Parliament but failed to do it properly.
Those failures were broadly on three fronts. First, this House failed to guarantee separation of powers to Scotland. We have known for centuries that separation of powers is fundamental to a functioning democracy, yet in Scotland, the Lord Advocate both leads the prosecution service and serves in the Scottish Cabinet. That leaves him conflicted and compromised, with his Department’s independence undermined.
Secondly, the Scottish civil service was left as a part of the wider UK civil service. It therefore does not have its own mechanisms of control and accountability in place, but it is only loosely controlled by Whitehall, as we shall see in a moment. The result has been tolerance of failings that ordinarily would have led to resignations.
Thirdly and most importantly, Scottish parliamentarians were not given the same powers and privileges that Members of this House enjoy. That means that evidence relevant to the Holyrood inquiry can be freely discussed here today using parliamentary privilege, but if an MSP in Holyrood were to do the same, they would likely find themselves facing down prosecution.
Indeed, the Crown Office has been making such threats to Mr Salmond’s lawyers, various journalists and even the Holyrood inquiry itself. It made it clear that it would deem disclosure of evidence to a Committee of elected representatives to be a criminal offence. We have, in effect, given the Holyrood inquiry the right to summon evidence but not to use it.
It is because of these failings that I have brought this debate today. We need to reinforce the ability of the Scottish Parliament to hold its own Government to account. I am here to strengthen the Scottish Parliament, not to bury it.
A few weeks ago, I was passed some papers from an anonymous whistleblower. The information in those papers consisted of a download of text messages from the telephone of Sue Ruddick, the chief operating officer of the Scottish National party. This download—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his very serious point of order. I can assure him that I am listening very carefully to what the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) is saying. I think that he, being a very experienced parliamentarian, understands the side of the line on which he must stay, as far as mentioning sensitive matters and matters connected with courts, and so on.
Mr Davis
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I have, I think, brought whistleblower views to the attention of this House on about a dozen occasions in the last 20 or 30 years and, on every single occasion, I have protected the innocent people involved.
The download that I am talking about—Sue Ruddick’s telephone download—is held by the Scottish police, so the accuracy of this account can be checked if they need to. Alex Salmond has asserted that there has been, and I quote,
“a malicious and concerted attempt to….remove me from public life in Scotland”
by
“a range of individuals within the Scottish Government and the SNP”,
who set out to “damage” his
“reputation, even to the extent of having”
him “imprisoned.”
These are incredibly grave charges. The whistleblower clearly agrees with those charges. He or she starts their communication with the assertion that the evidence provided, and I quote,
“point to collusion, perjury, up to criminal conspiracy.”
Since I received the data, it looks as though the Committee has received at least some of it themselves, and some has also been put in the public domain by the hon. Member for East Lothian (Kenny MacAskill), a previous Justice Secretary in the Scottish Government. It was described anonymously by one of the Committee members as
“just private conversations that we had no business intruding on”.
Well, I will let the House be the judge of that.
No single sequence of texts is going to provide conclusive proof of what the whistleblower described as a “criminal conspiracy”, but it does show a very strong prima facie case, which demands further serious investigation, by which I mean, at the very least, a thorough review of all the emails and other electronic records for the relevant personnel at all relevant times.
For example, these texts show that there is a concerted effort by senior members of the SNP to encourage complaints. The messages suggest that SNP chief executive Peter Murrell co-ordinated Ruddick and Ian McCann, the SNP’s compliance officer, in the handling of specific complainants. On 28 September, a month after the police had started their investigation of the criminal case, McCann expressed great disappointment to Ruddick that someone who had promised to deliver five complainants to him by the end of that week had come up empty, or “overreached”, as he put it. One of the complainants said to Ruddick that she was
“feeling pressurised by the whole thing rather than supported”.
The day following the Scottish Government’s collapse in a judicial review in January 2019, Ruddick expressed to McCann the hope that one of the complainants would be
“sickened enough to get back in the game.”
Later that month, she confirmed to Murrell that the complainant was now “up for the fight” and
“keen to see him go to jail”.
Ruddick herself, in one of her texts, expressed nervousness about
“what happens when my name comes out as [redacted] fishing for others to come forward”.
Note, again, that this was after the criminal investigation into Salmond had commenced. This is improper, to say the least. Contact with, and influence of, potential witnesses is totally inappropriate once a criminal investigation is under way. That was known inside the SNP itself.
Text messages reveal that at an SNP national executive committee meeting early in January 2019, the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) raised concerns among staff at Westminster that SNP headquarters were engaged in “suborning” of witnesses, while on 28 August 2018, a senior member of SNP staff in this building described in an email the SNP headquarters move against Salmond as a “witch-hunt”.
Shortly after charges were brought against Salmond, Peter Murrell sent messages saying that it was a
“good time to be pressurising”
detectives working on the case, and that the more fronts Salmond was having to “firefight” on,
“the better for all complainers.”
When the inquiry put those messages to Mr Murrell, he said that they were “quite out of character”. That is no defence even were it true, but, having seen the evidence of other messages, it seems to me that they were all too much in character for Mr Murrell. In a Committee evidence session on 8 December last year, Mr Murrell replied under questioning that there were no more messages of the type already in the public domain from January 2019.
That statement, delivered under oath, is hard to reconcile with the dozens of messages stretching over a period of months from September 2018 that I have now seen. There is more, but it would take the whole debate to read them out. The Committee needs to gain access to all this information. The anonymous Committee member who described them as “just private conversations” should understand that meddling in an ongoing police inquiry is at best improper, and at worst criminal, so it requires proper investigation. If the Committee does not feel it can do the job, perhaps it should ask the police to do it instead.
That brings us to the complaints process that Mr Salmond was subjected to. This process was new. Created in late 2017, it was different from existing Scottish Government complaints procedures in a number of ways, including being retrospective, lacking a mediation procedure and, extraordinarily, applying to previous Ministers but not to previous civil servants. The procedure was shared with the head of propriety and ethics in Whitehall, who expressed discomfort with the proposals and specifically asked whether they were only to apply to Ministers, not civil servants. As far as I can tell, she did not get a reply. It is hard to imagine a Department in Whitehall essentially ignoring concerns expressed by the head of propriety and ethics, which is one of the reasons that I want Whitehall to review the checks and balances built into the Scottish civil service.
The Scottish Government also ignored their own new policy and appointed an investigating officer who, it emerged, had had prior contact with the complainants, and not just any contact—a potential complainant was asked for their input on the draft procedure before they had formally made their complaint. They did not consult women’s advocacy groups, which would have been proper. They did consult trade unions, but not in a proper or timely fashion. Instead, input was sought from the very first complainant whose case would be investigated. Mr Salmond sought judicial review of the process, and in due course, this complaints procedure and process was judged by Lord Pentland in the highest civil court in Scotland to be “unlawful”, “unfair” and “tainted with apparent bias”—an astonishing judgment, backed up by the maximum possible punitive award of costs.
The judicial review of 2018 led to further extraordinary behaviour by the Scottish Government. In her evidence before the Holyrood inquiry, the First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, said that her Government’s external counsel were “confident” at the outset of the civil case that they would be successful. That is a significant mischaracterisation of the advice. The Government’s external counsel had identified a central vulnerability in the Scottish Government’s case. The complaints procedure under which Salmond was investigated had a real risk of being found to be unfair. Counsel stated:
“the vulnerability arises from the Procedure itself, and not from its implementation in this particular case.”
We now know that counsel came to that conclusion without being given the full facts of the case—facts that, in due course, took it from being an arguable case to a completely unarguable one.
External counsel Roddy Dunlop QC gave that first assessment of their chances in late September. By the end of October, he is clearly worried that the Government had not disclosed important facts about their operation of the process and says that at that point:
“it makes little sense to continue to defend the indefensible.”
Within a few days, he is advising that the “least worst” option is to concede the case. By 14 December, the obvious failure of the Government to meet their duty of candour leads to a commission and diligence committee being appointed to establish the real facts.
On 19 December, after the first meeting of that commission, the Government’s external counsel tells the Government:
“With regret, our dismay at this case deepens even further...Suffice to say that we have each experienced extreme professional embarrassment as a result of assurances which we have given, both to our opponents and the court, which assurances have been given on instruction, turning out to be false as a result of the revelation of further documents.”
The Scottish Government pressed on despite the counsel’s continued concerns about their “untenable position”. Most remarkably, the counsel told the Scottish Government that they were “personally horrified”, and that they could
“no longer rest on pleadings that they knew to be untrue.”
The defence had collapsed because of the Government’s lack of candour. Mr Salmond was very fortunate that the Government’s counsel, Mr Roddy Dunlop, now Scotland’s leading QC, behaved with impeccable honour and honesty throughout. Let us be clear: this is not just a case of a Government who failed to provide information because they could not manage their own filing systems. This was a Government who actively withheld important, relevant information. In one case, a critically relevant email was actively removed from an information bundle that was going to the court and that had already been approved by the Government counsel. I do not know who took that email out—I have it here. I do not know who gave the instruction, but in my view the removal of that document would be a summary dismissal offence and possibly a criminal offence. At the very least, it would be a contempt of court. Yet over his three evidence sessions, the Lord Advocate, the Chief Law Officer of Scotland, did not see fit to mention this crucial incident to a parliamentary Committee trying to get to the truth. It came to light just 10 days ago, when the Government were forced to publish their legal advice.
It was only in January 2019, after months of increasingly damning advice, that the Scottish Government faced the inevitable and conceded the judicial review. Costs were awarded against the Scottish Government at a punitive level reserved for defences conducted “incompetently or unreasonably”. The Scottish public will now pay the bill for their Government’s dogged pursuit of a doomed case.
More than that, the Scottish Government behaved in a way that was misleading to the court in a case that had serious implications for the criminal case that was to follow. The charges in that case were very serious. Had Mr Salmond been guilty of them, he would, quite rightly, have gone to prison, and his reputation would have been destroyed forever. Yet the Government were willing to play fast and loose with the facts in a way that, if they had succeeded, would have jeopardised the whole process of justice. For me, that is even bigger than the grotesque waste of £1 million. As it was, of course, he was exonerated on all charges by a predominantly female jury in a criminal court presided over by a female judge.
The Scottish Government had committed abuses of process in the initial investigation. They had failed to live up to their duty of candour in court with an indefensible case. At this point, we might have expected some contrition. Instead, the Scottish Government have now set their sights on impeding the Committee tasked with investigating the whole affair. The Members of the Holyrood inquiry are valiantly struggling to do their job, or at least some of them are, but time and again they have been frustrated. The inquiry has had to cope with evasiveness from the Scottish Government and the constant threat of legal action by the Crown Office, the Scottish equivalent of our Crown Prosecution Service.
First, the Crown Office intervened by barring the publication of the evidence of Geoff Aberdein, Mr Salmond’s former chief of staff. This evidence is critical in determining whether Nicola Sturgeon breached the ministerial code. It is clearly in the public interest to see this evidence. However, it is not allowed to be published, so I have a suggestion for the Committee. I have it on good authority that there exists from 6 February 2018 an exchange of messages between civil servants Judith McKinnon and Barbara Allison suggesting that the First Minister’s chief of staff is interfering in the complaints process against Alex Salmond. The investigating officer complained, “Liz interference v. bad”. I assume that that means very bad. If true, this suggests that the chief of staff had knowledge of the Salmond case in February, not in April, as she has claimed on oath. The First Minister also tied herself to that April date in both parliamentary and legal statements. She was, of course, aware earlier than that. The question is just how aware and how much earlier.
Secondly, the Crown Office intervened to see that the evidence of the former First Minister was redacted, supposedly to protect the identity of complainants, which is the point that the hon. Member for Midlothian (Owen Thompson) made quite properly earlier. Again, that redacted evidence focused on whether or not the First Minister breached the ministerial code, but The Spectator magazine had already published online Mr Salmond’s entire evidence with only a single paragraph redaction.
When The Spectator went to court to secure the publication of that evidence, the Crown Office made no objection whatsoever to the paragraphs that it bullied the Holyrood inquiry to redact. That leaves an absurd situation where the inquiry cannot speak about evidence that is freely available to anyone with an internet connection. The redactions are therefore clearly not designed to protect the complainants; they are designed to protect the First Minister from accountability to the inquiry.
Thirdly, the Scottish Government withheld the damning legal advice given in the civil case. It was only with the threat of a no confidence vote in the Deputy First Minister that the Committee could see part, and I emphasise part, of that advice. However, what we do know is that across November and December 2018 there were a series of meetings where it was decided to persist with the judicial review. That was against clear advice from counsel.
Rather extraordinarily, those meetings appear to have been largely unminuted. I recommend that they ask for the junior counsel’s notes. It was only at the last possible minute that the Government conceded the case, and only after counsel had threatened to resign. The First Minister told the Committee:
“I am not aware that they threatened to resign”,
but she will have seen a report that clearly states that counsel
“in light of their professional duties”
and their view of the case
“will require to withdraw from acting on January 3”.
Fourthly, the Scottish Government have repeatedly denied the Committee relevant evidence for what they claim to be legal reasons. That position is nonsensical. Of course there should be protections over sensitive material exposed in criminal trials—we agree on that—but those protections should not prevent a parliamentary committee from doing its job of holding Government to account.
Together, those form a litany of acts that repeatedly frustrated the Committee and denied the public full transparency and accountability. They fit squarely into a pattern of evasiveness and abuse of process that the Scottish Government have woven from the start. As I said in opening, the proper place for these matters to be determined is Holyrood. It would be eminently preferable for MSPs to be exposing any relevant evidence, but given the British Government’s failure in 1998 to give sufficient power to the Scottish Parliament, and given that the Scottish Parliament derives its authority from this House, certain evidence must now enter the public domain here.
The Holyrood inquiry has exposed some critical failings at the heart of the Scottish Government. They failed with the complaints process, they failed to heed legal advice, and they failed to honour commitments to ensure a transparent parliamentary review, but perhaps more worryingly the inquiry has revealed the limits of what the Scottish Parliament can expose. There is a deficit of power, and with it comes a deficit of accountability.
At the very least, I ask the Minister to consider an amendment to the 1998 Act to deliver separation of powers to Scotland—something that I believe a previous Justice Minister, the hon. Member for East Lothian, has written to the Justice Committee about already—to strengthen the civil service, and to reinforce the powers of the Scottish Parliament, correcting the fundamental power imbalance between the Executive and the legislature in Scotland. Let us give the Scottish Parliament the power to do the job.