On the issue of party procedures, members will be aware that the Scottish Green Party has gone through a huge amount of change in recent years. Our membership is much bigger than it was before 2014, so we have been trying to review and reform how we organise the party, to a great extent. That process has been delayed by the amount of elections and referendums that have come along since then, but we have made progress on the conduct complaints side—more than we have made on other things.
We used to have a system that involved a slightly arcane process. It took too long to resolve issues—that refers to the first part of Kate Forbes’s question, because one of the reasons why people were unhappy about raising an issue internally in the party was the length of time that it could take to resolve the issue. The process also involved not only some elected members of the party but a random selection of party members, who played the role of a jury, in a sense, in certain circumstances. Again, that gave rise to lots of problems around timescales, people’s access to the right amount of support and people’s ability to understand issues.
Recently, we have done away with that system. We have set up a new system whereby each branch appoints a welfare and conduct officer, who has to be someone who does not have any other position in the party, whether that involves being an officer, a candidate or anything like that. The group of welfare and conduct officers works together across all our branches, and our national conduct and complaints committee is developing new processes.
The policy that was put in place was to be discussed at our party council meeting the other week, but that was cancelled because of the bad weather. That was the meeting at which we were supposed to put in place new procedures for the interim period between the old system going out and the new one coming in.
Basically, we are in the middle of quite an extensive redesign of how we deal with all matters to do with complaints, conduct and the welfare of our party members. Once that is in place, our parliamentary group will more than likely apply that in the same way that the branch would, by having one person who does not hold another office—so it would not be an MSP—acting as a welfare and conduct officer, and tying into the rest of the party. If a complaint goes through that process, that would involve our operations manager—that is, our senior staff member—working with our standing orders committee and our operations committee to develop processes that are right for each circumstance.
As we are a small political group, we do not have the big team of whips that the SNP group might have, for example. Therefore, we are keen to ensure that issues can be resolved without relying on someone who might be involved in the issue or who might be a close colleague of the person who had been complained about. We would be keen to ensure that the process taps into the party’s external processes.
I would add one final caveat. I know that the committee has discussed the lack of the ultimate backstop of an MSP being dismissed from their job. If complaints of the sort that we are talking about all go through political parties, I fear that we might still be in a position in which that backstop is not possible, because the outcome of an investigation needs to be available to a body that has the authority to make a decision around disciplining a member to the point of expulsion or removal from office. A political party would not be in the position to do that. Again, that leads me to ask whether we should expect people to go through party procedures in these kinds of circumstances. It seems to me that, with regard to the most serious issues, where we would want a disciplinary option to be available, we should be able to tap into an independent and official process for disciplining MSPs, and not necessarily a party process, as that process might not be capable of taking that kind of disciplinary action.
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