I am the general secretary of the FDA, which is a union that represents managers and professionals in public service—mainly the civil service, but also the national health service. We tend to represent the most senior people in the civil service. We have been around for about 100 years—we celebrated our centenary last year.
As members can tell from my accent, I am from these parts. I grew up in Scotland and worked for unions in Scotland before I moved down to London to work for the FDA. I have worked for the union for 20 years; I have been its deputy general secretary and, since 2012, its general secretary.
We are a small trade union of about 18,000 members, and we deal with the more senior civil servants in the country. When there are politically sensitive issues, they tend to come across my desk, which is one of the reasons why I am sitting in front of the committee to give evidence from the union.
On the matters that are before the committee, we have made it clear in our evidence that the dialogue on a review of the existing processes for dealing with complaints about ministers started around summer 2017. There was informal dialogue in our trade union about a wish to look at processes and procedures. That did not really take off until the explosion of concern around the #MeToo movement and what it meant. It is clear that there were scandals related to that at Westminster. The civil service as a whole decided to consider whether its existing policies were fit for purpose; as part of that, the Scottish Government indicated that it wished to review its process.
At this point, the Scottish Government is still the only part of the United Kingdom civil service that has a bespoke policy for dealing with the concerns of civil servants against ministers. Despite three years of dialogue with the Cabinet Office, no such equivalent policy exists at Westminster. As members will be aware from events at Westminster, the only opportunity to raise a concern is through the ministerial code. That process is completely inadequate for dealing with such issues; indeed, no written process is provided for dealing with concerns.
The Scottish Government already had a process, but, as with all processes, we wanted to improve it. An exchange of views was part of the dialogue. From talking to the people who negotiated at the time, the process was very ordinary; negotiation on procedures and policies is routine for trade unions. We had a series of informal and semi-informal dialogues about principles, and there was an exchange of drafts. Comments were made by all the trade unions, including ours, and we eventually ended up with the policy that came out of the other side of that dialogue.
In many ways, the creation of the latest iteration of the policy was an unremarkable event, because such work is, essentially, what we do, as trade unions. We will have raised issues, and we will not have got everything that we wanted, which is the nature of dialogue and engagement in negotiations. At the other side, we ended up with a policy that we saw as being an improvement on the policy that existed before it.