The 2016 “Me Too” campaign
In 2016, a Scottish Government, “employee survey” highlighted that around (10%) of responders said they had experienced bullying or harassment.
Reviewers of the survey judged that the very low number of formal complaints raised suggested a lack of awareness or confidence in the existing processes and procedures and this led, in spring 2017, to the appointment of a Director to champion work tackling bullying and harassment.
AfterNote:
Permanent Secretary Evans and her senior managers were disingenuous about the need for a “Civil Service Champion” since the small number of complaints did not justify any procedural changes. The truth of the matter was that Sturgeon and the senior civil servant management team were fully subscribed to the ideals of “Stonewall” and implementation of the organisation’s mission statement.
4 Nov 2017: Government Minister Resigns
Children’s Minister, Mark McDonald resigned from his post offering that some of his previous actions “have been considered to be inappropriate” and was suspended from both the SNP parliamentary group and the party pending an investigation whilst retaining his MSP status.
The event reinforced the importance of ensuring that robust policies and procedures were in place capable of responding appropriately to allegations and prompted yet another review which identified that while options were available to consider sexual harassment complaints about serving Ministers, no such option was available in respect of former Ministers.
A case of need for an extended procedure did not exist since there had never been an allegation against a former Minister and the motivation of Sturgeon and Evans who between themselves decided that a non-existent gap in coverage should be closed with procedures extended to include historical complaints remains a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
Afternote:
The use by Sturgeon and Evans of the Mark Macdonald incident as justification for extending the well tried and trusted “Fairness at Work” procedure in place for a number of years to include historical allegations of sexual harassment and/or bullying was opportunistic and unsustainable since Mark Macdonald retained his status as an MSP.
Introduction of new untested procedures
In December 2017 the Scottish Government adopted an “internal procedure” entitled “Handling of harassment complaints involving current or former ministers” and published it on the Scottish Government intranet on February 2018. Surprisingly, (since it was written by a senior civil servant) it did not cover historical claims against former civil servants.
The process of developing the policy and the consultations involved were described in a document entitled “Response to Committee of the Scottish Government Handling of Harassment Complaints” which explained the motive behind the policy review was to address and eliminate bullying and harassment within the Scottish Government. A draft copy was shared with the Cabinet Office of the United Kingdom Government and the Scottish Government Trade Unions.
Consideration was not given to implications that there might be legal obstacles to applying the Procedure, designed and described as an internal Scottish Government procedure, to rope in former Ministers who were no longer in a contractual or statutory relationship with Scottish Government. Written legal advice was not provided to Scottish Government
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