 We will get started. Good morning and welcome to the fifth meeting of the local government and communities committee in 2019. I remind everyone present to turn off their mobile phones as they interfere with electronics. We have apologies from the convener, James Doran. I will be there for convening today's meeting. Agenda item 1 is the decision to take a business in private and it's to take agenda item 3 in private. Are we agreed? Agenda item 2 is consideration of the annual report and accounts 2017-18 of the commissioner for ethical standards in public life in Scotland. I would welcome Bill Thomson, Vethical Standards Commissioner, welcome Bill and the commissioner is joined by Ian Bruce, who is the Public Appointments Manager. I would invite the commissioner to make some brief opening remarks. I am grateful for the opportunity to do so as I approach the end of my five-year term of office next month. As you have mentioned, I am accompanied by Ian Bruce, the Public Appointments Manager, in case you wish to ask any detailed questions on the public appointments part of my work, which I appreciate is not obviously within your remit. I am here to answer any questions you may have on the annual report for the year to 31 March 2018. With your indulgence, that might take me a minute or so. I thought that it might be helpful to set out how my post came into being and provide a little bit more detail than is in the briefing paper for the committee. The post was in effect created in stages. It was created by this Parliament, as some of you will know from your period of office here. The chief investigating officer was the first post to be created. That was created in 2000 by the ethical standards in public life, etc., the Scotland Act under which I still operate. That act also established the standards commissioned to whom I report if I am dealing with complaints against councillors or members of public bodies. The second role was the parliamentary standards commissioner role. That was created in 2002 by the Scottish parliamentary standards commissioner act. That is the act under which I investigate complaints about MSPs. The third element of it was the public appointments commissioner. That was brought into being by the public appointments and public bodies, etc. Scotland Act 2003. Those three strands have been brought together in two different stages. First, between 2009 and 2011, the roles of the chief investigating officer and the standards commissioner were held by the same individual. That was until April 2011 when they were merged to create a post of public standards commissioner. That was done by an act of 2010, the Scottish parliamentary commissions and commissioners act. That act also created a new ethical standards commission, which had two members. One of them was the public standards commissioner and the other the public appointments commissioner. That lasted for two years. In 2013, by an order under the public services reform act of 2010, the commission and the two commissioner posts were abolished and my current post was created. Then additional responsibilities were added last year by the Lobbying Scotland Act 2016. There are quite a few strands that come together in the role. The annual report obviously covers all of the aspects of the functions. As I say, I will deal with any questions that you have on them. I would like to restrict the remainder of my opening remarks to one aspect of my role, the investigation of complaints about councillors. In addition to commenting on the figures that you have before you in the annual report, I now have figures for the period from April 2018 to the end of the year, i.e. to December 2018. Those are interesting in a few respects. The first is that the reduction in complaint numbers in the year to March 2018 has been reversed quite significantly. That looks to be a repeat of a pattern that we have noticed before, where there is a reduced number of complaints in the year following an election. We have now, as it were, rebounded to something closer to the norm. In the nine months to December 2018, we received 150 complaints that we are dealing with or have dealt with as 100 cases. If that rate was to continue throughout the full year to the end of March, the total would exceed the numbers that we have received in all previous years except 2015-16. It has significantly gone back up again. As in previous years, the main categories of complaint in the reporting year and in the part year to December have been—there are four of them—failure to register or declare an interest, which I am treating as one category. The second is misconduct in individual applications, and that involves quite a range of things that I can discuss with you if you are interested. Lobbying—not under the lobbying act, but lobbying in the sense of how councillors have dealt with issues brought to them by constituents or, in some cases, have not dealt with them. The fourth aspect is disrespect. I once said to the committee that I thought we had seen the final blossoming of disrespect complaints, and that was in December 2017, and I regret that I was wrong. Almost one-third of the complaints received have alleged a failure to respect councillors or members of the public and employees. In total, that is 46 out of 150 received this year, sorry, in the year to December 2019. Social media featured in approximately 40 per cent of the disrespect complaints and, for that matter, in some of the others in different categories. An equal percentage—and I was slightly surprised by that—related to conduct in public meetings, including council meetings or council meetings and other public meetings attended by councillors. The remainder involved comments made in the press or simply direct communication, in other words, engagement one-to-one with the person who complained. As in previous years, a roughly similar number of complaints concerned failure to register or declare an interest and misconduct on individual applications. A quarter of those also involved allegations of disrespect or misrepresentation. Others involved allegations of bias, undue influence and conspiracy or failure to withdraw after declaring an interest. The committee and its predecessor have asked about the definition of disrespect, which I think is quite an important issue. It still remains a difficult question to answer because of the importance for any assessment of the context and the relevance of article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. If you wish, I am happy to go into that in more detail in the course of the meeting. Over the years that I have been coming before this committee, questions have been posed about the scope for revision of the councillor's code, and I have actually given oral evidence on that and made written submissions to the previous committee. Some changes were made last year, as you may be aware, primarily to incorporate a specific statement to the effect that bullying or harassment is completely unacceptable and will be considered to be a breach of the code. My understanding is that civil servants have now made submissions to ministers seeking views on whether this is the time to conduct a full review of the councillor's code and of the model code for public bodies. I am not aware of any response from ministers, but it is possible that that may come within this committee's remit in the reasonably near future. If reviews are undertaken, that may obviously be an early opportunity for my successor to make a contribution. Caroline Anderson's appointment was confirmed last month by the Parliament. It will be effective from 1 April, and I am sure that this committee will wish to engage with her in due course and afford her the same courtesy. With your permission, I would like to finish by recording my appreciation of the efforts of the staff in my office that commissioners come and go, as you can see, but those who support us just keep on doing so. They keep the show on the road, they do so accurately and with remarkable good humour. I would like to say that the quality of the advice and support that I have received, not least from the man sitting on my right, has been second to none. Thank you. Thank you very much. We will move to questions. We will start off Graham. Thanks, convener. Good morning, Mr Thomson. The previous two years, I feel that I have probably given you a bit of a hard time in opening questions, but I am going to go a bit easier on you because you are retiring. I do not think that any of this is your fault. You have a job to do. You have done it. If any of us have complaints about the position, it is not personal. I do wish you well in the future. You have raised a number of very interesting points in your opening remarks. You say that there was a reduction in complaints following an election, and then it has gone back up. Maybe we can start on that and ask you why you feel that is. You mentioned various categories of complaints. What do you think is going on there? This is pure speculation on my part, but it is probably useful for me to indicate why I think it should be. There is a settling in period after an election that you will all be more accustomed to than I am. I do not think that that applies to the people who are elected. It also applies to the electorate who are, if you like, waiting to see how the newly elected body performs. It seems to me that there is no complete gap, but certain types of complaint have not had time to arise. For example, misconduct in individual applications. Newly elected councillors will not, for several weeks, have been involved in dealing with applications, far less got into a position where people think that he or she had this predetermined position and therefore they have behaved wrongly. As I have been asked in previous evidence sessions, a number of the complaints are politically motivated. There is no doubt about that at all. If there is a settling in period, perhaps people are, if you like, sizing each other up or waiting to see what happens before they start down that road. I know that this is an annoyance for many elected members. If a member from one party makes what is apparently a politically motivated complaint about a member of another party, almost assured as night follows day, there will be a reciprocal complaint at some later stage. It may be that newly elected members are not keen to rush into that. I think that you are right. A number of complaints are politically motivated, even if they are not directly from a councillor or an MSP and get somebody else to do the complaining. Do you think that, in this review that civil servants have asked for, if that was to ever take place, that we should be able to weed out politically motivated complaints? I have thought quite a lot about that. I did, at one point, come to the previous committee with a list of grounds on which I might prioritise complaints. That was at a time around 2015-16 when the number of the volume was increasing almost exponentially. I thought that we just would not be able to handle them all. One of the things that I thought about putting on the list was where complaints are obviously politically motivated. I have been questioned at this committee in the past about vexatious complaints, which is a similar issue. The difficulty with it is that a vexatious complaint requires two things. I appreciate that, but that is not specifically the question. One is that it is designed to annoy. That is its primary purpose. The other is that it has no proper substance, no foundation. I think that the same thing applies with politically motivated complaints. If there is no foundation, then it should not proceed and resources should not be wasted on it. Where it becomes more difficult is where there is some foundation, some basis for it, and there may be a substance to the complaint. My attitude has been, and the committee may disagree, that in that context the motivation of the complainer is irrelevant. I have also tried to take this forward. If there appears that there might have been a breach of whatever the code is, is it right to ignore it just because it is politically motivated? It has been put to me in the past that there may be circumstances where everybody around whatever table it is has engaged in the particular thing that has given rise to this complaint. Therefore, why should they complain about each other? If you follow that through, it leads to the awkward conclusion that some types of potential breaches of the code are not important, whereas others are. I think that that is quite difficult for somebody in my position to make a judgment on and therefore decide not to pursue. Sorry, this is a long-winded way of coming back to the question. If politically motivated complaints are to be eliminated, that would have to be done in the council's code by you as the body setting it up. I do not think that anybody in my position could make that judgment. You can have a view on it. My view is that if there is a basis for the complaint, in other words, if it appears that there has been a breach of the code, then it ought to be investigated, even if the motivation for making it is purely political. You mentioned previously about complaints of disrespect. How hard that is to establish, and sometimes it depends on how thick of a skin you have got, whether you feel you have been disrespected. That must take up an enormous amount of your time and resources. Is that an area that we should be looking at? You are right. It does take up a lot of time and resource. In my shoes, I have found some of the judgments quite difficult to make and some of the decisions difficult to make. I have, if it helps at all, gone through the disrespect complaints that have been referred to the Standards Commission, and those that have been found to be a breach have almost always involved the following sets of words. Those are the things that the Standards Commission, to whom I report, treats as serious enough disrespect to involve a breach of the code. Personal attack, affecting the rights and reputation of whoever the individual is. Statements or comments that are intended to impugn and demean, and comments that are gratuitous, offensive and abusive, and the word that the Commission used finally is egregious. I was at a school that had a lot in Latin motto, so I know what egregious means, because that was part of it. Those are in the context of article 10, which I mentioned in article 10 of the EC in the European Convention on Human Rights, which, of course, grants everybody a right of freedom of speech. As you will be well aware, politicians and those who engage in commentary on politics have an enhanced right of freedom of speech. When disrespect is alleged by a councillor of that matter by an MSP, it has to be assessed against this kind of higher standard. I do have examples, which I can give you if you wish, but they do not take you anywhere, because they are simply based on the particular circumstances. I was once lied about in a local newspaper, and I spoke to a lawyer about it. I was thinking of complaining. It is not something that I really ever do. He said, we have no point complaining, because you cannot besmirch the reputation of a politician. You just have to take it on the chin. That is what he said. I thought, well, okay. Do you think that politicians need to toughen up a bit? That is a general statement that I am not in a position to make. Some of the stuff that I have quoted is based on the jurisprudence of the European Court. It has said that, along with the enhanced protection for what is called political expression, there is on the other hand an expectation that those who put themselves forward for election and engage in politics should expect to have thicker skins and be open to levels of frankly abuse, which the general public should not expect to have to deal with. There is an interesting distinction drawn in the court cases between statements of fact and value judgments, and some accusations of lying may be based on what is clearly an attempted statement of fact. In those circumstances, the protection of the court or under the code is only available if there is some reasonable basis for the alleged statement of fact. They are much more lenient if the accusation is made by a way of a value judgment. In those cases, they do not use the word flimsy, but there is some flimsy basis for making the allegation. That is another complication. There is one more question for me, because I know others want to jump in. Have you seen over the course of your tenure an improvement in behaviour or not? I am going to duck that, because I do not drive behaviour as such. I only deal with the complaints about allegedly poor behaviour. I cannot answer that question. I can ask in terms of resources, but I am focusing a bit on what support and training happens in councils for councillors. There was quite a number of new councillors elected across Scotland the last time round. Have you seen any correlation between councillors erfining times very tough? Increasingly, council officials will be saying, sorry, no can do, councillors are having to then go back to constituents and say can't do. Does that lead to greater tension between the constituents and the councillors, but also between the councillors and the council officials that one could interpret as being disrespectful in terms of councillors fighting their corner? Two questions there, one in terms of what support and training for councillors is happening out there, and two, the pressures that are on councils, does that lead to difficulties? I think that starting with the second one, although I do not have evidence for this, I think that most of us would expect that increased pressure will lead to tension. The more difficult the situation is, the more likely it is in terms of human behaviour that tensions will arise. I think that the complaints that come to me are more down to individuals, rather than to the overall picture. Back to your first question, there is an obligation under the code for councils to support councillors, and I know that training is made available particularly for new councillors. In some council areas, there is follow-up training. It varies across the country. Those councillors who receive the most severe sanction at public hearings are those who have either not bothered to attend the training or, in one case, have deliberately ignored the code. I think that the most extreme examples that I have seen have been in part down to the personalities involved. I think that what there has been by way of a growing tendency is less obvious party discipline. I worked in local government in the 70s. If there was an issue with councillor X's performance, you went to councillor X's group leader, whoever it was, and you had a discussion, and it was dealt with. It was as simple as that, apart from the odd renegade. That applies to fewer councillors now in terms of the overall percentage. There are, undoubtedly, minority councillors, independent councillors from small groups, who feel strongly about a particular issue. They may be prepared to flout the rules in order to make their point. In some ways, I have sympathy with them, but the difficulty is that the rules are there. If they breach them and there is a complaint, I simply have to investigate and report. I do not know if that answers your question. It is my best. I think that it would be that point about, should there be some kind of, for example, when the local public services ombudsman was in, they talked to us about the level of work they were doing with councils on the complaints procedure. The more effective that complaints procedure was, the less likelihood of complaints reaching the ombudsman. It is whether there should be a stronger relationship between councils and the officer leadership to try and do more to ensure that there is decent quality information and training for councillors around the whole area, given the pressures that are on councillors. That is a fair point, convener. There is contact. I am not allowed to give advice, so I try not to. However, the Standards Commission itself does, and the Standards Commission, to whom I report, do two things. They organise training generally on a regional basis, rather than, although sometimes they are council specific. They also arrange, once or twice a year, meetings for monitoring officers who tend to be the key people in terms of advising on the code. I get involved in those. I tend to hear what is being said and to engage with people. There is a fair amount of support there. My final observation on it would be—I do not disagree with what the ombudsman is saying, but in terms of looking at what happens in life, it is not the managed things that go wrong. It is circumstances where, for one reason or another, it may be somebody's personality, it may be a sequence of events on a particular day, something goes wrong. Occasionally, it is done deliberately more often than not, I think that it is probably in the heat of the moment. There has been quite a lot of publicity and there have been many campaigns of late with reference to harassment. There have also been quite specific ones related to sexual harassment. Have you seen any change in the number of complaints that are coming forward in relation to sexual harassment or has that not been your case so far this year? I have not as yet received any complaint specifically about sexual harassment. A year or so ago, I dealt with a complaint that involved a male councillor and a relatively junior female member of staff who was harassed by the attention that the councillor was paying to her. There was no allegation of any sexual motive. I have more recently dealt with—we went to a hearing—a case in which there was inappropriate physical contact between a male councillor and four women, two of whom were councillors and two of whom were members of staff. In that case, there was no allegation that it was sexual. In my opinion, it was sexist, but there was no allegation of sexual harassment. If the case is serious enough, it is more likely to be reported to the police than to come to me. Do you think that the code of conduct is clear enough on how that—or do you think that there is any new guidance or any new views that should be put into that in the current climate? I think that the code of conduct is crystal clear. I am not sure how much more you could do by a way of improving on that, because as soon as you start to give examples, you may leave some things out or you end up with a ridiculously long list, which is not particularly helpful. In terms of guidance, I do not mean this to be flippant—I think that just being alive should allow people to understand what is acceptable and what is not. I—we can all learn—I do not mean to be facetious. Yes, it is true that there appear to be some councillors whose social attitudes are different from the current general approach, but I do not think that the code will make much difference to that. By the way, just to come back to one of the things that the convener asked me about, at the last meeting with monitoring officers whom I attended, it was very clear from those who spoke that they find the code helpful in guiding members who come to them for advice. I think that that is the case. The code is there to try and support individuals under that situation. You also talked about, in your opening remarks, about 40 per cent of the climate has been social media related in some way. Obviously, with the private and professional side of people's social media, is there an element there that needs to be looked at as to what content should be? Obviously, if the lines and boundaries are becoming quite unclear, is that what is creating the issue to have the number of 40 per cent? That is quite a high number, I would expect. Just to be clear, convener, what I meant to say was that 40 per cent of the disrespect cases involve social media, and some of the other cases do as well. Technically, if a councillor says something disrespectful on their personal social media, it is not a breach of the code. However, if they are identifiable as a councillor or if they do it in circumstances where they appear to be holding themselves out as a councillor, for example, commenting on something that happened at a council meeting that they were attending, then I do not think that they can avoid the obligations under the code. The general attitude among people involved in regulating these things is that it is becoming very difficult to draw a distinction between what you as NSPs or what us councillors, as many of you have been, might have done in your private lives and what you do. The committee and standards in England published a report on ethical standards in local government just 21 January. They came out and said that there should not be any distinction between what councillors do on social media in their private lives and what they do in their public persona. That will be a matter for you and other politicians to determine, but I think that that is the way that things are moving. Before we leave this line of questioning around sexual harassment, within the Scottish Parliament there is now training being set up, diversity training for all MSPs, for members and staff. Is that not something that you think would be useful in terms of local government? It is not just about what is appropriate and any appropriate when it comes to sexual harassment, it is about what is generally appropriate and inappropriate in terms of the way that we treat each other. Is that not something that councillors could gain from? Yes, I agree. I am sure that councillors could, and despite what I may have said earlier, I am not disagreeing with the suggestion that people, including councillors, would benefit from training. Good morning, gentlemen. We anticipate at some point a new piece of planning legislation to be enacted. Obviously, the committee has done a lot of work on the original draft of the bill, and we wait to see what the ultimate product will look like, because, of course, there have been significant amendments. Presumably, you have been watching this to an extent. If you had any particular expectations about the potential impact of the legislation that will be in place at some point on perhaps the number of complaints in this area, because it seems that in terms of the figures that we already had, issues regarding planning were already quite high up there in terms of number of complaints, and that indeed seems to continue to be the case in terms of the update that you gave us in your opening statement. I am not sure that the changes to the law will make much difference to the fact that planning is still the biggest single source of complaints. I have been asked in the past about its furious complaints, and this is probably the area in which to test that, because quite a lot of the complaints that occur in relation to failure to declare an interest, in fact, almost all of them relate to planning cases. In some cases, failure to register an interest may be relevant. Some of the cases to do with disrespect have arisen from what has been said by a councillor at a planning meeting. Some of the other allegations of conspiracy bias most of those probably relate to planning decisions, because they matter to people. We have even had cases of councillors seeking to influence decisions on their own planning applications, so they generate quite a lot of business. I hope that this is not seen as a way of avoiding the question. Changing the law won't remove the tensions and frustrations that people feel, which lead them to examining carefully what has been said, what has been done and looking to see whether, if they cannot appeal under the planning system, they can find another way of trying to undermine—I think that some of them probably expect that they can undermine the decision—that they can't by complaining to me, but they might well undermine the people who made the decision. It's very difficult to determine at this stage if there will be any positive impacts. You mentioned the issue of failure to disclose to declare a registered interest or failure to register, and I wonder whether you are picking up on the convener's point. Presumably, that's not heat of the moment public meetings where passions are on high on particular planning applications. That's cold in the light of the day requirements. Given that this is a perennial problem, what action are councils taking to try to encourage councillors to abide by the requirements that are down? Certainly, our experience here in this Parliament is that it's very clear what the requirements are and that there's no hesitation in the part of the parliamentary bodies reminding you what the requirements are. What happens at the local authority level? I don't have a comprehensive picture of what happens. Advice is given and, in some cases, we end up with disputes between the councillor and the advisers as to what was said. Those are quite difficult cases, obviously. I think that there's a distinction between registration and declaration. I agree with what's behind your question. Registration should be pretty straightforward. I mean, I've been involved in this in the Parliament as well. There are difficult cases, but it is relatively straightforward. Where members have not registered, I don't think that I've come across any cases where, even after hearing, it's been clear that it was done deliberately. It tends to be, if you like, inadvertence. For example, it may have been shared or appointed a director in a dormant company. Various people have fallen into that trap. Declaration is more difficult than more nuanced, because then the question is if you have registered your interest, are they properly relevant to, are they so significant that you ought to have declared them? Views can vary quite significantly on that. That is where I don't think that changing the law will make any difference, because there will still be room for differences of opinion. In terms of the censure aspect, in cases in which a breach of that particular requirement is established, what kind of censure would there be? I would have thought that the censure might encourage others to reflect a bit harder on the issue. Before I come to that, it occurred to me to mention that the Committee on Standards in England, in the report that I referred to earlier, have suggested the adoption within the English codes and each authority in drafts its own. The adoption of the objective test, which is set out in the Scottish councillor's code. They see that as a step forward from where things are at the moment. In terms of censure, trying to influence your own planning application tends to attract suspension. Failure to register or having forgotten about something and failure to declare something that is, for example, dormant, I don't impose the sanctions, but they are imposed by the Standards Commission. I don't recollect any member being any more severely dealt with and censured for those types of breaches of the code. If it was blatant, there would be a different position. I am clear that the Standards Commission regard failure to register or failure to declare as a serious breach of the code, because transparency of people's interests is vital. I am racking my cumbersome brain for circumstances where a councillor may have been suspended for failure to declare. I can't at the moment remember any. I may be wrong, convener. I am sorry if I got that wrong. That is fine. Perhaps it is just supplemental information provided to the Committee. I think that it is a question of over time watching what the trend is with regard to those particular breaches, which may suggest that further action can be carried out to try to guide councillors as to the safest and most prudent way forward for them. Turning to the issue of the GDPR, I wonder if you are seeing any particular impact as a result of the general data protection regulation being in place? If not yet, do you anticipate that that may lead to more complaints coming forward? I do get complaints that make reference, convener, to GDPR issues. I refer those aspects of the complaints to the Information Commissioner's office because it is not my remit. It has had an effect on the way we do things in the office. I no longer publish decisions with names because that is not appropriate anymore. It won't affect my successor's workload because it is outside the remit, but more complaints are coming in, referring to those issues. I noted that you have anonymised decision summaries on your website. I haven't had a chance to look that up, so what does that mean that even the name of the councillor is not part of the information? The councillor will not be disclosed. He will not be disclosed? No. I'll be perfectly honest with you. I'm not wholly sure quite how far I have to go in anonymising. My current thinking is that naming the council area isn't in itself sufficient to allow the council to be identified, but it may, depending on the circumstances, be sufficient. I'll need to be very careful about that. You get to the point where the amount of information that you can give is so little that it's not particularly helpful to people. Having said that back to a previous question that you asked about, the word does go round—you will know this. I sometimes find that if I end up back in an area where I've been fairly recently, people will say to me, oh, we know what happened to so-and-so. It does go round. Localise. For those in the know and the same milieu, perhaps, it seems a bit strange that one piece of legislation is actually making things less transparent in another area, because I've always thought that the public interest would merit further transparency in regard to, at least, I understand about perhaps names of other people involved in the particular circumstances, but the actual councillor against whom the inquiry is proceeded against and if there is a breach established against whom censure is taken, I find it very strange that that is not part of the public domain. Sorry, convener. I'm trying not to make this complicated. The decision summaries that I used to put up related to cases where there was a breach and some cases where there was no breach. Councilors who have been found not to be in breach, I think, probably understandably object to their name coming up on Google when they weren't in breach of the code. What happens now is that I do not put up decisions of that nature. If there's a public hearing, the Standards Commission, who have the specific statutory right to do this, publish the decision, and, as of now anyway, they name the councillors involved. This is relatively recent. They issue press releases in advance of the public hearing taking place, and they will issue a press release with the outcome. There is publicity given, not by me, but by the Standards Commission, to those cases that go through to a public hearing and result in a finding. Thank you very much. I mean, just to be clear on that, if any councillor who is found in breach of the code would have to go to a public hearing. Section 16 of the act gives the Standards Commission three options. One is to send the report back to me for further investigation. Thankfully, that hasn't yet happened, but it could do. The second is to hold a public hearing, which is what happens in 90-something per cent of cases. The third option is to do nothing. That has only happened once in my term of office. Right. Essentially, anyone who is found in breach of the code by you would be named somewhere. Yes, they will. At the public hearing, there are two options available to the commission. One is to agree with me that there has been a breach, and the other is to disagree with me and say that there has been no breach. That has happened, but it is not by any means a foregone conclusion. Thank you very much. Returning to the question of sexual harassment, if I am right, you said that you would have no complaints. Correct. Does that not surprise you, given that there has been quite extensive concern expressed in the media by councillors such as Julie Mackenzie, Nargail and Bute, Rose and Beninian, North Lanarkshire and others who have documented extensive complaints of that and described a toxic culture in parts of local government? Does that not surprise you that you have had no complaints? There are a number of factors involved. One is the simple question of conduct. Another is the impact of the conduct. I do not underestimate the amount of courage it takes to put forward a complaint. In that sense, I am not wholly surprised outside the remit of this committee, but I have had to investigate allegations. It is not easy for the people involved. I understand that and there are issues around the complaints procedure within councils of this nature. I understand that, but it would be somewhat surprising, would not it, given the evidence that we have, if there were not to be some complaints made to the ethical standards commissioner in relation to the behaviour of councillors where they are involved? Well, I think that you are asking me a slightly awkward question. No, I appreciate that. I am not minded to suggest that councillors are engaging in sexual harassment. I have no evidence of that, so I have no basis for making that suggestion, and that leads me to the question of whether I am surprised or not. If I have no evidence, that is all that I can answer on. Okay, that is fair enough. Do you have any information or evidence about how satisfied complainers are with your investigations? Obviously, when they go to the standards commission, there is a sanction and people will take a view as to whether they feel that is appropriate or not. Do people ever complain that you have not investigated something properly? If they complain that it has not been investigated properly, I invite them to or I offer to pass their complaint on to the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman. Over the years, once or twice a year, that has happened. As of now—this could change tomorrow—the Ombudsman has not yet found that there was a failure to investigate properly. I record the amount of what we call post-decision correspondence. Nobody has yet written to me and said what a wonderful job you did. It tends to be the opposite. Now, when I started looking at it, it was 20 per cent of cases led to post-decision correspondence. That is now down at around 11 per cent. I appreciate that that could change. It suggests to me that, at the very least, we are doing a better job of explaining the reasons for the decision, but I accept that there will always be a percentage of people who are dissatisfied with the outcome, if they have complained and if the outcome has been that there is not a breach. Others are dissatisfied simply because it is outside my remit. When I explain that, they are annoyed about that. I appreciate that, but there is nothing that I can do about the remit in the short term. I set out in my strategic plan to assess satisfaction levels. I have held off doing so until we have a properly functioning website that will allow us to do that. We have, in the course of this year, been revamping the website. The new one goes live on 18 February, at which point we will be able to do that in a more satisfactory way. I think that it is a gap at the moment that we have not tried to assess that and find out why people are dissatisfied. Some will be obvious just because it was their own decision from their point of view, but if there are things that we can do to improve how we handle complaints, we need to know and improve. That is very helpful. I should declare an interest as a member of the corporate body who provided your resources and set on the panel that interviewed your successor, Caroline Anderson, who was appointed by Parliament last week. Would you like to put on the record in public any advice that you would have to Caroline about the role that you are responsible for and how you discharge your responsibilities? That is an opportunity that I would prefer to decline. I have already met Caroline Anderson and I expect to meet her reasonably frequently between now and when she takes up the post. I am doing my best to make sure that she is well informed and introduced to as many people with whom she will be engaging as possible. I will put that in another way. What do you feel are the key challenges facing your successor? In terms of complaints against councillors, the challenge always is to find the right balance between investigating thoroughly and doing so as quickly as possible. There is an inevitable tension there. Obviously, anybody in my shoes would like to make the right decision in terms of whether there has been a breach or there hasn't. That is a challenge at times. The complexities of some of the issues create their own challenge. Dealing with MSP cases is not always, but generally the profile is a bit higher, which I think also puts further pressure on the timescale. I am conscious that the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee is going to be considering the joint working party report on sexual harassment at the Parliament. That may lead to changes to the code and to procedures. I think that there is a possibility that that may have implications for other aspects of the role, which are not governed by the same code. However, if the procedure changes in one area, it strikes me as reasonably obvious that there are implications for other areas, and they are only to be handled carefully. On the Public Appointments side, I think that there are two challenges. The most obvious one that comes back to something that the convener asked about in terms of local government is simply the pressure on resources. There are more and more public appointments coming through. There are no more resources to deal with them. We have identified ways of improving the process. We have discussed those and agreed them with people in the Government who are involved in it. However, having the resource to do that is quite challenging. The other thing is trying to avoid a growth in what we call dual scrutiny, which is circumstances in which the minister making an appointment has to put the preferred candidate to a parliamentary committee for approval. There are some risks involved in that. It is not for the remit of this committee, but it is a challenge, potentially. Alexander Stewart Can I go back to have some discussion once again about social media? It has become such a large part of everyday life around the concept of politicians and how they can engage and support individuals. Do you think that the code is adequate enough to manage that for us all? Is there some need for revision or looking at what we can do to try to do that? Everything instantly happens from the social media side of things. Someone can react to something or someone can put something on. It gives an impression or a potential for it to be taken the wrong way or misconstrued. I think that that is a challenge that you have already identified. I do not think that the code is adequate. The code was drafted before social media was current. The Standards Commission has issued guidance, which is helpful, but you are right. It is the immediacy of it. Another factor is, as I mentioned before, context. A councillor may be something that appears pretty rude in social media. It may be in response to a torrent of abuse from another source. It is not necessarily right, but the context is relevant to how you assess it. That is a challenge. I do not think that the code currently deals with it properly. And some individuals have been targeted in some respect because of what they may have said at a committee or what they may have made a comment about in a press release. They can have a torrent of information coming, and that can be positive or negative, depending on what stance they have taken. I think that that must be quite difficult to manage if you are deciding whether someone has breached the code or there is a complaint process going forward with relation to that. I agree. Thankfully, my judgment on it is not the final word. It goes to an independent panel, which has three people on it, who will make a judgment and the full circumstances will be outlined there. It is difficult. Thank you, Cymru. We had the ombudsman before us a couple of times. They made the same point. They want the ability to launch their own investigations and not have to just wait for complaints, to take their own initiative on things. When you get a complaint, you just have to deal with that in a very narrow sense. For example, if we are talking about planning and somebody says that councillor knows that applicant and did not declare it, the extent of the relationship between the two, you cannot investigate. For instance, there might be financial links. It seems to me that you are quite restricted in that sense. Do you think that you should have the ability to, when you are doing an investigation, go off in different directions? I would like to answer that in two ways. First of all, the example that Mr Simpson has given is a live one and not for the first time. I do endeavour to investigate the extent of the relationship, the contact and whatever it is. My decision will be based on my assessment of that, and that is one of the things that may come out differently at a public hearing, because in those circumstances, the councillor may put more effort into explaining the situation or somebody else might give evidence that I am not expecting about the level of the contact. That happens. We do our best, and it is an important issue. The one report that I made to the Standards Commission, which did not go to a hearing, involved circumstances where, in the course of investigating one thing, I uncovered a failure to register an interest, and I reported on that. The Standards Commission decided not to investigate it for various reasons, one of which was that it was not in the original complaint, another was that the impact had been effectively zero, in a view that it had not really changed anything. I have said this before, and I have no wish to have a power, that is too late for me anyway, but if I were continuing, I would not wish to have the remit to go looking for things beyond the scope of the complaint. I am not suggesting it. I am not suggesting for a moment that you do which hunts, that would be crazy, but in the course of a dealing with a complaint, and other things crop up. I will then mention them, and as I said, in one case, I reported on it as a breach. Okay, thank you. That has come to the end of our questions. I thank both your self-commissioner and Ian for attending today's session. As a number of members have said, this is Bill Thomson's final session with the committee, and on behalf of the committee, I wish you the very best for the future, and I thank you for the service that you have given. That concludes the public part of today's meeting, and I move the meeting into private.