SCOTTISH Police Authority chair Andrew Flanagan is embroiled in a fresh secrecy row over claims his watchdog has been hampering a council body from carrying out its scrutiny work.
The SPA has been criticised for holding back board papers from the public until the day of a meeting, but it has emerged the same restriction was applied to the official local authority policing group.
Scottish Greens MSP John Finnie said: “Tactics such as delaying the release of papers and swamping recipients with reams of information without time to analyse it are often used by those with something to hide."
The SPA was created in 2013 as the oversight body for Police Scotland, but it has been dogged by controversy over its commitment to openness and transparency.
Following a governance review by Mr Flanagan, the SPA moved to private committee meetings and restricting publication of board papers until hours before a meeting.
An SPA board member, Moi Ali, resigned her post after a row with Mr Flanagan relating to the proposals and he was later quizzed by Holyrood’s Public Audit and Post-Legislative Scrutiny committee on the changes.
Flanagan, who has faced calls for his resignation and will give evidence on governance to a second Holyrood committee this morning, is now under further pressure.
In a recent speech to the Scottish Police Federation, QC John Scott spoke about a meeting he had last year with the COSLA Police Scrutiny Conveners Forum, which is made up of councillors and was set up to scrutinise policing from a local perspective.
He revealed that the Forum, like the public, was only getting the papers at the last minute: “The emotions in the room ranged from annoyance at the calmer end to outrage at the other.
“The members of the Forum were complaining that they could not do their job of scrutiny of the SPA properly because papers for meetings were not published before the day of the meeting.
“Papers were sometimes extensive and members were therefore not always able to read and digest them beforehand. This led to wasted or failed opportunities to scrutinise the work of the SPA.”
Mr Scott continued: “Mr Foley [the SPA chief executive] tried to justify this approach to issuing the papers for meetings, but without any success. Ultimately, in a telling comment, he implied that papers were not issued any earlier because of concern about leaks to the media. You can imagine the reaction of disbelief in the room.”
A senior local government source confirmed Mr Scott’s account: “It was a meeting at which the conveners gave John Foley a real kicking over the lack of transparency generally and the fact the papers weren’t published in advance at all. That was something they went heavy on.”
In response, the SPA provided senior council figures with papers 48 hours in advance of the last board meeting, but it is understood COSLA believes this is still insufficient and would like the documents one week ahead.
Finnie said: “It would be shameful if, in light of all the justifiable criticism it has faced, the SPA hasn’t now co-operated with COSLA’s Scrutiny Forum to facilitate their important work.”
A COSLA spokesman said: “COSLA has been arguing on behalf of our members that the SPA should be more transparent. The sharing of Board papers was a key ask and it is disappointing that progress in this regard has been limited. It is important that the SPA finds a way for the views of locally elected members and the communities they represent to feed into the police scrutiny process rather than the Board doing its role in isolation.”
A spokesman for the SPA said: "The SPA issued papers under embargo to all 32 local authority scrutiny bodies and council chief executives some 48 hours in advance of its last board meeting. The SPA is due to reconsider holding its committees in public and issuing papers further in advance of meetings at its next board meeting on 25 May."
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