The next item of business is a debate on motion S6M-20269, in the name of Martin Whitfield, on the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee’s ninth report in 2025, in session 6. I invite members who wish to speak in the debate to press their request-to-speak buttons.
17:45
As convener of the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee, I have the responsibility of lodging and speaking to motions seeking the Parliament’s agreement to the committee’s recommendation of a sanction when the committee has concluded that a breach of the code of conduct has occurred and that a sanction for that breach would be appropriate. The code of conduct sets out the rules that the Parliament has agreed should apply to all MSPs in carrying out their parliamentary duties. It also sets out the processes for enforcing the code in the event that a complaint is made about our compliance with the rules.
Over three meetings in December 2025, the committee considered a report submitted to it by the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland following an investigation of a complaint about Ash Regan MSP. The complaint was that Ash Regan had breached section 9.1 of the code by disclosing details of her complaint or intention to complain about Maggie Chapman MSP prior to lodging a complaint with the commissioner. That was on the basis of a social media post in respect of a letter that Ash Regan sent to you, Presiding Officer, on 22 April 2025.
The committee considered carefully the commissioner’s report, representations by and on behalf of Ash Regan and the terms of the code of conduct. Full details of our consideration are set out in our report to the Parliament, which is referenced in the motion.
The committee was unanimous in its decisions and conclusions. In reaching its decision, the committee considered the terms of Ash Regan’s letter to the Presiding Officer, Ash Regan’s subsequent social media post, the commissioner’s report and representations made to both the commissioner and the committee by Ash Regan.
The committee was not persuaded by the proposition set forth by Ash Regan that she did not intend to make a complaint. The letter to the Presiding Officer includes statements such as “formally raising concerns” and
“respectfully request that this matter be considered by the relevant parliamentary authorities”.
The committee further noted that email correspondence to the Presiding Officer and to the clerks of the committee referenced a “formal complaint”. The committee considered that any objective reading of the letter, covering emails and social media post would be that there was, at the very least, an intention to make a complaint about the conduct of Maggie Chapman. For those reasons, the committee agreed with the commissioner’s conclusion that Ash Regan’s conduct in posting her letter to the Presiding Officer on social media constitutes a breach of section 9.1 of the code of conduct.
The purpose of the provision at section 9.1 of the code is to protect the integrity of the system for investigation and consideration of complaints about MSP conduct, which is a matter to which the effective conduct of the commissioner’s investigations and the position of all those involved in the complaints process are relevant.
Can the convener tell us whether Ash Regan ended up making a complaint?
I am unable to answer that question, because no complaint has come via the independent commissioner to my committee that I am aware of. However, section 9.1 is very specific, in that it is about not only the act of making a complaint, but the intention to do so. We see the reason for that if we go back to a previous parliamentary session and an earlier iteration of the committee that I have the pleasure to convene. It wrote:
“The Committee condemns, in particular, any breaches which risk causing reputational damage to another member in advance of a proper investigation.”
That is why the code of conduct makes reference to intending to make a complaint, because damage could be done without any complaint being taken forward.
In so far as section 9.1 of the code of conduct imposes a restriction on members’ conduct, it goes no further than is necessary for that purpose, and it would not prevent a member from expressing their opinion in relation to matters of public debate or indeed other elected representatives.
The committee concluded that, in this instance, the breach was sufficiently serious to merit the recommendation of a sanction and, on the basis of the facts and circumstances of this case, it determined that the most appropriate sanction available to it was exclusion from meetings of the Parliament and its committees for two sitting days, those days being a Wednesday and a Thursday. The committee considers that period of exclusion to be proportionate, in that the recommendation of any sanction is an extremely serious matter. The committee also considers that the period of exclusion would not be detrimental to the Parliament’s opportunity to consider the general principles of a member’s bill of which Ash Regan is the member in charge.
Members may wish to note that the recommended sanction does not entail withdrawal of the member’s right of access to the parliamentary complex or to any parliamentary services or facilities, which includes the right to lodge both motions and questions over that period.
With that, I will move the motion in my name.
Will the member take an intervention?
I will do if he is very quick.
I am genuinely listening to what Mr Whitfield is saying, and I am trying to work out what is best to do. I wonder whether the committee convener can help me understand something. People who are watching these proceedings will see a sanction being applied for a breach of the rules, which is to be a two-day suspension. People will have been watching the Parliament earlier on and will have seen that a cabinet secretary has been found, on two counts, to be in breach of the ministerial code, and has come before the Parliament to give a statement and carry out the remedy that was advised in that case. I worry that people will be looking at these proceedings and asking whether the sanction that has been handed out by the committee is proportionate. Can the convener help me understand?
I can certainly endeavour to do so—but I have no intention of stepping across the First Minister’s responsibility for the Scottish Government and the ministerial code of conduct.
Noting the way that I have articulated the proposal in the motion today, along with what is in the committee’s very full report, I draw attention to the fact that, as a committee, we do not follow precedent in a strict form, but we do of course look at previous incursions. We also look at the circumstances of the very specific case that is before us because, under natural justice, that is not only what we are expected to do, but what we should do.
I draw the member’s attention to paragraph 26 of our report, which says:
“The Committee considered a number of factors in what it considered to be the appropriate period of exclusion”—
which appears in the motion. The report continues:
“This included whether there were any mitigations that could be taken into account.”
The report and the sanctions that are proposed in today’s motion were unanimously decided by the committee. I hope that that assists the member in his thinking.
With that, I move,
That the Parliament notes the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee’s 9th Report, 2025 (Session 6), Complaint against Ash Regan MSP (SP Paper 945), and agrees to impose the sanction recommended in the report that Ash Regan MSP be excluded from all meetings of the Parliament and its committees for two sitting days, with those sitting days being the next Wednesday and the next Thursday following the agreement of this motion.
17:53
Over these past decades, public trust in this Parliament has declined significantly, and that is every member’s joint responsibility. Confidence in this institution is now at its lowest point since devolution began, dropping 20 points in just 10 years. I think that Scots expect their Parliament to act to their values and in their interests. Today, many people are, unfortunately, questioning whether we still do that. Transparency is central to building and sustaining trust, and more than 90 per cent of Scots value openness in public decision making. Honesty, clarity and accountability are values that should guide how we all operate.
I sought and gratefully received advice from the Presiding Officer and the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee in response to overwhelming concern from the public, the Law Society of Scotland and the Faculty of Advocates, where there was widespread condemnation of an attack on the judiciary from a member of this Parliament with a privileged position of deputy convener. That committee has human rights and civil justice responsibilities, which—I believe—compounded the gravity of the incendiary public comments accusing the Supreme Court of “bigotry, prejudice and hatred”.
What followed was widely regarded as farcical, with the member allowed to dial in to vote to save herself from a motion to remove her that had been lodged by a committee member, Tess White. Meanwhile, the Ethical Standards Commissioner pursued a complaint about me making a complaint that the commissioner never actually received, as I never made the complaint.
Upholding our duty to defend the judiciary, however, is specified in section 1 of the Judiciary and Courts (Scotland) Act 2008, which obligates us, as members of the Parliament, to do so. Other members who similarly publicised their grave concerns have received no proposed sanctions.
My legal advice, from Roddy Dunlop KC, highlights both the commissioner’s misrepresentation of human rights legislation and a confused interpretation of the code. The logic—which the convener has repeated here today—appears to be that publicising anything that is loosely interpreted as an intention to complain would impact a potential ESC investigation, despite such an investigation clearly never commencing because there was no ethical standards complaint in order to trigger one.
After six sessions of this Parliament, there remains no convener code for committees that I or other members could have used, despite unanimous agreement on the critical importance of committees to an effective legislature. I also make Parliament aware that this is not the first complaint against me to the Ethical Standards Commissioner since I launched the consultation on my unbuyable bill. The process has been on-going for more than seven months and concludes with a proposed sanction just as I prepare for a critical stage 1 debate and vote, which were supposed to take place next week.
Advancing a bill of that nature against the roots of male violence against women has been extraordinarily challenging, despite the issue supposedly being a priority in this Parliament for women and girls across Scotland and those around the world who are trafficked here and groomed and coerced in our own towns and cities.
Despite the barriers that I have faced, which have included having no non-Government bills unit resource such as other members have enjoyed for their members’ bills, I am working to make—I hope—meaningful legislative change that the Parliament and the country can be proud of.
Holyrood was designed at the outset to be more transparent, more participatory and more accountable than Westminster, and every single member in here has a duty to protect those principles and not to undermine them.
Will the member give way?
If I will get the time back, Presiding Officer.
I call Rachael Hamilton.
Miss Regan’s letter to the Presiding Officer and the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee expressed concerns about Maggie Chapman’s attack on the Supreme Court and requested advice, not action.
With regard to what Mr Whitfield said, I would be interested to know the answer to this question. Can Miss Regan say whether there was no intent to complain but an intent to seek advice, which would mean that the code of conduct was not broken in that instance?
I confirm to the member that I did not send a complaint to the Ethical Standards Commissioner and that both the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee and the Presiding Officer—I believe—read my letters as an attempt to seek guidance. I hope that that clarifies the matter for the member.
I believe that, as members of this Parliament, we should not fear communicating freely with the public on important matters—matters that they think are important—about what is going on in here. The motion before members this evening is not just about sanctions for a social media post; it is about whether we are consistently upholding accountability and maintaining public trust in this institution.
I move amendment S6M-20269.1, to leave out from “to impose” to end and insert:
“that no further action should be taken.”
I call John Mason.
17:59
I will be very brief, Presiding Officer. I have to say that I find this an extremely strange scenario. We have one MSP over there who is seeking to undermine the judicial system of this country, and we have another MSP over here who has made a minor technical breach of the code of conduct.
The convener made a couple of interesting comments that jumped out at me. First, he said that “damage could be done”. I suggest to him that such damage could be done by the MSP over there, not by the MSP over here. He also talked about natural justice. Natural justice would do something with the MSP over there, not the MSP over here.
So what do we do? We ignore the substantive issue and we jump on a minor breach. That seems to me very much a case of forgetting the spirit of the law and focusing far too much on the letter of the law. To put it another way, we need to get things into perspective. Overall, I suggest that we accept that Ash Regan did breach the code. I do not know whether she did so consciously or not, but I suggest that we admonish or reprove her, and do not suspend her.
I call Martin Whitfield to wind up the debate.
18:00
I thank those who have contributed to this debate.
Section 9.1 of the code of conduct, on the enforcement of the rules, states:
“Members must not disclose, communicate or discuss any complaint or intention to make a complaint to or with members of the press or other media prior to the lodging of the complaint or during Stages 1, 2 and 3 of the procedure for dealing with complaints”.
The reason for the reference to the intention to make a complaint is that, as I read out from the session 5 committee’s report, if a member is protected in saying that there is an intention to make a complaint about another member, damage can be done to that member, and they have no ability to answer that without that being in the public domain.
Members may have concerns about the actions of other members of this Parliament, and procedures are available and open to them if they wish to pursue those. We received from the complainer a specific complaint about the breach of publicising an intention to make a complaint. The committee concluded that
“any objective reading of the letter, covering emails and social media post would be that there was, at the very least, an intention to make a complaint about the conduct of Maggie Chapman”.
In our discussion of what the sanction should be, we considered a number of factors with regard to the appropriate period for the exclusion, taking into account the fact that the member was sponsoring a bill. The discussion included consideration of whether there were any mitigations that could be taken into account, and we found none. Therefore, unanimously, we proposed the sanction that appears in the motion today.
I urge members to reject the amendment and support the committee’s motion.
That concludes the debate on the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee’s ninth report in 2025.
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Decision Time