23 Queen Square
Glasgow
G41 2BG

15/12/15

Linda McKay
Loch Lomond & Trossachs National Park 
Carrochan
Carrochan Road
Balloch
G83 8EG

Dear Ms McKay, 
My letter of 15/11/15 the response from Gordon Watson dated 14/12/15 “COMP 2015-093”
Gordon Watson’s response to my letter to you of 15th November is wrong, both in suggesting that I was questioning the Commissioner for Ethical Standards decision in case 1771 and in treating my questions about this as a complaint.   While I note Mr Watson’s comment that the Park will file, but not respond to any further correspondence from me on this subject, this letter is to ensure you are fully aware of what is wrong and unacceptable in his letter.  I believe it is your responsibility to hold him to account.
Mr Watson’s letter starts by stating that my letter of 13th November “was asking questions about (my emphasis) a decision made by the Commissioner for Ethical Standards”.  This is wrong.  It was asking you questions arising from the content of the Commissioner’s Investigation which is not yet public.  It was not questioning the decision and I made that abundantly clear.  
The content of the Investigation revealed three significant new pieces of information, one of which has subsequently become public (the final version of the Board Minute of 27th April):
•	The first was that it was staff NOT Board Members who had decided to alter the Board Minute of 27th April.  Part of my complaint to the Commissioner concerned your potential involvement in the falsification of the Board Minute subsequent to my Freedom of Information request. I accept the Commissioner has found that staff were responsible.  What I do not find acceptable is that staff should be able to alter minutes in this way without any consequence.  That is wrong and requires action. When the police investigate a crime, believe someone is responsible but it comes out in the Court case that it was someone else who did it, this does not then prevent them taking action against the person who was responsible.  Mr Watson appears to be claiming in the letter that because my complaint against you was not upheld, you should not be taking action against him or other staff.   This is clearly wrong.   They are totally distinct matters.
•	Second, the content of the investigation revealed that Minutes had been taken of a Business Meeting which took place prior to the meeting on 27th April despite the Park having told me under FOI that there were no such meetings or notes (the issues are set out in my letter to you of 9th December which has been acknowledged as a new FOI request 2015-058).  
•	Third, the Commissioner’s decision referred to statements from yourself and the other two Board Members that there were NO camping issues on the areas adjacent to your houses and therefore no reason to declare an interest.  Accepting this, I simply asked you what the need was for the Park to install gates across the carparks by your house and why a member of the public told me the gates were locked at 9pm each night.   Mr Watson’s response claims the information I received from a member of the public must have been wrong and states the gates were installed to manage traffic at peak times and because of flooding, beggars belief and simply raises more questions.  How does locking cars in or out of the carpark possibly help with traffic management?  Yes, the Park is permitted to install gates, but the only purpose can be to prevent vehicular access.   So, it now appears the gates were installed not to prevent camping – which is now in any case clearly impossible due to the way the site has been landscaped - but to prevent access by car at the times people most want to visit the Park.  
I hope this makes it very clear that these are completely different issues to those decided upon by the Commissioner and need to be responded to by the Park as such.  
I do wish to apologise though for the accidental omission of the word “immediate” from the second paragraph of my letter of 13th November.  This should have read:  “As you will be aware, what prompted my complaint was the failure of you and two other Board Members to declare your property was in one of the proposed Management Zone and the subsequent alteration of the Board Minutes.   I would hope that you, and fellow Board members, would agree that deliberate alteration of minutes is a serious matter and why, in the absence of any IMMEDIATE response to the letters I sent to you about this on 12th and 16th June, I had reasonable cause to believe that you could have been involved in changing them.”  I had made clear in both of those letters that I was asking for an immediate response from you but you chose to pass it down to be investigated under the Park’s complaints process.  Indeed, I had never made a complaint under the Park’s complaint process about the falsification of the Board Minute and only complained to the Commissioner once it was clear you were not going to provide immediate clarifications as requested.  The so-called complaint investigation, which the Park conducted under Stage 2 of its complaints process was sent to me on 9th July as Comp 2015/044 Response.  It simply repeated what had been said in meetings without clarifying either who had authorised alteration of the Board Minute of 27th April (we still don’t know which staff authorised this) or responding to my questions about what exactly had been minuted.    Mr Watson appears to have used my mistaken omission of the word “immediate” as an excuse to claim in effect that I am a vexatious complainer when in fact I have been asking questions about issues that are of the public interest.  The Commissioner for Ethical Standards would never have investigated my complaint if he had not thought there were reasonable grounds for doing so.   The fact that he has found you did nothing wrong says nothing about the conduct of staff which is outwith his remit.

I am also very clear that my letter of 15th November was not a complaint but rather was asking you as convenor to answer a number of questions about what you were doing to hold staff to account and to explain certain matters in the public interest following Commissioner’s Decision 1771.   Indeed, I was very careful to avoid any use of the word “complaint”. 
Despite this I was issued with COMP 093 Acknowledgement on 19th November.   I immediately responded to you by letter on 19th November asking you what complaint you were asking staff to investigate. This has not been answered.   The first section of Gordon Watson’s letter clearly refers to the questions I asked and at no point defines the complaint.  He then goes on to say the Park will not deal with any more “complaints” or correspondence from me on this subject.  This is a crude attempt to avoid answering my questions to you.
Indeed, if this had been a complaint, the Park has totally failed in terms of its complaints procedure:
•	Mr Watson has not defined the complaint.  Your procedure makes it clear “It is important to be clear about exactly what the customer is complaining about”.
•	Mr Watson has not explained whether he was responding to the complaint, however framed, under stage 1 or 2 of its procedure although under your procedure, any complaints involving senior staff require to be investigated under Stage 2.   I will assume from the reference to SPSO it has been treated as a Stage 2 complaint.
•	Mr Watson appears to have “investigated” a complaint that concerns himself.  If the questions in my letter about the role of senior staff are being treated as a complaint, your procedure has specific provisions which require an investigation from a Director.  My letter clearly stated that the decision to alter the Board Minute of April was likely to have involved senior staff as well as Sandra Dalziel and I explicitly stated that I thought the Chief Executive must be involved.  You have therefore allowed Mr Watson, who I accept is a Director, to investigate himself.
•	Mr Watson has conducted no investigation.  No answers have been provided to my questions about senior staff involvement in the falsification of the April Board Minute and in respect to my questions about gates being locked outside your house, claims the gates were not closed in the way described by me without any evidence of having investigated what is actually going on on the site.   
I previously attempted to take your failures to hold Mr Watson to account in complaints 2015/001 and 2015/009 to the SPSO but, because I had not suffered personal harm or damage, was unable to do so as this was outside the SPSO remit.   The statement by Mr Watson in his letter that the SPSO has previously fully investigated my complaints is simply incorrect.  
I would be grateful if you intend to reply to this letter, rather than file it, you would let me know by the end of the week.   I will, unless advised otherwise by yourself, not use your home email in future as requested by Mr Watson.   I would however seek assurances that you have mechanisms in place to ensure that you read and consider concerns about your Chief Executive before he does.

Yours Sincerely, 

Nick Kempe

cc 	Dr Aileen McLeod, Minister for the Environment
Richard Lochhead, Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs
Bill Thomson, Commissioner for Ethical Standards
Scottish Public Services Ombudsman