This is my fourth post looking at how the Ethical Standards Commission has investigated the complaint made by Heather Reid about six emails which Sid Perrie, the locally elected member for Balloch, sent between 26 and 28th August 2024.  As I explained in my first post (see here):

“After the arrangements for the special board meeting  to determine the Flaming Land planning application on 16th September 2024 had been signed off  on the nod (see here), Sid made a last ditch attempt to get Heather Reid, the Convener of the LLTNPA, and other board members to consider the process and the conflicts of interest involved.  Sid was concerned about the role of both staff, who had been involved in the appointment of Flamingo Land as preferred developer for Balloch, and Board Members who when approving the National Park Partnership Plan had given their backing to progressing one major development in the National Park – a reference to Flamingo Land.

My second post  (see here) looked at the allegation that Sid has shared private email addresses with two MSPs and Scottish Ministers, contrasting that “crime” with how Heather Reid had immediately shared Sid’s first email expressing concerns about staff, with those staff.  My third post (2.5) (see here)  showed how Heather Reid had committed exactly the same “crime” herself but apparently failed to inform the Ethical Standards Commissioner (ESC) of this.

This post focuses on what has been treated as the core of the complaint investigation, that the language Sid used in those emails was a disrespectful and unjustifiable breach of the Code of Conduct for Board Members.  It argues  the real ethical issue, which has implications for democracy across Scotland, is the right of board members and local authority councillors to hold staff to account.

 

An example of the issues Sid Perrie was trying get the LLTNPA Board to address

In August 2024 (see here) I described and evidenced the involvement of the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority staff in the appointment of Flamingo Land as preferred developer for Balloch and my failed attempts to get first James Stuart and then Heather Reid, as Convener of the Board to investigate this.   I will not repeat that story here – Sid included the link in his first email to the Board, Scottish Ministers and MSPs – but its worth noting that the two statements issued by the LLTNPA issued in 2016 (see here) and 2021 (see here) about their involvement in the Flamingo Land appointment are still on their website.  The second includes this claim by the Chief Executive Officer Gordon Watson:

As I explained last year:

“All the claims in the highlighted paragraph are wrong: the decision to appoint Flamingo Land as preferred developer was not just taken by SE; the “former [ie since retired] member of the tourism team did not just provide “informal tourism advice” to SE before their decision but was a member of the interview panel; and Stuart Mearns, as head of planning, appears to have attended a meeting which agreed the proposal.”

Among the evidence I provided to substantiate this were FOI responses from Scottish Enterprise in  2016 which stated LLTNPA staff had played a full role on the interview panel which recommended appointing Flamingo Land and then at the meeting afterwards which confirmed the appointment.  In the light of the information, how would you as a reader describe Gordon Watson’s claim that the decision “to appoint Flamingo Land as preferred bidder for the West Riverside site was made by Scottish Enteprise alone?”

I ask because initially I described what Gordon Watson said as “a lie” but a journalist, fearing for me, cautioned me about using that word so I changed it.

 

Sid Perrie’s first email on 26th August

It was these issues, as well as the LLTNPA voting to support a major development in Balloch as part of the National Park Partnership Plan, that Sid was trying to get the board to address when he sent his first email to Heather Reid on 26th August (my direct interest in this, having written the blog post, is obvious).

Sid is far less of a feartie than I am, has a way of seeing right to the core of a matter and expresses himself in a forthright manner:

 

The ESC’s “investigation” of Sid’s email

The ESC chose the parts of Sid’s email that I have underlined for special censure:

The ESC’s investigation made no attempt to investigate Sid’s complaint that there had been misconduct and law breaking in public office.  Instead it focussed on the language Sid had used.  If everything Gordon Watson had done was above board why – to take just the example highlighted above – did he cover up the involvement of his staff in appointing Flamingo Land as preferred developer for Balloch?

Whatever you think of the exact wording Sid used, Sid was not using these terms lightly, he was deadly serious.  The problem is that the  ESC seems to have been wilfully blind to the possibility that there could have been any wrongdoing on the part of LLTNPA staff and that the Flamingo Land planning application had only got as far as it had as a result of governance failures on the part of the LLTNPA board, particularly its conveners James Stuart and Heather Reid.

This paragraph has staggering implications for our whole system of democracy.  The ESC clearly not believes it is inappropriate for any board member to raise concerns about the “performance, conduct or capability” of the Chief Executive “in public” but also that Sid drawing the attention of two MSPs and Scottish Ministers to his concerns counts as doing so “in public”.  That was hardly “public”, more the height of discretion.  How could any board member ever whistle blow if the Code of Conduct for public life bans them from alerting MSPs and Scottish Ministers to concerns?

The ESC’s assertion that the right person for Sid to have addressed his concerns about the Chief Executive was with that same Chief Executive is farcical. Twice I complained about Gordon Watson’s claims the LLTNPA were not involved in appointing Flamingo Land and twice those complaints were investigated by staff managed by him rather than by the LLTNPA board as I requested. The results were predictable, two farcical investigations.  I pitied the staff forced to undertake them.

It is the LLTNPA board who should have held the Chief Executive to account.  That is why Sid’s email was addressed to the convener and other board members only for Heather Reid, as I showed in my first post, to forward it to staff seven minutes after receiving it.

The last sentence in paragraph 79 of the ESC’s report is also highly misleading.  Sid had been trying to raise his concerns about the role of staff in the Flamingo Land planning process with first James Stuart and then Heather Reid since being elected as the board member for Balloch.  He had had no success.  Here is an example;

 

 

x

 

 

 

 

 

 

Heather Reid appears to have always refused to meet Sid without staff present.  That made it impossible for him to raise with her concerns about staff. Confidentiality has been made even more difficult because Heather Reid and Gordon Watson share a personal assistant. This means Gordon Watson has access to all the Convener’s emails and diary arrangements.

The ESC’s investigation has made no attempt to investigate whether the Chief Executive, Gordon Watson, is in fact a liar and dishonest and if not, whether the claims he made in public about the LLTNPA not being involved in the appointment of Flamingo Land were “false information”.  The last sentence makes it clear the ESC’s main concern is not the truth but the reputational damage to the Chief Executive.  The logical conclusion is that the ESC is now treating Chief Executives and other senior officials as being above the law.

How Heather Reid responded to Sid’s email raising these serious concerns is not considered in the ESC report.  Apart from forwarding Sid’s email to staff, she sent several emails which are not included in Appendix 3 to the ESC’s report “complaint material”.  I only have them because Sid passed on the LLTNPA’s response to his Subject Access Request.

Sid’s email to Heather Reid and board members describing his concerns about the planning process had been sent at 9.03.  This email shows that in less than three hours Heather Reid had forwarded that email to the staff concerned, met with them and apparently the LLTNPA’s legal adviser, taken the word of staff that the allegations and concerns expressed by Sid were unfounded and then told the Board to say nothing more.

Imagine if the first action of a senior police officer, on being sent an extensive dossier about an alleged crime, was not to read that dossier but forward it to the primary suspect, meet with them, take their assurances they weren’t responsible and close the case!  If that happened in the police we would call that corrupt.

Having left Sid out of her 11.57 email, an hour and a half later Heather Reid responded to him formally copying in Scottish Ministers and the two MSPs (and in doing so also sharing the “private emails” of board members as I explained in my last post):

 

 

While failing to consider Heather Reid’s response to Sid Perrie, paragraph 31 of the ESC’s report provides a convoluted and not very clear account of how Heather Reid responded to similar concerns raised by Balloch and Haldane Community Council the next day:

 

 

 

The important sentence for the purposes of this post is the last.  It shows that the ESC accepted, without any investigation of the facts, that there were no conflicts of interests that needed to be addressed before the Flamingo Land planning application was considered.  The ESC then referred to this response, that Heather Reid had “refuted” the concerns expressed by the BHCC, to justify not doing any further to investigate the concerns Sid had tried to raise:

 

The fact that the ESC concludes “the Respondent had some basis in fact for his views” but accepted Heather Reid’s assertions these were “misplaced or incorrect” tells you everything that was wrong with this investigation.

 

What needs to happen?

If anyone should be in the dock before the Standards Commission, it should be Heather Reid not Sid Perrie.  Unfortunately, as I will explain in a further post, my attempt to help Sid Perrie by lodging a complaint about how Dr Reid silenced him at the Board Meeting in June 2024 was dismissed by the ESC.

I have already asked the ESC to withdraw their report into this case, which procedurally they can do, but they declined.  I will now ask again. Unfortunately it appears both the ESC and the Standards Commission know that legal support to contest what they are doing is so expensive (£250 an hour and probably close to £100k for a case like this) that they will continue to accept the word of the Park establishment and squash any attempt to hold that establishment to account.

It is also past time that Jackie Baillie, MSP, and Ross Greer, MSP offered whistle blower protection to Sid and started raising questions about the process in the Scottish Parliament.  Both were included in the email from Heather Reid, quoted above, so if they had time to read that email both should be aware that Heather Reid immediately discussed Sid’s concerns with the staff responsible and agreed with them his concerns were unfounded.  Do these two highly intelligent MSPs really believe that the Park’s legal adviser could have dismissed all Sid’s concerns in the space of a morning?

As for the Scottish Government, who are ultimately responsible for the governance in the LLTNPA, they should have initiated a full-scale investigation into the handling of the Flamingo Land planning application years ago.  Their response if asked to do so now will be predictable: “we cannot comment on live planning applications”.

Democracy in Scotland is being eroded step by step. I hope to show in further posts how  the Code of Conduct for those in public life, which was originally intended to strengthen democracy, is now being used to undermine it and strengthen the power of the state.