A mess that could have been averted

Andrew Bourke, who has worked in HR since 1996, and who is the founder of Edinburgh-based Absolutely HR Limited, said the Scottish Government has “made a mess” of the investigation.

“The Acas code of conduct says if there’s been an incident and someone has made a complaint there should be one person to deal with the investigation, one to deal with the complaint and a third person to deal with any appeal. The Acas code of conduct says quite clearly you can’t be judge jury and executioner.

“There are a lot of people working for the Scottish Government and they should have been able to find someone who was not linked to the complainants to investigate. I don’t know what they were trying to do but they made a mess of it.

“The Scottish Government should have known that there was a problem with the investigation before they cost the Scottish people £500,000 in court costs.

“It could so easily have been avoided and questions have to be asked about why this went so badly wrong.”