Not one but two Police Scotland leaders probed before they quit

COMPLAINTS against both Police Scotland chief constables were being investigated when they resigned.

Phil Gormely quit last month as a probe into a series of bullying allegations against him dragged on.

But his predecessor Sir Stephen House was also being investigated when he retired as the country’s chief constable.

Members of the Scottish Police Authority’s (SPA) Complaints and Conduct Committee were considering whether the claims merited being passed to the Police Investigations and Review Commissioner when Sir Stephen stepped down in August 2015.

They dropped the investigation after the officer, who was last week appointed as an assistant chief constable at the Metropolitan Police in London, stood down.

Neither the SPA nor the Met would confirm if the complaint was flagged up to Scotland Yard before he was offered his new job.

A former board member confirmed the group had been looking at a case involving the former Strathclyde chief, who has now come out of retirement after leaving Police Scotland while it was embroiled in a series of controversies.

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Sir Stephen departed the Scottish force with a £500,000 lump sum pension payout and joins the Met on a salary of around £190,000 a year.

Last month, the 60-year-old’s successor as chief constable, Phil Gormley, also resigned after spending five months on special leave as watchdogs investigated a series of bullying allegations against him. The retiral of a number of officers, before or during, disciplinary inquiries has reignited calls for Scotland to follow England and bar officers from leaving their roles while facing possible misconduct investigations.

An ex-SPA board member said: “It’s not unusual for senior officers to have complaints made about them.

“It almost goes with the job.

“The majority of such complaints turn out to have no substance to them.

“However, as we’ve seen from the recent cases of Oxfam and Harvey Weinstein, it’s important that complaints are investigated because there are bad apples in all walks of life and they need to be brought to justice.”

Sir Stephen will now be tasked with sorting out a major row over the disclosure of evidence in rape cases.

The Met said that Sir Stephen, who has been given a five-year contract, would bring “resilience and succession planning” to its senior leadership team. Asked whether the force was aware of the complaint when appointing Sir Stephen, a spokesman added: “All appropriate processes are carried out when appointing senior officers.”

The SPA said: “All complaints are confidential and we wouldn’t go into any kind of detail on any inquiry.”