Glasgow Councillor Fiona Higgins Wins Landmark Ruling Against Standards Commission

London, United Kingdom Aug 22, 2026 ALN: At the end of my interview with Fiona Higgins, she lays bare the culture that she says is embedded in Scotland’s largest local authority. Ms. Higgins is the councillor for Glasgow’s Canal Ward, which includes some of the city’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods. She has just won a landmark ruling in the Court of Session against Scotland’s ethical watchdog, the Standards Commission for Scotland, which will have serious implications for all of the country’s local authorities. The Commission had sought to deny her the opportunity to present what she says is vital evidence in proceedings involving Ms. Higgins and Glasgow City Council. In an opinion issued today, Lord Sandison has ordered that the evidence be admitted.

In an exclusive interview, Ms. Higgins, while delighted at the verdict, tells of the price she’s paid in a painful two-year process. “I think the human cost needs to be assessed,” she says.

Last year, she raised concerns about what she calls a “culture of secrecy” at Glasgow City Council as she embarked on a legal battle to fight allegations of misconduct after she criticized controversial teacher cuts. She argued that her right to freedom of speech was being curtailed after she was reported to the Ethical Standards Commissioner for allegedly breaching the councillors’ code of conduct.

The complaint was made by former Glasgow City Council finance director Martin Booth after she publicly criticized the handling of planned education cuts and claimed that councillors and the public were being misled.

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After an initial standards hearing was paused, Ms. Higgins won the right to a judicial review of her case at the Court of Session, which was held earlier this month. “I’m absolutely delighted that the judge has found in my favor and this will be shared by many individuals in other Scottish local authorities who had contacted me after finding themselves in similar situations to mine.

“Like everyone else, I’m entitled to a fair hearing and the documents in question were directly relevant to my position. I look forward now to the opportunity to present my full case before the Standards Commission with those documents in place.”

As details emerged over time into the public forum, a picture had formed of a terrain in which elected representatives felt intimidated if they dared to ask searching questions about the way that money was spent, or even about how such decisions are reached. It suggested that a 'star chamber', comprising a handful of powerful non-elected executive officers with extensive powers of patronage, ruled the council in an atmosphere of fear. She tells me she was advised by several people who had her best interests at heart “to let it go”; that she’d “never win” and not to “stick your head above the parapet.”

Ms. Higgins says, though, that they were only speaking from a position of anxiety and fear and not from what they felt was the right thing to do.

“There’s a culture amongst councillors throughout Scotland where you are afraid of scrutinizing things; you're afraid of asking questions, particularly over anything finance-related, because the code of conduct for councillors hangs over you and you don't want to be accused of upsetting officers. But I chose to ask questions because the situation was so serious. I'm a teacher by background, and when I saw these massive £30m cuts to education being obscured in an area of the budget that wasn't education, I thought this was so serious and so shocking that I had to ask questions.

“Lots of us were asking questions. It wasn't just me. We were getting shut down in informal meetings or via emails. I know the cost of not having enough teachers in classrooms. I've been the teacher standing in a classroom with 30 pupils in front of me, and all with different needs; whether it’s autism, or additional support, or additional language needs.”

It seems there’s a lexicon of idioms that executive officers and their staff reach for when they want to instill fear. Fiona Higgins has learned to decode them. How did the city council’s displeasure first manifest itself?

“When I asked questions, whether by email or in-person meetings, I felt a displeasure and an immediate hostility, especially in emails. These are your best shot of asking a question as a councillor, because you’re creating a paper trail. On one occasion, I contacted a senior officer to say that I’d heard from education staff and teachers that they didn't think what was being proposed was deliverable in terms of their statutory responsibilities and that they were quite worried. I was told that my email was “very unusual” and that I was making this person “uncomfortable.” That may not immediately seem like something I should be worried about, but when you're a councillor in Scotland and you get an email like that, you know that it’s a cypher. I'm uncertain about what had made this person ‘uncomfortable’. There was no explanation.

“It suggests that you've been improper and is designed to trigger the code of conduct. It’s telling you that you’re skating on thin ice by asking me this, because it’s made me uncomfortable. The jump from there isn’t very far.”

In refusing to accept her fate, Ms. Higgins has exposed a feature of life inside Scotland’s local authorities which proceeds unseen by the public. We imagine that all the battle-lines are drawn across the traditional and well-known party political boundaries. Yet, there’s another secret war raging above this that pits elected, but mainly part-time, councillors against full-time executive barons with hosts of juniors and assistants – all ambitious for the salaries and powers of their superiors – to back them up.

The ethical standards commission, inadvertently, seems to have become another asset in their formidable armory. Councillors all over Scotland have come to know that this sort of language is normally a precursor to a more formal warning, such as being asked to attend the CEO’s office to be taken through the code of conduct. There’s an unsubtle hint that this may be used against you in a complaint to the Ethical Standards Commission which can censure you, or suspend you for months at a time. If you’re suspended, you can still undertake your ward work and answer constituent emails, but you can't attend meetings of the council.

In a culture where councillors struggle to access information and must routinely use freedom of information requests, it makes it even harder to obtain information and get answers. “I often hear the phrase ‘the process is the punishment’ and now I really get that after actually going through two years of being investigated,” says Ms. Higgins.

“I remember the day I read the initial report by the Ethical Standards Commissioner, saying that I'd been an ‘egregious bully’. This really sickened me.”