Profile : Steve Mannion
As a member of the Council and of the Council's Scottish Committee, Steve Mannion is fiercely committed to improving the ways in which people can seek administrative justice. But his background in the Scottish police force and a famous draw with a chess World Champion make him the unlikeliest of Council members.
On leaving formal education, Steve spent two years in compulsory National Service with the Scots Guards and joined the City of Glasgow Police in 1960, before it merged with other forces to become the Strathclyde Police.
In a career spanning 32 years with the second largest police force in Britain, one which took him to the position of Assistant Chief Constable, Steve was involved in his fair share of high profile cases, including the tragic death of 66 football supporters at the Ibrox stadium in 1971.
However, it was his involvement in the Lockerbie air disaster in 1988 that defined his police career. Steve says:"We were managing a monstrously large crime scene with wreckage spread over hundreds of miles. I was heavily involved behind the scenes and this was the first time any police force had dealt with a murder inquiry of this sort, using computers all over the world to successfully process a vast amount of data."
The following seven years as Scottish Area Commander of the British Transport Police were no less eventful, with vandals causing a train derailment, which claimed a number of lives, being among the worst cases he had to deal with. This, and his campaign to reduce the deaths of children on Scotland's railways to none, largely contributed to him being awarded the Queen's Police Medal for Distinguished Service in 1997. In his varied schedule he still finds time for his hobbies – chess and fly-fishing – catching trout and salmon to cook at his Scottish Highland home in Perthshire, where he lives with his wife, and mulling over what was so nearly a famous victory over Vasily Smyslov, one of the greatest Russian chess Grandmasters and a former World Champion. Steve is now one of the World Chess Federation's International Arbiters, a title he was awarded in Seville in 1987, while his son carries on the mantle as an International Master.
So what led him to join the Council on Tribunals?
Sitting in his home in Perthshire, which overlooks the idyllic Scottish Highlands, Steve says: "When I was in the police service I felt, along with a number of my colleagues, that the police disciplinary set up needed to change. Unlike in other areas of the public sector, the disciplinary system did not operate under tribunal rules as such. In the 1980s, the Police Appeals Tribunals were successfully integrated into the larger tribunals world. It led to a fairer, speedier, more impartial and transparent system. This is where my interest in tribunals began."
Steve became a lay member of the Employment Tribunal Service in 1999 and served at Dundee. He felt this was a most valuable experience fitting him well for his present role. He dealt with a wide variety of disputes including some long running discrimination cases. He then became a member of the Council and of the Council's Scottish Committee in 2001.
"I feel fortunate to be involved at such a time of change," Steve says. "I have watched from the early days of the Leggatt review, which put forward the idea of a unified tribunals system, through the White Paper, which now heralds such huge changes. Tribunals are not a riveting read to some people but the energy being shown to ensure these changes are positive is nothing short of dynamic.
"As the Council develops into an Administrative Justice Council,we have an opportunity to make such a difference and develop a system that is easy to understand and less complicated. But we need to remove the fear that people have of tribunals and to take the next step forward,making the system more accessible to users. "We must give a lot more attention to users and look at the process before a dispute even gets to the tribunal stage. The new system needs to be less formal, quicker and information needs to be fed back to first tier decision makers to ensure the same mistakes are not being made again and again. I am certainly looking forward to the challenge."
(April 2005)