Gender Recognition Act progression: FOI release

Information requested

• Information held relating to a letter sent from the Cabinet Secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville by email on 1st April 2020 to 4 organisations, Equality Network, Scottish Trans, LGBT Health and Wellbeing and Stonewall Scotland. The letter was about the decision to halt progress on the Reform of the Gender Recognition Act.
• This information to include phone calls, texts and emails between these organisations and the Cabinet Secretary or her staff in the 21 days before the letter was sent and regarding the decision to send the letter and the content of this letter; ie progress or otherwise on the Gender Recognition Act Reforms.
• This to include phone calls, minuted discussions, texts and emails between the Cabinet Secretary and her staff as well as between members of her staff in the 21 days before the letter was sent regarding the decision to send the letter and the content of this letter; ie progress on the G R A Reforms.
• This information also to include phone calls, emails and texts between these 4 organisations and the Cabinet Secretary and her office in the 7 days after the letter was received in reaction to said letter.
• This information to include phone calls, emails, texts and minuted discussions between the Cabinet Secretary and her staff in the 7 days after the letter was received regarding the reactions to said letter.

Response

I enclose a copy of some of the information you requested.
While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance we are unable to provide some of the information you have requested because an exemption under section 38(1)(b) (personal information) of FOISA applies to that information. The reasons why that exemption applies are explained below.

An exemption under section 38(1)(b) of FOISA (personal information) applies to some of the information requested because it is personal data of a third party, consisting of the names, email addresses and telephone numbers of some officials in Scottish Government and the email addresses of some individuals outwith Scottish Government. Disclosing this would contravene the data protection principles in Article 5(1) of the General Data Protection Regulation and in section 34(1) of the Data Protection Act 2018. This exemption is not subject to the ‘public interest test’, so we are not required to consider if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exemption.

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at http://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.

FOI-202000031912 Information released

File type

37 page PDF

File size

1.2 MB