Complaints of sexual misconduct (Scottish Government) 2010 – 2020: FOI Review

Information requested

A full count and disclosure of any complaints of sexual misconduct towards any woman or transgender woman by the organisation or any of its male or trans male members between 1/1/2010-1/1/2020 that may have been raised by any person whatsoever.

Response

I have now completed my review of our failure to respond to your request under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA) for:

A full count and disclosure of any complaints of sexual misconduct towards any woman or transgender woman by the organisation or any of its male or trans male members between 1/1/2010-1/1/2020 that may have been raised by any person whatsoever.

In accordance with section 21(4) of FOISA, I have also reached a decision on your request. I apologise for missing the deadline for replying to your request. This was due to additional workload pressures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

I can now provide our response to your original request.

In your request, you have asked for information about the Scottish Government and its staff. Our response therefore covers permanent staff employed in the core directorates within the Scottish Government.

You have asked for information about any complaints of sexual misconduct towards any woman or transgender woman by the organisation or any of its male or trans male members between 1/1/2010-1/1/2020. We have taken ‘sexual misconduct’ to mean any unwelcome behaviour of a sexual nature. Information about complaints of sexual misconduct (sexual assault or sexual harassment) is already available - see Parliamentary Question S5W-18396 published on Thursday 20 September 2018. This previously published information covers the period 2007 to September 2018. For the period from September 2018 to date, there have been 2 complaints.

While our aim is to provide information wherever possible, I am unable to provide the remainder of the information you have requested because an exemption under section 38(1)(b) of FOISA applies. That exemption applies because the information is personal data of a third party/parties, and disclosing it would contravene the data protection principles set out in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Regulation 2016/679 and section 34(1) of the Data Protection Act 2018.

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.