Publication - FOI/EIR release

(Trans)forming single gender services and communal accommodations article: FOI release

Published: 31 January 2020
Directorate: Justice Directorate
Topic: Equality and rights, Public sector
FOI reference: FOI/202000011201
Date received: 6 January 2020
Date responded: 31 January 2020

Information request and response under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002

Information requested

All information held in the Scottish Government's records regarding the article (Trans)forming single gender services and communal accommodations (2017), published in Social and Legal Studies 26(5), which is cited on p174 of the consultation paper on the Gender Recognition reform (Scotland) Bill, issued on 17 December 2019. This includes, but is not limited to, anything recording how the article came to the attention of the Scottish Government, any analysis or summary produced of the article, any record of discussions of the article, whether internal or with third parties, and any records of how the article was selected for citation in the consultation paper.

Response

The Scottish Government worked on the evidence base for the consultation in-house. The Scottish Government Library conducted a literature search and this drew the article to our attention. We then prepared a literature review based on the literature search. It was then decided not to publish the literature review and instead include relevant information in the Equality Impact Assessment.
I attach the following:

Document 1 (August 2019 - December 2019) email exchanges collecting and discussing the literature
Document 2 (6 December 2019) an extract of submission to the Cabinet Secretary
Document 3 (21 August 2019) a Scottish Government Library literature search request
Document 4 (5 September 2019) the Scottish Government Library literature search results for Document 3
Document 5 (November 2019) an earlier version of the literature review
Document 6 (5 December 2019) a revised version of the literature review

Reasons for not providing information
An exemption applies
An exemption under section 38(1)(b) of FOISA applies to some of the information you have requested, because it is personal data of a third party, in that it consists of the names, email addresses and other information that may identify an individual and disclosing it 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.