A kind of freedom
Alert readers will have noticed our so-far-fruitless attempts to extract information from the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator regarding the disturbing activities of the controversy-plagued LGBT Youth Scotland.
We are far from the only people raising concerns about the charity – we know of at least 17 separate formal complaints against LGBTYS in the past year alone, yet the OSCR has declined to open any sort of formal inquiry into them. (It carried out three such inquiries in 2024.)
But despite the OSCR’s assertion that “we strive to be transparent and accountable”, when we went to find those complaints (including, of course, the one from ourselves) to link you to them, we hit a brick wall that rapidly turned into a whole new concern.
The OSCR has a Freedom Of Information page, but it contains no links to either the FOI requests it has received or its responses.
It does however state that the OSCR has adopted the Model Publication Scheme produced by the Scottish Information Commissioner, which it helpfully links to.
The first clause of the Model Publication Scheme is this:
And a few lines later it makes very clear what it means by “publish”.
In other words, that you should be able to find FOI responses on the OSCR’s website without having to email them and ask.
So we went back to the OSCR’s FOI page and clicked the link on “our FOISA policy”. It links to a document which includes a paragraph on “Our Publication Scheme”.
That points to the OSCR’s “Guide To Information”, which is a dead link. (Something of a speciality of the OSCR website, as we know.)
However, if you go back to the main Freedom Of Information page, there’s a working link to the information guide.
The guide states again that the OSCR is signed up to the Model Publication Scheme, and notes that the published information is available “on our website”, without stipulating where.
The document contains a total of 51 links, including to the OSCR’s Equalities Strategy and guidance on how charities can safely support Ukraine (which redirects to a page saying “We’re sorry, this page no longer exists”), but nothing about anywhere you can read FOI requests and responses.
The closest it appears to get is the section headed “Communications”, which simply links back to the main Freedom Of Information page.
And round and round you go in circles, without ever getting the information you want. Which just isn’t good enough, folks. So we’ve asked for an explanation, but since we already know how that goes with the OSCR, we’ve also gone straight to the Information Commissioner to alert them to the OSCR’s clear non-compliance with the Model Publication Scheme.
To: enquiries@foi.scot
I note with some concern that it appears to be impossible to locate responses to FOI requests anywhere on the website of the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR). Their “Guide To Information”, located here, makes no reference to where responses are published.
The “Publication” section of their FOISA Policy, located here, merely directs readers to the aforementioned Guide To Information, which is of no assistance, and their Freedom Of Information page, located here, does not include any link to where responses are published.
It does however claim that they adopt the Scottish Information Commissioner’s “Model Publication Scheme” with regard to FOIs. That scheme, which as you know is published here, stipulates in its first clause that:
“1. The Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA) requires Scottish public authorities to adopt and maintain a publication scheme. Authorities are under a legal obligation to:
(i) publish the classes of information that they make routinely available
(ii) tell the public how to access the information they publish and whether information is available free of charge or on payment.”
(It notes that the definition of “publish” is that the information must be “available to anyone to access easily without having to make a request for it”.)
The OSCR therefore appears to fall at the first hurdle, since as far as I can establish it does not tell the public how to access the information it publishes with regard to FOI requests at all, let alone “easily”. I consider myself a reasonably diligent and competent professional journalist and I’ve been trying to locate said information for an entire morning without success, merely being sent round and round in circles to pages which do not contain or link to it.
I am keen to hear the Information Commissioner’s view on this matter.
Hopefully the SIC will be more helpful and competent than the OSCR is.
Excellent sleuthing Stu
Who is responsible for OSCR? Who do they answer to? Who has oversight?
Surely there is a minister in the Scottish Parliament who is responsible for it?
The answer(s) to these questions could be quite revealing.
A cliche, I know, but keep up the good work.
The current non-executive director is a former yoga teacher who’s been on the public sector board merry-go-round. Part of the quangocracy.
Really, Stu, you are a star.
But what on earth did you think that the civil service do all day long, other than construe labyrinthine legalese concerning how to protect, obscure and cover up their tracks and those of other government organisations on the same payroll?
Government sinecures are a major growth industry now especially since the rise of IT which equates to a whole new generation of toilet monitors, but there’s nothing here to really bother your silly little head with. They know best. Now be a good boy and eat up your cereal. There’s a good lad.
All bureaucracies are self-serving. End of.
Lock these beasts up. Get them to fuck out of Scottish public life.
I did a FOI request to the Care Inspectorateand got a similar response today.
“the Scottish Information Commissioner” (SIC).
Very droll 🙂
No doubt no pun was intended, but seriously, was there nobody in the room capable of thinking that one through?
There appears to be numerous statements that the information MUST adhere to legal parameters BY LAW, the question has to be who is overseeing and REGULATING the various nonentity government departments to ensure they are complying with the law (surely that would be the Scottish Information Commissioner) which then begs the question are they deliberately ignoring these flagrant breaches of the law or has no one reported the various government departments engaging in these duplicitous illegal actions
Fantasy or Reality?
Scottish children are in Danger from LGBTQ.
The LGBT brigade are after Scottish children because there is no chance of a future LGBT generation coming up behind to take their place. The big plan being lets brainwash boys and girls into “it’s” to Secure the Queer future. The lesbian adoption experiment in Scotland is up to it’s neck in blood. So they changed tactics.
If this is the reason behind the criminal activity of the LGBTQ gang then the whole Scottish government,legal system is facing charges of conspiracy and collusion.
This madness is prospering at the expense of our children and you have to wonder at the silence of the MSM and that of parents.
Thank God for the rev.