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In April last year we wrote to LGBT Youth Scotland asking them to explain why they were conducting activities in primary schools (and even with pre-school children) about sexual matters despite only having a remit to work with young people aged 13-25.
We received no reply, so we contacted the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator, who sent a rather sniffy acknowledgement saying:
“If your concern leads us to making inquiries with the charity, we are unable to update you on the status of those inquiries. For more information about what to expect after you submit a concern, read our guidance on how OSCR deals with concerns and inquiries.”
That link, you’ll be amazed to hear, leads to a dead page.
The OSCR also has a Freedom Of Information page.
It links to “OSCR’s Guide to Information”, a PDF file containing lots more links. But if you click on the one about “How we deal with complaints about charities”:
it takes you here.
The OSCR costs Scottish taxpayers around £3.4m a year, the large bulk of which is spent on its 43 staff. (A tasty average of over £60,400 each.)
That’s on top of the £1.9m LGBT Youth Scotland costs taxpayers every year, nearly all of it directly or indirectly from the Scottish Government and local authorities.
But apparently we don’t get any accountability or transparency for that. LGBT Youth Scotland have continued to insert themselves into primary schools and nobody will explain to us why they’re so obviously improperly being allowed to. So today we’ve filed a Freedom Of Information request:
We’ve also resent our initial enquiry to LGBTYS to give them another opportunity to explain why they’re exceeding their authority and involving themselves with toddlers when they’re only meant to work with teens and young adults.
(They actually updated their Articles Of Association just a few days ago, reaffirming the details of their supposed target group.)
We don’t have high hopes. We’ve learned over the past few years that essentially no public body or figure in Scotland is answerable to anyone for anything, all the way up to the Crown Office, and it takes exhausting numbers of years to even begin to scratch the surface of how those whose wages we pay conduct themselves.
All we can do is keep trying. We notice, though, that as luck would have it the charity has a “live chat session” scheduled for this afternoon, where you can talk to them about “whatever is on your mind”.
We’ve certainly got some stuff on our minds, so we’re going to pop along, and any interested readers may like to join in too and see if we can find out what’s going on. Because there appear to be no other methods available.
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