Dear Welsh Government,

Please pass this on to the person who conducts Freedom of Information reviews.

I am writing to request an internal review of Welsh Government's handling of my FOI request 'Equality Impact Assessment for the Welsh Government Action Plan to advance equality for transgender people'.

The Welsh Government reply to my request leaves me uncertain as to whether a proper search has been conducted to attempt to find the document I requested. I would like a full search to be carried out with the help of the Welsh Government IT department to see if a copy of this document still exists anywhere on the Welsh Government server in a back-up system or archive. I understand that documents which are recoverable in any way are deemed to be “held”, following the case of Catherine Whitehead v. The Information Commissioner (EA/2013/0262; 29th April 2014): “if requested information is in (or on) back-up tapes which are themselves held by the public authority or is in some other way still stored on the public authority’s server, we consider that it is clearly “held” by the public authority.”

There is also a wider issue around the loss of this document, which was not due for deletion. The final response I received from Welsh Government, dated 18th April 2019, contained the following statements:

“Unfortunately we are not able to determine the reasons why or how the Equality Impact Assessment (EIA) was lost. Our efforts to locate the document following your request revealed to us that it was not on file as it should be. We have also been unable to locate a copy in any archive.”

“As far as we are able to determine, this loss was not the result of any conscious decision or policy not to retain the EIA. Similarly, since the loss was only discovered following your request, no consideration has been given until now to replacing it.”

It seems clear from this response that a document which should have been a public record, kept on file and made available to the public on request, was somehow lost, although nobody appears to know why, when or how it came to be lost. This is a serious issue, beyond the lack of public availability of the contents, particularly in view of the fact that the loss only came to light when a member of the public asked to view it. How many other such records have also been lost, whose loss will only be noticed when a member of the public, or another organisation, makes a request to view them?

I would like the internal review to look into how this particular document came to be lost, and whether other documents could be lost due to similar errors.

The “Transgender Action Plan” itself is quite emphatic in its insistence that Equality Impact Assessments should always be carried out to ensure that the needs of transgender people are considered. However, the Action Plan takes no account of the needs or safety of women and girls, and I wanted to see how the Equality Impact Assessment for this Action Plan justified this position.

At least two documents regarding transgender inclusion were financed by Welsh Government and produced by charities as a result of this Action Plan: the Trans*Form Cymru Toolkit, for young people, and a “Transgender Policy & Procedural Guidance” document for Welsh Women’s Aid. These documents fail to take account of the impact of the inclusion of transwomen (i.e. transgender people who were born male) on vulnerable women and girls. These documents were produced by charities, who are under no obligation to carry out an Equality Impact Assessment, and it would be left to individual organisations using their guidance to do their own impact assessments. If these are also charities, they will similarly be under no obligation to carry out an impact assessment. It is therefore possible that such policies could be implemented with no consideration given to the impact on people with other protected characteristics, since whatever was in the Welsh Government EIA, it clearly didn't take account of the impact of these policies on other groups protected by the Equality Act.

This is an important document, the loss of which should be treated as a serious matter and thoroughly investigated.

A full history of my FOI request and all correspondence is available on the Internet at this address: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/e...

Yours faithfully,

E. Williams