Current status: Answered by Kate Forbes on 6 January 2026
To ask the Scottish Government, further to the evidence given by the Cabinet Secretary for Justice and Home Affairs to the Education, Children and Young People Committee on 17 December 2025, in which the Cabinet Secretary commented that she had made a "private call" to a person with no officials present, stating that she subsequently made a note of this on the basis that “everything needs to be on the record”, whether it will confirm how many other similar such calls have been made by each minister since May 2021; what the circumstances of each call was, and what subsequent note of the call was recorded by the minister.
All engagements carried out by Ministers where government business was undertaken are published on Scottish Government website three months in arrears, as is required by the Scottish Ministerial Code and the Scottish Government’s Records Management policy. There is no requirement for the origin of any such information to be collated and there is no mechanism for capturing the detail on the number of calls made by each Minister since May 2021.