Taxpayers are being billed almost £160,000 as a result of the SNP’s failed legal bid to defend their “reckless” gender policy, the Scottish Conservatives can reveal today.
A response to a Freedom of Information request submitted by the party, in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of a woman, indicates that the cost of fighting the judicial review by For Women Scotland was £157,816.30.
This is on top of the previously-documented £216,182.50 Scottish Government costs stemming from the initial legal challenge by For Women Scotland.
And the final figure could yet grow, as the Scottish Government admit in their response: “Final costs in relation to the case are still being determined and are not yet available. We will publish the total cost of the case when it is fully complete.”
Scottish Conservative shadow equalities minister Tess White said: “It will rightly stick in the throat of taxpayers that they are picking up a huge legal tab for the SNP’s needless and humiliating court defeat.
“John Swinney’s party threw good money after bad in a doomed attempt to defend their reckless gender policy which betrayed women.
“They dug their heels in defending the indefensible to the highest court in the land, instead of accepting that gender self-ID was a dangerous fallacy that ignored the legal rights of women and girls.
“The Nationalists’ desperation to pander to gender zealots inside and outside their party was shameful and pig-headed.
“Yet, even now, John Swinney won’t apologise or issue a new directive to public sector bodies – which adopted self-ID wholesale – on their legal requirement to protect single-sex spaces. That negligence leaves the taxpayer wide open to huge compensation payouts.”