Adam Kula: It took this for the PSNI to finally hand over their transgender training materials

It took about nine months of trying by the News Letter and the threat of taking the police to a tribunal though.

What follows is an account of the torturous journey reporters sometimes face when trying to prise information out of public agencies.

The training material was produced by the publicly-funded activist group Cara-Friend, and concerned transgender matters.

Its content was revealed in yesterday's edition (click this link for details).

In short, Cara-Friend taught the police to accept that children can be transgender from three up, that being a woman is really a "social construct", and what terms like "pangender” and “greysexual” mean.

But let's start at the start.

The whole saga has its roots in 2018, when the PSNI hired a group called Transgender NI to train its officers at a cost of £1,030.

Back then, the PSNI handed the training files over without a fuss when asked, and the News Letter reported on their contents. Details here:

• Activists claim NI has as many transgender people as ethnic minorities

• Director of group hired to train police called them ‘racist oppressor pigs’

• Cara-Friend springs to defence of vitriolic anti-police trans activist

Fast-forward to July 2023 and the News Letter learned by chance – thanks to a tweet from an unrelated group – that Cara-Friend had now also been hired to train officers.

This time, the PSNI's approach was different.

They confirmed that “112 officers and staff from PSNI Public Protection Branch attended this training,” that the course “would form part of officer and staff’s continuing personal development”, and that it was provided in exchange for a £500 “donation” to Cara-Friend.

But, in contrast to before, the police refused to hand over the training materials.

What came next was a mammoth undertaking to overturn that refusal.

The PSNI was challenged repeatedly, but refused to budge from their position: handing over the materials could “prejudice Cara-Friend's commercial interests”.

It would, they claimed, “weaken their ability to tender for future contracts in a competitive market, impacting on future business revenue”.

But Cara-Friend is not a business in any normal sense – it's a not-for-profit company / charity, largely funded by public bodies.

And in any case, it had given its services away not as part of a commercial contract, but for a mere £500 donation from the police.

The News Letter appealed this decision to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), which is meant to make sure public bodies follow the 2000 Freedom of Information Act.

It sided with the police.

This reporter then asked for a “first tier tribunal” – a kind of specialist court case – to rule on the legality of all this.

It was pointed out that the case was being driven by a single individual with limited resources and no legal specialists on hand, against two public bodies with plenty of both, and the following arguments were presented for the tribunal’s consideration (among others):

• That Cara-Friend's annual income is over £400,000, with only about £28,000 coming from training income and donations, so if any prejudice to their interests did exist, it was minimal;

• That it was possible that Cara-Friend's training course contains no “novel research of value, but rather amounts to a series of contestable assertions, or a wish list of how Cara-Friend would like the police to behave”;

• And that the police had previously handed over such training materials without issue.

• It was also argued that the ICO's “ability to act as a neutral broker is in question”. Why? Because that agency has now adopted an internal trans policy of its own, basically instructing its staff to act in accord with trans activists' wishes.

After all this was submitted to the tribunal, the PSNI changed their tune and just handed over the materials we had been seeking all along.

Asked to explain this abrupt change of heart, the PSNI said “we have nothing further to add”.

This is not the first time that the News Letter has had to demonstrate to public bodies that they can’t just expect to grind down our efforts to obtain information and we’ll throw in the towel and forget about it.

The question of why a police force would spend the best part of a year attempting to withhold this information, at a presumably not insignificant cost to themselves, is left within the gift of readers to answer.