The Christian Institute (CI) has taken issue with the Scottish government’s approach to a planned ban on conversion therapy, suggesting that ministers are in thrall to LGBT activists and are using Westminster to avoid accountability.
Scottish Equalities minister Simita Kumar recently told a Holyrood committee that she and her officials meet with “LGBTQI stakeholders on a very regular basis” on the issue of conversion therapy.
In a letter to Kumar, Joanna Timm, a spokeswoman for the CI’s Let Us Pray campaign, said that repeated requests for meetings had been brushed off and that only a “short online meeting every couple of years” with officials had been granted.
Timm called upon Kumar to redress this “heavily one-sided approach to engagement” by holding a meeting in which concerns about the proposed ban could be aired.
The CI noted that the Scottish government, rather than passing its own ban on conversion therapy, has indicated that it wishes to be part of a ban imposed from Westminster. While the Scottish government did indeed bring forward its own plans in 2024, these were later shelved.
According to LGBT group Out For Scotland, ministers confirmed in a meeting that passing responsibility for the ban up to Westminster would mean that they “don’t end up facing judicial review” and it would “remove constitutional heat”.
The CI has previously raised concerns about the undue influence of LGBT groups on the Scottish government. Earlier this year a freedom of information request found that the Scottish government paid just shy of £72,000 to a charity called LGBT Health and Wellbeing to operate a helpline for victims of conversion therapy.
In the last three months of 2025 the helpline received just three calls, possibly from the same person. The government was unable to provide the number of calls for the first three quarters of the year. However The CI noted that if Q4 was indicative of overall demand, the helpline would have received 16 calls during the course of the year, with each one costing the taxpayer around £4,500.
