In March this year, the Scottish Government finally launched the long-awaited (and long overdue….by three years) public consultation on whether the investigatory powers of the SSPCA should be increased to allow them to formally investigate more types of wildlife crime than their current remit (see here).
The consultation opened in March and closed on 1st September. We’re not expecting to hear the Government’s decision until later this autumn/winter.
However, their official consultation document included the following statement:
Next steps in the process
Where respondents have given permission for their response to be made public and after we have checked that they contain no potentially defamatory material, responses will be made available to the public on the Scottish Government website and in the Scottish Government library by 11th October 2014.
Today is 14th October 2014. We’ve looked for the responses on the Government’s website but we can’t seem to find them. Has anyone else found them?
We’ve seen the odd response published here and there (e.g. from the Scottish Gamekeepers’ Association, from OneKind, from Scottish Land & Estates, from the Law Society of Scotland, and from the former Head of the National Wildlife Crime Unit), but we’ve yet to see the full set of formal responses.
Where are they? We’d really like to see them…..
Raptor Persecution UK 
Given how often I see “[sorry we can’t say that, libel]”, or words to that effect, on this blog, I’d be expecting the editing to avoid defamation to take quite some time. I also do not evny whichever poor sod gets the job. It’d probably be an education though.