Over the weekend, it came to light that the Scottish Government has squandered £72,000 of public money on a telephone hotline for LGBT people to report so-called ‘conversion practices’ which only received four calls in three months. The cash was splashed on an LGBT charity, which also teaches men who pretend to be women how to breast feed babies.
You may think, during a cost of living crisis, that there are better ways for a government to spend £72,000. It could repair a road, support a struggling family, help a pensioner heat their home, or perhaps — and here’s a daring thought — provide something useful to the Scottish taxpayer.
Instead, the Scottish Government spent £71,996 in 2025 funding a ‘conversion practices’ support service helpline operated by LGBT Health and Wellbeing. Between October and December of that year, the helpline received just four calls relating to conversion practices. Four. Not four hundred. Not forty. Four. And we don’t know whether it was four people, or the same person using the helpline four times.
At that rate, the taxpayer was spending approximately £18,000 for every contact in that three-month period. If those three months were representative of the year, the annual cost would work out at roughly £4,500 per contact. It may be Scotland’s most expensive telephone conversation.
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