This is really interesting - or disturbing - that at a "junior" level the Scottish Government was talking to the UK Government at Westminister whilst putting forward their GRR bill:
The most recent FoI response reinforces how much the Scottish Government relied on informal, unminuted, irregular contact with the UK Government Equalities Office (GEO), at which they were joined only by officials from Northern Ireland. The most recent FoI responses do not show any involvement in this at senior civil service level.
These junior level contacts between the Scottish Government Bill team and equivalents in the UK GEO, specifically its LGBT Equalities team, appear to have been the whole basis for concluding that the Bill would not face any objections from the UK Government. The new information released still leaves unclear how far Scottish Ministers were aware this was the case.
As the Bill’s sponsors, the lead responsibility for ensuring discussions happened at the right level of formality and detail, and were properly recorded, lay with the Scottish Government. It was poor practice for a government taking forward a sensitive piece of flagship legislation, in an area known to have reserved and devolved dimensions, to rely entirely on a small group of junior officials, meeting periodically for a general catch-up, without agendas, papers or minutes, to ensure cross-border issues were properly addressed.
The lack of any sort of formal dedicated cross-government working group here is noticeable, especially as the GEO process does not appear to have been seen, or used, by the Scottish Government as a means of engaging with other UK departments as the Bill proceeded. With no minutes, it seems likely no formal papers, and no other UK government departments attending or copied in, these discussions would anyway have been difficult to use for that purpose.
https://murrayblackburnmackenzie.org/2023/09/12/scottish-uk-government-contact-over-the-grr-bill-shedding-more-light-on-the-process/
(Are there really only 3 of them at MBM? How do they get all this work done?!)