Mr. Niall Burgess:

I will be brief since I am conscious of time. Shortly after our initial conversation in February, I came back to the Minister and told him that I had seen that the Biden Administration was appointing a special envoy for LGBTI+ rights. I said that I was going to explore whether value could be taken from a similar mechanism in the Department's work. That work was initiated quickly and was under way through March. I did so while conscious of the scale of work across the Department in supporting LGBTI+ rights. The committee has an indication of that scale in tab 16, which contains a report with an update to the implementation committee on LGBTI+ inclusion on the work across the Department. That work continued until near the end of March. When that work was concluded, I asked our political director to examine that further through the prism of our wider human rights work. That work took about another month. During those two months, the Minister and I had no further discussions and there was no political input into the tasking or development of the mandate.