MORE than 15,000 requests under freedom of information legislation were made to Scotland's public bodies in three months, according to the first dataset of its kind.

The Scottish Information Commissioner said there were 15,340 applications for information submitted between April 1 and June 30 this year. Rosemary Agnew, the commissioner, said she received 155 appeals in the same quarter, representing around 1% of all requests.

The Police Service of Scotland received 562 requests, which was the highest number reported by one public body, and 109 of its responses were given after the 20 working day limit. Aberdeen University failed to respond to 22 out of 68 FoI requests.

Ms Agnew said: "This is exactly the kind of contextual information I have never had access to before, and which will help all of us better understand information requests"