THE Scottish Government is refusing freedom of information requests on cost grounds based on a “rough” eight-year-old estimate of staff time, it has emerged.
John Swinney made the admission in a parliamentary answer about the Holyrood inquiry into Alex Salmond’s civil legal battle with the Scottish Government.
The Government spent £512,250 covering Mr Salmond’s costs after he won a judicial review in 2019 into a botched Government sexual misconduct probe into him the previous year.
The Government also spent around £118,000 on external legal advice.
But it has never produced even an estimated figure for the cost of tasking civil servants and in-house lawyers to work on the case, claiming it is impossible to calculate.
Labour MSP Jackie Baillie used a parliamentary written question to asked Mr Swinney why the Government was unable to estimate this cost when it routinely estimated staff costs when deciding whether to answer FoI requests.
The Government can refuse FoI requests if they would cost more than £600 to answer, a number based broadly on 40 hours of work at £15 an hour.
In his reply, the deputy First Minister said the FoI figure was a “rough number” based on a “bespoke exercise” eight years ago that could not be applied to litigation costs.
He said: “In 2012, the Scottish Government undertook an exercise aimed at evaluating the cost of dealing with FoI.
“Dealing with an FoI request generally involves following a number of distinct steps and work was carried out on a sample of cases to estimate how much time, broken down by staff band, was spent on each step.
“This was used to develop an estimate of the cost for handling requests, reviews and appeals. The figures were uprated for inflation in 2019.
“This approach was a bespoke exercise that looked at the steps in handling an FoI and the Scottish Government has not conducted a similar exercise for conducting litigation.”
With FoI now 15 years old in Scotland, constantly improving Government handling of FoI would cast doubt on whether the eight-year-old formula is still suitable.
Mr Swinney went on: “Staff working on responding to the judicial review are civil servants who receive a salary rather than being separately remunerated for dealing with particular matters.
“In addition, they do not record the proportion of their time that they spend working on particular matters as a matter of course. It is therefore not possible to say how many hours were spent by civil servants involved in this work.”
Last year, Gerry Hendricks, head of the Government’s FoI unit, told Holyrood’s Public Audit Committee the staff time formula was updated “not particularly scientifically” in 2018.
He told MSPs: “We did some work back in 2012 and updated that - not particularly scientifically - last year. The average cost of a request is £234 for the Scottish Government.
“We have not looked at that for any other authorities.
“We are working with our analytical services people just now in the hope that they will be able to carry out some more detailed work, probably in April/May [2020], because we are introducing a new case-handling system.
“That new start should give us a better way of measuring how much a request costs, so we hope to get clearer information.”
However the coronavirus pandemic had a major impact on the Government’s FoI work, with response times slowing up significantly during lockdown.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel