Question reference: S5W-31825
- Asked by: Jackie Baillie, MSP for Dumbarton, Scottish Labour
- Date lodged: 15 September 2020
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Current status: Answered by John Swinney on 29 September 2020
Question
To ask the Scottish Government for what reason it can calculate the cost of staff time to answer FOI requests but is unable to provide information to a parliamentary committee regarding the cost of staff time in the work of preparing for the judicial review into the handling of sexual harassment complaints.
Answer
As the Minister for Parliamentary Business & Veterans reported to the Public Audit and Post-legislative Scrutiny Committee on 19 December 2019, we have a rough number for the cost to the Scottish Government of dealing with FOI.
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.
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.