COVID-19 vaccine passport scheme: FOI release

Information requested

1. How much money did the Scot Gov spend overall on the Covid vaccine passport scheme?
2. Breakdown of these costs.
3. Any correspondence between Scot Gov ministers/civil servants and members of the hospitality industry mentioning the Covid vaccine passports from 2021/22.
4. How many users downloaded the app?

Response

Questions 1 & 2
The total cost of the COVID Certification scheme is not held by the Scottish Government as delivery – and therefore costs – is split across a number of different organisations. However, I can confirm that where it is possible to separate costs out, the Scottish Government has allocated £7,036,854.31 to date which I have broken down below.

Description	Cost
Allocation to NHS National Services Scotland for Identify Verification Service for NHS Scotland COVID Status App (Developed by Jumio)	£4,373,360
Allocation to NHS National Services Scotland for the NHS Scotland COVID Status App (Developed by Netcompany)	£2,400,000
Marketing Costs for COVID Certification Scheme	£199,071.66
COVID Certification – Medical Exemption Scheme	£60,895
Publication Costs for COVID Certification Impact Assessments	£3,527.65

Question 3
I have included a copy of the requested information in ANNEX A which can be found attached.

On reviewing the documents, some exemptions have been applied in line with the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002.

The exemptions applied in this instance were:

A small amount of information has been redacted from the documents disclosed under section 38(1)(b) (personal information) of FOISA. This exemption applies because the information is personal data of a third party, i.e. names/contact details of individuals, and disclosing it would contravene the data protection principles in Article 5(1) of the General Data Protection Regulation and in section 34(1) of the Data Protection Act 2018. This exemption is not subject to the ‘public interest test’, so we are not required to consider if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exemption.

Question 4

This is a formal notice under Section 17(1) of FOISA that the Scottish Government does not have the information you have requested.

Public Health Scotland (PHS) publish a weekly COVID-19 Statistical Report which includes data on the number of App downloads, PDF downloads and paper copies of COVID Certificates that have been issued. You can find the latest information on the interactive dashboard which includes data up to midnight on 26 March 2022.

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at http://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.

202200283900 - Annex A

File type

12 page PDF

File size

502.6 kB