Cambridge Analytica: FOI release

FOI reference: FOI/18/01008
Date received: 28 March 2018
Date responded: 19 April 2018

Information requested

You asked for the details and evidence of any contact that the Scottish Government has had with Cambridge Analytica, including any invoices for contracts or submissions from Cambridge Analytica for work.

Response

Specifically regarding the second part of your question, I confirm that the Scottish Government has no record of any contracts with, nor any invoices or submissions from, Cambridge Analytica. This is because we have no contracts with either Cambridge Analytica, or their parent company SCL, and have purchased no services from them.

This is a formal notice under section 17(1) of FOISA that the Scottish Government does not have the information you have requested in this part of your request.

Regarding the first part of your request ("details and evidence of any contact"), while our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the costs of locating, retrieving and providing the information requested would exceed the upper cost limit of £600. The reason for this is that to locate and retrieve that information we would need to conduct a search of all of the records of the Scottish Government. It may help if I explain that we file our information according to the subject matter, not by reference to the names of organisations with whom we have corresponded. Under section 12 of FOISA public authorities are not required to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying would exceed the upper cost limit, which is currently set at £600 by Regulations made under section 12.

You may, however, wish to consider reducing the scope of your request in order that the costs can be brought below £600. For example, you could specify the subject matter(s) of the correspondence you are interested in or restrict your request to a specific business area of the Scottish Government, as this would allow us to limit the searches that would require to be conducted. You may also find it helpful to look at the Scottish Information Commissioner's 'Tips for requesting information under FOI and the EIRs' on his website at:

http://www.itspublicknowledge.info/YourRights/Tipsforrequesters.aspx.

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