Scottish Government staff and contravention of fairness at work: FOI release

Information requested

In your request, you asked for:

Please provide with me a report of the statistics including characteristics of individuals having been found guilty of contravention of fairness at work over a 5 year period. I assume you collect information on punishment, grade, gender, nationality, race etc on those found guilty.

Response

You have asked for information about individuals that have been found guilty of contravention of fairness at work over a 5 year period. This response therefore covers permanent staff employed in the core directorates within the Scottish Government (see Annex A).

Annex A
Core Directorates of the Scottish Government:

• Director-General Constitution and External Affairs
• Director-General Economy
• Director-General Education, Communities and Justice
• Director-General Health and Social Care
• Director-General Organisational Development and Operations
• Director-General Scottish Exchequer

In the 5 year period up to 31 August 2020, 9 individuals had a fairness at work complaint upheld against them (5 male and 4 female).

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance we are unable to provide the remainder of the information you have requested because an exemption under section 38(1)(b) (personal information) of FOISA applies.

This exemption applies because the information is personal data of a third party 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.

With regards to your request for information about nationality and race an exemption under section 17(1) of FOISA also applies. This exemption applies because the information is not held.

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.