Percentage of freedom of information requests refused on cost grounds: FOI review

Information requested

For each of the past five years

1. How many FOI requests, by number and percentage of all FOI requests, are refused on these grounds?

2. What percentage of the refusals are followed up with a refined request from the member of the Public?

3. What percentage of the refusals are followed up by a request for a review and what are the outcomes of are those reviews?

Response

I have concluded that the original decision should be partially overturned, for the reasons set out below.

As set out in our initial response to your request, section 12 may be applied to a whole request or to individual elements of a multi-part request. This means we might respond to several parts of a request, while refusing other parts.

As we also explained, we are required to submit quarterly statistics to the Scottish Information Commissioner, which provides amongst other data, an absolute number confirming how many times we have applied the cost limit. However, that does not differentiate between cases that have been wholly refused (like your original request, 202100170102) and those where only some elements have been refused. We have no business requirement to gather data on how many cases have been refused, wholly through application of section 12, so our case management system does not provide management information to answer this question.

At the time of your original request, we would therefore have had to check each casefile individually to determine if some or all aspects of it were refused on cost grounds.

However, since your initial request was submitted, the company supporting our case-management system has provided us with:

• A facility - separate from our standard reports - to download information from our current casemanagement system, MiCase, which was fully implemented by early 2020.
• A data dump, from January 2017 to March 2020, of our previous case-management system, which was decommissioned in early 2020.

It is now possible for us to use these analytical tools to identify most of the information from our current and legacy FOI tracking systems in relation to questions 1 and 3 of your request.

1. How many FOI requests, by number and percentage of all FOI requests, are refused on these grounds?

Most of the information, as recorded in our case-management systems by case-handlers, you requested is set out below. This relates to cases wholly refused under Section 12(1), and does not include cases refused under a number of different exemptions or where some information was released. The figures also contain a small amount of data from bodies, like the National Records of Scotland, which use our case-management system, though they are not covered by the Scottish Government’s FOI designation.
 

Year (1 April - 31 March)	Total number of cases answered	Cases wholly refused under S12(1)	% of cases refused under S12(1)
2016/17 (final quarter)	778	16	3%
2017/18	3275	161	5%
2018/19	3047	172	6%
2019/20	1894	80	4.2%
	1692	34	2%
2020/21	4720	203	4.3%

As noted above, the Scottish Government introduced a new case management system, Micase, in 2019/20. We have provided data for that year in two parts, reflecting data extracted from the previous FOI tracker and from Micase.

3. What percentage of the refusals are followed up by a request for a review and what are the outcomes of are those reviews?

Most of the information, as recorded in our case-management systems by case-handlers, you requested is set out below. This relates to cases wholly refused under Section 12(1), and does not include cases refused under a number of different exemptions or where some information was released. The figures also contain a small amount of data from bodies, like the National Records of Scotland, which use our case-management system, though they are not covered by the Scottish Government’s FOI designation.
 

Year	Cases wholly refused under S12(1)	Number of cases wholly refused under S12(1) resulting in a review	Decision Overturned	Decision Partially Upheld	Decision Upheld
2016/17	16	1	0	0	1
2017/18	161	17	2	2	13
2018/19	172	16	0	2	14
2019/20	80	3	1	1	1
	34	2	0	2	0
2020/21	203	4	1	0	3

Please note that the Scottish Government introduced a new case management system, Micase, in 2019/20. We have provided data for that year in two parts, reflecting data extracted from the FOI tracker and from Micase.

2. What percentage of the refusals are followed up with a refined request from the member of the Public?

I have considered whether the additional data now available would allow us to provide you with the information requested in point 2 within the cost limit. As set out previously, we have no business need to monitor whether requests rejected under section 12 are followed up with refined requests. While the data downloads provide a very brief summary of the content of each case, they do not provide enough detail to enable us to confirm this. We would therefore need to manually check the casefiles for each request received from individuals after they had received a section 12 response to determine this information.

As set out previously, this would significantly exceed out upper cost limit of £600. On that basis, I have upheld this part of our response to your initial request.

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.