Meeting between Director of Rail and Professor Iain Docherty: FOI Review

Information requested

I am requesting a review of case number 202100228760 for:

A list of all meetings that have taken place between Director of Rail, Bill Reeve, and Professor Iain Docherty of Stirling University. From those meetings can you provide:

· Pre meeting briefing(s)
· Agenda
· Venue and list of attendees
· Minutes or notes from meeting
· Post meeting action points

Response

I have concluded that the original decision should be confirmed, with modifications.

In conducting my review, the searches completed at the initial stage were reconsidered and after having completed additional searches, some further information has been identified which falls within the scope of your request. Since March 2020, Bill Reeve, Director of Rail at Transport Scotland, has been involved in three MS Teams academic research survey interviews with Professor Iain Docherty as follows:

20 May 2020 - Covid 19 Transport Response Interview - (not included in the original response)
4 December 2020 - Covid 19 Expert interview
25 May 2021 - Covid Expert Interview

Additionally, you may find it helpful to note that on 22 March 2021 a phone call took place between Bill Reeve and Professor Iain Docherty regarding the Glasgow Connectivity Commission report.

An exemption under section 38(1)(b) of FOISA (personal information) applies to the name of the one other individual who attended the interview meetings noted above because that 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. I apologise that not all of the information was identified for disclosure in reply to your original request. 

As outlined in the previous response to your request, the purpose of the survey interviews was to discuss the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on transport operations and travel patterns. At these survey interviews, Bill Reeve was asked a series of questions as part of what is understood to have been a series of academic research interviews with a number of parties.

Of these meetings which took place between Bill Reeve and Professor Iain Docherty, no pre-meeting briefings, agenda, minutes, meetings notes, or actions were shared with Transport Scotland. The meetings also took place virtually as noted above and therefore we do not hold information in relation tothe location of the meetings. 

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

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.