Temporary accommodation to Ukrainian Refugees: FOI release

Information requested

1. All information relating to communication or consultation with local stakeholders about the plan to house refugees on a boat in Leith. This may be anyone who could have an interest in the decision, community groups, councils, health boards, local medical or dental practices, transport bodies and charities such as food banks, humanitarian charities etc. Please provide any details about the communication, including but not limited to emails, letters, text/whatsapp messages, and minutes of meetings or phone calls. Please provide this from the first date of any such communication up to 19/07/2022.

2. Details of any additional money being allocated to any public services in the Edinburgh or Leith area as a result of the decision to house refugees on the MS Victoria.

Response

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the costs of locating, retrieving and providing the information in the first part of your request would exceed the upper cost limit of £600. There is a large volume of documents and correspondence held in our Electronic Documents Record Management system and within email inboxes of staff working on the Ukraine programme that could be relevant to your request. We have calculated that searching our records and asking colleagues to carry out specific inbox searches for this information would exceed the cost limit. 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 by specifying a more detailed matter. 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.

In the second part of your request, you asked details of any additional money being allocated to public services in Edinburgh or Leith as a result of the decision to house displaced people from Ukraine on the MS Victoria. No specific funding is flowing to Edinburgh as a direct result of the ship, however funding to local authorities on a per-person arrival basis is being carried out by the UK Government.

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.