Civil servants working on the proposed referendum on October: FOI release

Information requested

How many civil servants and at what cost to the Scottish government will the proposed referendum on 19th October?

Response

The Referendums Scotland Bill team is a team of four civil servants in the Scottish Government’s Constitution and Cabinet Directorate. Work related to the 2021 Programme for Government commitment to take forward a referendum within the term of this Parliament is led by this team. A small number of other civil servants have been involved in the wider work on referendum legislation and other preparations for the proposed referendum, but as civil servants are not required to record the time spent on individual tasks we cannot provide an exact figure.

Some of the information you have requested is available from the Scottish Government website and the Scottish Parliament website. Under section 25(1) of FOISA, we do not have to give you information which is already reasonably accessible to you. However, in the interests of being helpful, we have provided the link to the relevant material below:

The Resource Spending Review, published on 31 May 2022, included a £20m provisional allocation for the non Scottish Government costs of an independence referendum for the 2023-24 financial year. This can be found at the following link: Investing in Scotland's Future: Resource Spending Review - gov.scot (www.gov.scot) Further estimates will be published when an independence referendum bill is introduced in the Scottish Parliament.

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.

FOI 202200315576 - Information released

File type

1 page PDF

File size

69.8 kB