Information on the CivTech programme: FOI Review

Information requested

Information on the CivTech programme.

Please provide a list of all participants and sponsoring organisations since the programme started.

Please include:
1. name of the applicant organisation
2. their registration number (such as Companies House number)
3. their business address
4. CivTech round
5. challenge sponsor
6. challenge question
7. proposed solution
8. stage reached (exploration, accelerator or development stage or challenger winner)
9. whether a pre-commercial agreement (PCA) was signed with the sponsor
10. value of the PCA
11. whether any further agreements have been signed with the sponsor
12. value of those further agrements
13. whether the proposed solution is currently in use by the challenge sponsor

I'd like to receive this information in an tabular format such as an csv file.

Response

I have concluded that a new decision should be substituted.

Request 1: FOISA allows the inquirer to specify the format of the requested information. I have specified I would like to receive the information in a tabular format such as CSV or XLSX. You have clearly compiled the information in a spreadsheet before you saved it as a PDF. If you look at
participants' names carefully in the supplied document, you will also notice that some of them were cut off in the process of saving the document to PDF and are therefore incomplete. Can you please provide the original spreadsheet?

The information you requested has now been supplied as an Excel (xlsx) spreadsheet with all columns corrected to show complete information, which I have attached.

Request 2: Under section 25(1) of FOISA, you refused to supply information to questions 2 and 3 and have directed me to Companies House website to search for the information. The participants' names you provided are often not their official business names. Some names are missing their company incorporation type. As I mentioned in point 1, some of the names in the document are also incomplete. The names you provided are therefore not sufficient to identify the business entities that are represented by them. For this I require either their Company House registration numbers or their
business addresses. Can you please provide them? In the unlikely event that you have not collected them with the programme application, you may provide the websites given in the application.

I have established that as applicants to the CivTech programme do not necessarily have to form companies until the Accelerator stage, the Programme Team will not have Companies House registration numbers for all applicants. I requested that they collate and supply all registration numbers and business addresses that they do hold. These are now included in the spreadsheet.

Request 3: Under section 25(1) of FOISA, you refused to supply information to questions 9 to 12 and have directed me to Public Contracts Scotland website. I understand that public contracts, despite the best intentions to do so, sometimes do not get published. I would therefore like to ask for a review of the published contracts to ascertain if all the contracts between participants and the challenge sponsors to date were indeed published on PCS. Please note that my question relates to all the contracts between the sponsors and the participants and not just those from the CivTech
programme.

I have reviewed the original FOI documentation and requested confirmation that all contracts where the Scottish Government were the sponsors were uploaded to Public Contracts Scotland (PCS). I have received confirmation as follows:

All regulated contracts for goods and services with an anticipated value of £50,000 and above (excluding VAT) and for contracts for works with an anticipated value of £2,000,000 and above (excluding VAT) must be advertised on the Public Contracts Scotland advertising portal (PCS). The value of the contract is the total amount, net of VAT, which the Scottish Government expects to pay over the full duration of the contract (including any options to extend).

All contracts with an anticipated value of less than £50,000 but above £5,000 (excluding VAT) will require a DPO to use Quick Quote (an online competition process within PCS). As such, contract award notices for all contracts processed via PCS, either via the Quick Quote functionality, or as open competition should have a contract award notice published via PCS. Contract Award Notices for Pre Commercial Agreements awarded by CivTech will be registered on to PCS up to 18 months to 24 months after the Contract Notice – as the Exploration and Accelerator stages can take this amount of time to be completed.

This process is the same for both Scottish Government and sponsor organisations.

The information requested can be found on PCS at https://www.publiccontractsscotland.gov.uk/Search/Search_MainPage.aspx under the “Search Notices
Section”, by typing CivTech as a Keyword and selecting the tick box to include archived contracts.  User Guides and videos on how to download data in different formats can be found here: https://www.publiccontractsscotland.gov.uk/helpandresources/userguides

There is a value threshold of £5000 for contract awards to companies participating in the CivTech process, therefore there will be no contracts issued below this value. There is a maximum contract value for any given challenge and this includes all exploration stage payments, accelerator stage payments, accelerator extensions, pre-commercial work, and any pre-commercial extensions.

Request 4: Under section 25(1) of FOISA, you refused to supply information to question 13 and have directed me to Public Contracts Scotland website. I believe PCS website does not list the
software or workflow methods currently in use by public agencies and that this information is therefore not publicly available to me. Can you please provide this information?

CivTech is a Scottish Government programme. The CivTech solutions may be implemented by single or multiple organisations, and/or adopted by other public sector organisations such as local councils. In addition, some solutions may be applied in commercially confidential circumstances. I requested that CivTech team collate and supply all the information about solution applications that they have access to. This is now included in the attached spreadsheet. However, you may need to contact some organisations separately.

On behalf of the Scottish Government I apologise for the initial supply of incomplete data not in your preferred format, and for the delay in finalising this review.

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.

Annex A

File type

Excel document

File size

103.8 kB