Correspondence with CEO of Business for Scotland and Believe in Scotland: FOI release
Information request and response under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002
Information requested
Please provide copies of all email correspondence between the Scottish Government (including Ministers, Civil servants, and Special Advisers) and Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp, CEO of Business for Scotland and Believe in Scotland, 1st May 2021 - date.
Response
Searches were conducted across the email records of all Scottish Government Ministers and Special Advisers, along with the Scottish Government’s internal systems for records management and correspondence. Various items of information were identified from these searches and are enclosed in Annex A and separately with this letter.
An exemption under section 38(1)(b) (Personal Information) of FOISA applies to some of the information requested. This is because it 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.
In order to fully comply with your request however, we would have to conduct searches across the email records of every Scottish Government civil servant, which would not be possible to do within the upper cost limit of £600. 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. For example, you could restrict your request to a specific business area of the Scottish Government as this would allow us to limit the searches that would require to be conducted. You may also find it helpful to look at the Scottish Information Commissioner’s ‘Tips for requesting information under FOI and the EIRs’ at:
http://www.itspublicknowledge.info/YourRights/Tipsforrequesters.aspx.
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.
Contact
Please quote the FOI reference
Central Enquiry Unit
Email: ceu@gov.scot
Phone: 0300 244 4000
The Scottish Government
St Andrews House
Regent Road
Edinburgh
EH1 3DG
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