Social Security Scotland third party expenditure: FOI release
- Published
- 20 January 2025
- FOI reference
- FOI/202400441413
- Date received
- 19 November 2024
- Date responded
- 18 December 2024
Information request and response under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002.
Information requested
In the Scottish Government’s Public Bodies’ corporate function microdata as of 2022/23 release here (https://www.gov.scot/publications/public-bodies-corporate-function-data-data-as-at-financial-year-2022-23/), in the ‘Third Party Expenditure’ column, it shows your total third party expenditure is £107,410,000 for 2022/23.
Please provide the following information:
Request for information 1: An account of whether this figure shows outturn for 2022-23 or budget.
Request for information 2: An account of what this expenditure is for and what it delivers.
Request for information 3: Total third party expenditure by you, by financial year, from 2015 to present.
Request for information 4: A breakdown of the £107m figure in 2022-23 by third party.
Request for information 5: A breakdown of the £107m figure in 2022-23 by contract, with name of contracted party(s) and name and purpose and total value (not just including that year) of contract.
Request for information 6: A breakdown of the £107m figure in 2022-23 by spend area.
Response
Request for information 1 and 2:
The costs quoted are part of our outturn.
Some of the information you have requested is available from the guidance note “Spend Managed by the Function: Third Party Expenditure” on the “Guidance on completion” tab of the published document https://www.gov.scot/publications/public-bodies-corporate-function-data-data-as-at-financial-year-2022-23/.
Third party spend refers to the total spend on goods and services provided by external suppliers within the organisation. It is the total annual value of payments (excluding VAT) made to third party suppliers for purchase of goods and services, including payments to public sector organisations for direct provision of goods and services.
Third party spend includes:
- goods, such as office supplies and ICT equipment
- services, such as facilities management, professional services, travel and subsistence
- works, such as construction
- utilities, energy and waste
Third party spend excludes payroll costs, non-cash expenditure (e.g. depreciation), grants and benefit payments, accruals and receipts, but includes spending on non-payroll staff, capital expenditure and programme spend on commodities and services.
Requests for information 3,4,5 and 6:
While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the costs of locating, retrieving and providing the information requested would exceed the upper cost limit of £600. We have a number of different types of transactions which would require manual review for accuracy, what is categorised as Third Party Expenditure, and the removal of any VAT applicable. This would require inspection of a large volume of invoices prior to publishing and to ensure consistency. Electronic Purchasing Card (ePC) transactions are paid separately and would need to be investigated further. We would also need to manually interrogate information from our purchasing tool, in order to allocate each invoice to a specific contract.
Work would also have to be done to redact commercially sensitive and personal information.
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 eg by requesting information on a more specific spend such as accommodation costs or IT systems. 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
You may find it helpful to know that we publish details of all expenditure over £25,000, and all ePC transactions over £500 on our official publications page at Social Security Scotland.
About FOI
The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at https://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.
Contact
Please quote the FOI reference
Central Correspondence Unit
Email: contactus@gov.scot
Phone: 0300 244 4000
The Scottish Government
St Andrew's House
Regent Road
Edinburgh
EH1 3DG
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