Scottish Government office equipment spend: FOI release

Information requested

In each year since 2019-20, including the current year to date, how much has the Scottish Government spent on office equipment. Please break this down into relevant categories like: stationary, furniture, IT equipment etc.

Response

In response to your request, attachment 1 provides a breakdown of how much the Scottish Government has spent on office equipment since 2019-20. A high-level summary is below.

Fiscal Year	Spend
2019/2020	£17,409,469.09
2020/2021	£14,269,482.43
2021/2022	£10,925,708.24
2022/2023	£9,078,539.42
2023/2024	£6,912,130.34
Total	£58,595,329.52

We do not have a definition for “office equipment” and the FoI request was not definitive, however, we have provided a comprehensive list as per the spend data categories available in the Procurement Information Hub for the last five financial years, where the data is available (2019-20 to 2023-24). We have used the lowest spend category level available in the Procurement Information Hub, including all of the specific categories relevant to spend representation on “Office Furniture” as per attachment 1. Office furniture category is wide ranging including textiles and telephony etc, driven by the user and spend description available in our finance system that is mapped to the Procurement Information Hub.

The data for FY 2024-25 is currently unavailable from the Procurement Information Hub, however will be available at a future date post year end. If we were to try and provide this data, at this stage, it would undertake a significant manual exercise and exceed the cost limit set out in Section 12 of FOISA. Significant crossgovernment resource would be required to collate, analyse and redact the raw data from over 50,000 transactions held in multiple systems. It is estimated that the required analysis would equate to a minimum of 2 minutes per line therefore far exceeding the upper cost limit of £600.

Should you require the spend data for FY 2024-25, you may wish to consider reducing the scope of your request in order that the costs can be brought below £600. For example, you could specify the subject matter(s) you are interested in or 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 could also submit another FOI request later this calendar year around Autumn for the data to be available for FY 2024-25.

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.

FOI 202500450646 - Information released - Attachment 1

File type

PDF

File size

155.5 kB