Briefing documents prepared for the First Minister containing the phrase “full fiscal autonomy”: FOI release

Information requested

For each calendar year since 2014, how many briefing documents were prepared for the First Minister which included the phrase “full fiscal autonomy”?

Response

The Scottish Government does not have a centrally held record of every document a particular Minister has ever received, and documents are filed in accordance with their subject matter as opposed to specific phrases contained in them. Additionally, manually checking the content and recipients of every internal briefing document created by the Scottish Government since 2014 would not be possible to do within the upper cost limit in FOISA. We have therefore conducted what we consider to be the most proportional searches that can be done within the upper cost limit. As such, searches were conducted across the Scottish Government’s electronic records management system using the phrases “full fiscal autonomy” and “First Minister” between 1 January 2014 – 30 March 2025. The findings are presented in the table below.

Year	Number of Documents identified
2014	1
2015	16
2016	0
2017	0
2018	0
2019	0
2020	0
2021	6
2022	1
2023	0
2024	0
2025	0

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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.