Scottish Government Media Monitoring Unit annual outturn: FOI release

Information requested

• Please provide, from 2016-17 to present, the Scottish Government’s annual outturn on its Media Monitoring Unit. For years where you do not have outturn figures, please indicate this, and provide estimates and/or budgeted spend. If this unit has a budget for 2025-26, please provide this. Please break down these outturn figures into staffing costs and other costs, breaking down these other costs into further categories where appropriate.
• Please also provide, from 2016-17 to present, the Scottish Government’s annual expenditure on third party media monitoring services. For example, on page 192 of Scottish Government FOI response 202500453893, “Annex 17 February 2025”, it is listed that local broadcast summaries are provided to ministers ‘powered by precise’, which presumably refers to a third party service. Please also explain what exactly ‘powered by Precise’ means in this context. Please provide this result in excel spreadsheet format.

Response

Q1, The Scottish Government has a small media monitoring unit (MMU; employing 3 FTE), please find attached excel spreadsheet with the annual outturn figures for the Media Monitoring Unit from 2016-17 to present (2024-25).

The Media Monitoring Unit has no specific budget and no other associated costs other than staffing salary costs. Other spend to support the work of this function is met from the wider Communications budget. Staffing costs provided include employer's pension contributions and employer's National Insurance contributions.

Q2, We have detailed our Media Services Framework contract and the services provided by Precise Media Monitoring Ltd (trading as Onclusive) within a previous FOI response linked below. The phrase "Powered by Precise" refers to Precise Media Services, which operates under the name Onclusive.

This phrase indicates the source of the information, specifically local broadcast summaries provided under Lot One of the Media Services Framework.

The Scottish Government does not have the information you have asked for prior to 2019, this is because we used a range suppliers for Media Monitoring through the Media Services Framework and those contracts included additional services, therefore we are not able to split out the costs for Media Monitoring prior to 2019. This is a formal notice under section 17(1) of FOISA that the Scottish Government does not have some of the information you have requested.

The total value of payments for the externally sourced media monitoring services, including standing charges and unit fees (e.g. per unique newspaper article), from 2019 onwards are as follows:

• 2019-2023 - Scottish Government media and social media monitoring: FOI release - gov.scot
• 2023-24 (full year) – £57,402
• 2024-25 - £66,299

In order to access press cuttings, the Scottish Government pays a separate fee to the Newspaper Licensing Agency, with the payments over the last five years as follows:

• 2019-2023 – Scottish Government media and social media monitoring: FOI release - gov.scot
• 2024-25 - £27,542

About FOI

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FOI 202500460129 - Information Released - Annex

File type

Excel document

File size

12.3 kB