Scottish Government's procurement activity with suppliers outside of Scotland: FOI release

Information requested

The Scottish Government annual report on procurement activity set out that £16.6 billion was spent on procurement by Scottish public bodies in 2022/23, including £8.9 billion in Scotland.

Procurement activity: annual report 2022 to 2023 - gov.scot

Could you please provide a breakdown showing where the £7.7 billion awarded to suppliers outside of Scotland was spent, broken down by country.

Response

The requested breakdown of reported procurement spend is detailed in the table below and is subject to the following considerations:

• supplier location is based on the registered invoice postcode of that supplier which does not necessarily reflect the supplier’s headquarters or the location of where the supplier manufactured or delivered their goods, works or services;
• the data does not show the impact of public spend flowing through the Scottish supply chain via sub-contracting opportunities.

The full explanation of how this data is compiled and analysed each year, and the limitations of it is available in the methodology section of the Annual Report on Procurement Activity in Scotland 2022 to 2023.

Country/ region Aggregate spend Percent of total reported spend
Scotland	£8,857,215,388	53.3%
England	£7,068,775,687	42.5%
Northern Ireland	£234,487,180	1.4%
Wales	£122,527,851	0.7%
Isle of Man	£5,035,047	0.0%
Channel Islands	£5,184,643	0.0%
Unknown (international, unlisted, or uncategorised*)	£326,807,669	2.0%
GRAND TOTAL	£16,620,033,465

* The Scottish Government does not hold an analysis of the breakdown of this figure. This spend contains in excess of 8,000 lines of data. Producing this analysis would exceed the upper cost limit of £600 set out in Section 12 of FOISA as significant cross-government resource would be required to collate, analyse, and provide data held in multiple systems, estimated at a minimum of 2 minutes per line.

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