Procurement card purchases: FOI Review

Information requested

Original request 202500463140

Information regarding the use of procurement cards issued by the Scottish Government for the last full five financial years.

Specifically, I am requesting:

A detailed breakdown of all purchases made using procurement cards, regardless of value, including the following information for each transaction:

Date of transaction
Merchant/supplier name
Amount spent
Description or category of the purchase
If relevant, the minister who the purchase was made for
If possible, department, division, or individual responsible for the expenditure

Can I please have this information displayed in an Excel sheet.

Response

I have now completed my review of our failure to respond to your request under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA). You asked the following:

Information regarding the use of procurement cards issued by the Scottish Government for the last full five financial years.

Specifically, I am requesting:

A detailed breakdown of all purchases made using procurement cards, regardless of value, including the following information for each transaction:

Date of transaction
Merchant/supplier name
Amount spent
Description or category of the purchase
If relevant, the minister who the purchase was made for
If possible, department, division, or individual responsible for the expenditure

Can I please have this information displayed in an Excel sheet.

In accordance with section 21(4) of FOISA, I have also reached a decision on your original request. Please accept our apologies for the delay in responding. The request did not reach the correct area which resulted in a delay in responding.

I can now provide our response to your original request.

Your request asks for information “for the last full five financial years”, however please note that we only hold Procurement Card data for a rolling three year period. Whilst our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the Scottish Government does not hold some of the information you have requested. This is a formal notice under section 17(1) Information not held of FOISA that the Scottish Government does not hold some of the information you have requested.

The data from 1 September 2022 to 31 December 2024 has been released and published as part of a previous Freedom of Information request which is accessible at the following link:- https://www.gov.scot/publications/foi-202500448123/

We have however provided data from 23 April 2022 to 31 August 2022 and from 01 January 2025 to 20 February 2025.

Whilst our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the costs of locating, retrieving and providing all the information requested would exceed the upper cost limit of £600. This is due to the volume of transactions to be reviewed and personal information that would require redaction across 8856 lines of data. 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.

We have though provided the spend and the associated Merchant Category Code (MCC). The MCC descriptions are allocated by the bank to provide a general description of goods/services that the supplier provides.

Should you require transactional descriptions of the purchases made, 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 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.

I would also like to draw your attention to our regular published spend for transactions over £500 for electronic Purchasing Cards (ePC): Government spend over £500: monthly reports - gov.scot and also our monthly and annual reports of Scottish Government spend over £25,000 Government spend over £25,000: monthly and annual reports - gov.scot.

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 202500463239 - Information released - EPC Data

File type

Excel document

File size

324.9 kB