Private consultants expenditure: FOI release

Information requested

This is a follow up request to a previous FOI response. Your ref: 202400432841.

Please can you re-answer the same questions asked in the above referenced request, but for the financial years 2023-24 and (if possible) 2024-25.

Response

The Original FOI: 202400432841 was in five parts so we are treating your request in the same five parts:

1. The total expenditure by the Scottish Government on private consultants, broken down by financial year.

2. A breakdown of these consultancy costs by department, including the name of the consultancy firms used, the nature of the work undertaken, and the corresponding costs.

3. A breakdown of the consultancy costs related to any significant government projects or programmes, such as (but not limited to) the National Care Service, the Deposit Return Scheme, and the implementation of the Scottish Child Payment.

4. Information on any contracts awarded to private consultants without a competitive tendering process, including the reasons for doing so.

5. Details of any future projections or budget allocations for consultancy services over the next two financial years (2023-24 and 2024-25), if available.

For consistency we have answered this FOI in the same way that we did for 202400432841. We have provided data for 2023-24, the data for 2024-25 is not currently available, this is expected to be available later this fiscal year.

Part one:

In response to no. 1, we have added attachment 1 with the data for 2023/24. This dataset has been sourced from the Scottish Government’s Procurement Information Hub and includes all spend with suppliers classified as consultants using the Vendor Category commodity as the identifier.

Please note that this provides total spend with suppliers who’s main business activity is classified as “consultancy” but this does not mean that the services provided were consultancy services. Supplier classification attributes the main area of business of the supplier and is derived from publicly available data, for example, companies house. Therefore, a supplier marked as consultant may have delivered other services e.g. IT system implementation. As such, it may not align with other Scottish
Government publications on consultancy spend or reflect the specific goods or services procured from each supplier.

Published details on annual Scottish Government spending in financial years which includes spend on Consultancy Services can be found here - Government expenditure: 2016 to 2023 - gov.scot. This is due to be updated with spend for the 2023/2024 financial year later this calendar year.

Part two:

In response to request no. 2, we have broken down spend with suppliers whose main business area of business is Consultancy by Directorate, including the name of the consultancy firm used, this can be seen in attachment two. This data has been downloaded from the Scottish Government’s Procurement Information Hub and filtered on consultancy suppliers to provide all relevant and available data. As outlined in response to part one – this is not actual spend on Consultancy services.

This data has been filtered to Directorate level only due to the high volume of transactional data requested. To carry out the necessary data analysis of providing line-item detail (e.g. for 1,568 transactions) would mean that Section 12 of Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA) would apply, meaning the time taken to carry out this analysis would breach the cost criteria limit and take more than the 60 hours to collate and analyse.

Part three:

In response to request no. 3, the scope of the request is too wide and falls under Section 12 of Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA) as the provision of the data would take the request beyond the limit.

Should you still wish to obtain this data you can submit a further FOI narrowing the parameters e.g. shorter period.

Part Four:

In response to request no. 4, please see attachment three. The data is in relation to actual consultancy services where the contract has been identified as consultancy services on their Non-Competitive Action (NCA).

Where appropriate the names have been redacted as per section 38(1)(b) of FOISA (personal information) which applies to a small amount of the information requested because it is personal data of a third party i.e. names of individuals. Disclosing this information would contravene the data protection principles in Article 5(1) of the General Data Protection Regulation and in section 34(1) of the Data Protection Act 2018.

This exemption is not subject to the ‘Public Interest test,’ so we are not required to consider if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exemption.

Part Five:

Regarding request no. 5, Section 17 of FOISA is being applied. The Scottish Government does not hold the data to the level of granularity requested relating to consultancy spend within budget forecasting.

All data has been reviewed, and specific names of individuals have been redacted to adhere to General Data Protection Regulations

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.

You may 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.

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 202500470980 - Information released - Attachments 1 - 3

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