Costs of Scottish Government's media room: FOI release

Information requested

Full breakdown of costs for the Scottish Government's media room from the last five years, broken down per year.

Response

The Scottish Government has a Media Centre in St Andrews House, Edinburgh - The Media Centre is not solely a ‘media room’. The media centre space is used by the First Minister, Cabinet Secretaries and other Ministers to support briefings and press conferences to the public, the space is also used by core Scottish Government colleagues for other meetings and events.

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the Scottish Government does not have some of the information you have requested. From April 2023 to April 2025 a service contract was in place for all maintenance and service work undertaken within the media centre space and the annual cost for this contract was £7,977. Additional costs are also incurred for improvement works carried out on an ad hoc basis.

The Scottish Government does not have the information you have asked for prior to 2023, this is because we have used a range suppliers for our Media Centre through the Media Services Framework and those contracts included additional services, therefore we are not able to split out the costs prior to 2023 for the Media Centre.

The reason why we cannot provide details of the additional costs is because payment data available for reporting from the Scottish Government financial management system does not provide the level of detail needed to identify costs associated with the media centre.

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.

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.