Freedom of Information (FOI) statistics: FOI release

Information requested

1) The total number of FOI responses issued by the Scottish Government.

2) The number of FOI responses that were referred to a Special Adviser for review or comment prior to release.

3) The number of FOI responses that were referred for Ministerial approval or sign-off prior to release.

4) If recorded, the number of FOI responses in which any Minister intervened in the substance of the response — for example by amending, delaying, or preventing the release of information. For any instances where a Minister intervened, please also provide:

a) The name of the Minister involved

b) A brief description of the nature of their intervention

c) Whether any documents or information were withheld or edited as a result

Response

For the purposes of responding to this request we have interpreted that the term ‘FOI responses’ refers to both requests and reviews that have been responded to under FOI(S)A and requests and reviews that have been responded to under the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 (EIRS). We have also interpreted the request to mean Requests that were valid and refused in their entirety on exemption grounds and have not included requests that were invalid for such reasons as having no name provided/fake name/contact information.

We have interpreted the timeframe requested as from the 1 January 2024 to the 17 June 2025 when your request was received.

Question 1):

8796 FOI and EIR Requests and Reviews have been issued within this timeframe.

Question 2) and 3):

To provide clarification, cases that are reviewed by Special Advisors and Ministers are those classed as Sensitive under the Criteria for Decision Making. The process for completion of Sensitive requests for information is that, when ready for completion, the case handler sends them first to the SpAds for advice and then to the Minister for official approval.

During the requested period, 513 FOI and EIR Requests and Reviews were assessed as sensitive were reviewed by SpAds and approved by a Minister.

Question 4) a), b) and c):

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 suggest that you may wish to consider reducing the scope of that request in order that the costs can be brought below £600. We suggest that you could specify the subject matter(s) of the FOIs you were interested in or to restrict your request to a specific business area of the Scottish Government. We also suggest that 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.

Usually this can be done in such ways as seeking specific topics or smaller date ranges. I do consider that even a narrowed version of your request is unlikely to provide responses, however, for the reason stated below;

Your request would require a manual search of all requests be carried out. This is because while cases assessed as Sensitive are reviewed by SpAds and signed off by Ministers there are times where the sensitivity of the case file changes during its lifetime and therefore there could be cases that originally were Sensitive that became Routine and vice versa. In order to comply with this, a search of all the records of the Scottish Government including a search of all the individual casefiles for all the requests that have been made to the Scottish Government between January 2024 and June 2025. It may help if I explain that we file our information according to the subject matter, not by reference to instances where the relevant Minister departed from FOI Unit advice with regards to an FOI request.

Therefore, this would require significant public resource to locate, retrieve and provide the information requested. In these circumstances, we have concluded that your current request would clearly impose a significant burden on the Scottish Government.

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.