Spend on external consultants for economic or financial advice: FOI release

Information requested

A list of all payments made by the Scottish Government to external consultancy firms or individual consultants for economic or financial advice between 1 January 2023 and 30 June 2024. For each payment, please include:

• The name of the consultant or firm.
• The department or directorate that commissioned the work.
• The purpose of the contract or service provided (as stated in internal documentation).
• The total amount paid.

Response

We are treating your request in four separate parts:

1. The name of the consultant or firm.
2. The department or directorate that commissioned the work.
3. The purpose of the contract or service provided (as stated in internal documentation).
4. The total amount paid.

For parts one, two, and four, we have previously provided information on consultancy spend under two separate FOI requests: 202500470980 - Private consultants expenditure: FOI release - gov.scot and 202400432841 – Private Consultants expenditure: FOI release - gov.scot. The two FOIs noted cover the reporting period of 1st January 2023 to 31st March 2024. The data for the period of 1st April 2024 to 30th June 2024 is not currently available, this will be available later this year. As this information is already publicly available, these parts of your request fall under Section 25(1) – Information otherwise accessible of (Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002).

In response to part three, the previous FOIs listed above where we have provided spend data, however if we were to link the spend provided to the purpose of the contract or service provided, we would pass the limit imposed by Section 12 of FOISA. We are unable to do so due to the volume of data required (21,881 transactions) to be analysed and the cross-government resources needed to reference each individual spend transaction. The spend in the previous FOIs were taken from the Scottish Procurement Information Hub, which is a spend analysis tool, which uses a supplier’s primary business category as the commodity and rolls all spend into that category, even for spend out with that category. Contract information for the criteria requested is unavailable in the Scottish Procurement Information Hub.

However, to try and provide some of the info for part three, we have searched the national procurement advertising portal: Public Contract Scotland (PCS) for Scottish Government contracts that have been identified as relevant to your request by applying key search criteria e.g. finance/ financial/ economic/ economy to both the Contract title and Contract descriptions field. These contracts have been provided in Attachment 1. The list of suppliers in the previous FOIs from fiscal years 22/23 & 23/24 identified the suppliers to be analysed in PCS. The contracts listed were live and/or available to call-off from during the period of your request.

Whilst we are unable to match payments from one system to the other, we have been able to provide the data from two previous FOIs as well as the list of Scottish Government consultancy contracts looking at financial/ economic advice to respond to your request.

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 202500477219 - Information released - Attachment 1

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