Scottish Government alcohol policy documentation: FOI Review

Information requested

Original Request: 202500476817

Any internal policy, guidance, or recorded discussions on monitoring or limiting alcohol-related expenditure by government departments.

Any correspondence or briefings addressing potential contradictions between alcohol-related spending/investment and Scotland’s public health policies (e.g. Minimum Unit Pricing, alcohol-related harm reduction strategies).

Response

Further to my letter of 11 September 2025, I have now completed my review of our response to your request under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA) regarding policies, guidance, and contradictions around alcohol expenditure.

I have concluded the original response should be confirmed with some modifications.

I have revisited the searches conducted and have found some additional information that is of relevance to part 1 of your original request. In addition to the policies and guidance you were provided with, the Directorate of External Affairs also has a policy on the provision of official hospitality. I have copied and pasted the relevant section below:

Alcohol

• As a rule, alcohol should not be provided during working hours under the cover of official hospitality.
• Where there is an intention to provide alcohol during working hours, approval should be sought in advance from the Deputy Director. On that basis, the provision of alcohol is permitted when official hospitality is being provided at a restaurant/pub or official reception.

You have asked for details of the Directorates asked to search for information. For part 1 of your request, (Any internal policy, guidance, or recorded discussions on monitoring or limiting alcohol-related expenditure by government departments), a trawl for information was carried out across all areas of DG Corporate which includes Directorate of People, Scottish Procurement and Property Directorate, and the Visits and Events team, among others. These areas were provided with the detail of your request to aid in identifying search terms and relevant information. While this identified internal policies and guidance, it did not find any recorded discussions on monitoring or limiting alcohol-related expenditure by government departments. For this review, I have confirmed with these areas that no such information is held.

For part 2 searches were requested from the Alcohol Harm Prevention team, Food and Drink team and the team responsible for the Scottish Industrial Energy Transformation Fund. All search results were checked for relevance to this request. This found no briefings or correspondence addressing potential contradictions between alcohol-related spending/investment and Scotland’s public health policies.

The searches were conducted within relevant individuals' mailboxes, within relevant files of our electronic records data management system and, in the case of identifying policies and guidance around alcohol expenditure, the Scottish Government's intranet. The time period used was 2021 - 2024.

To further expand the search, I conducted a search of all files in our electronic records data management system using the following search terms:

Part 1:

“limiting” and “alcohol spend”

“monitoring” and “alcohol spend”

“limiting” and “alcohol expenditure”

“Monitoring” and “alcohol expenditure”

Part 2:

“policy contradiction” and “alcohol”

I did not find anything that was within the scope of this request.

Therefore, I have concluded that the Scottish Government does not have the information you have asked for because the information does not exist. The Scottish Government does not routinely monitor or record information in relation to limiting alcohol-related expenditure. This is a formal notice under section 17(1) of FOISA that the Scottish Government does not have the information you have requested.

I note that you have asked for more specific information on:

1. Whether any monitoring, compliance reports, or audits exist regarding alcohol expenditure and the “no alcohol” policy.

2. Whether any briefings or communications exist around the January 2024 ePC policy change, which clearly arose from internal discussion.

3. Whether any internal discussions, briefing notes, or submissions exist on the policy contradiction between alcohol promotion and harm-reduction policy.

As 1, 2 and the "internal discussions" aspect of 3 were not part of your original request, I respectfully request that you submit this as a separate FOI request. 

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.