Scottish Prison Service Executive Team reports and meeting information: FOI release
Information request and response under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002.
Information requested
All reports to and minutes of meetings between any member of the Executive Management Group of SPS and the Scottish Ministers and/or representative of the Scottish Government for the period 1 April, 2024 to 31 March, 2025.
Response
In our response to your previous request, we provided advice on how you can refine your ask to allow for information to be provided to you. As you have submitted another request with a broad timeline and scope of participants involved from the Scottish Government, this present request also exceeds the upper cost limit of £600 due to the time needing to be taken to locate, retrieve and provide the information requested.
As previously advised, 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.
Your ask would require many teams and individuals in the Scottish Government to investigate their calendars and our internal systems to retrieve dates, times, members, and minutes of meetings over a 12-month period, an ask which is not insignificant. In Annex A and Annex B, I have provided a breakdown of the calculations taken for this present request and your previous request, to demonstrate the estimated number of meetings that have taken place between the Scottish Government and members of the Scottish Prison Service Executive Team. Please be advised the calculations are not exact, and there is a likelihood that there are more meetings than found in this scoping exercise.
For further information, it may help if I explain that we file our information according to the subject matter, not by reference to the names of individuals. Therefore, our searches for the relevant person would also bring up all documents and communications recorded where the relevant person was included in any form (such as a recipient or sender of correspondence or a mention in document that we may hold).
In addition, our eRDM search system will seek all the keywords and terms that we search for and aim to find them in any document or correspondence saved. For example, it is possible that a single email mentioning or including a named individual, may spawn several other email chains, as the discussions evolve, therefore generating multiple documents that are still technically in scope of your request because they continue to retain said mention.
Whilst there are only seven members of the SPS Executive Team, they meet with officials and Ministers across the Scottish Government for a range of reasons. As previously advised, you may wish to refine your ask to a smaller timeframe, or to include specific teams, topics of meeting, or member of the SPS Executive Team to allow for the costs of your request to be brought below the £600 threshold, and allow us to provide this information to you.
This concludes our response to your 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.
Contact
Please quote the FOI reference
Central Correspondence Unit
Email: contactus@gov.scot
Phone: 0300 244 4000
The Scottish Government
St Andrew's House
Regent Road
Edinburgh
EH1 3DG