Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland news release query: FOI Review

Information requested

Original request 202500485618

This request relates to the following news release:

https://www.gov.scot/news/devolved-revenue-grows-faster-than-expenditure/

Please provide the identity of the person who wrote the words attributed to Shona Robison in the above news release. If that person cannot be named, please provide their job title.

Response

I have now completed my review of our response to your request number 202500485618 under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA) for:-

This request relates to the following news release:

https://www.gov.scot/news/devolved-revenue-grows-faster-than-expenditure/

Please provide the identity of the person who wrote the words attributed to Shona Robison in the above news release. If that person cannot be named, please provide their job title.

You subsequently requested a review as follows: -

“Please review the above referenced FOI response. It is not credible that nobody inside the Scottish Government knows who wrote the words attributed to Shona Robison. That news release was published just a few weeks ago. Somebody must remember who wrote it.”

I note from the response to your original request, 202500485618, we provided you with all of the information relating to the drafting of the news release in response to your previous FoI number 202500480132. This is available at https://www.gov.scot/publications/foi-202500480132/

As part of the review, a further trawl was conducted. A staff member who was asked to search initially, and was assumed to not hold information as they did not reply to the search, has since confirmed they hold information in scope of the request. That confirmed that the news release was drafted by a Scottish Government (SG) communications official, which is the case for SG news releases. Whilst we cannot provide the identity of the person who wrote the news release, we can confirm it was a SG communications officer.

The name of the official has been withheld under 38(1)(b) of FOISA as because it is personal data of a third party, ie the name of a junior official, and disclosing it would contravene the data protection principles in Article 5(1) of the General Data Protection Regulation and in section 34(1) of the Data Protection Act 2018. This exemption is not subject to the ‘public interest test’, so we are not required to consider if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exemption.

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