Scottish Government Pay Award 2025-26 correspondence and information: FOI release

Information requested

1. ALL internal correspondence from the past 6 months on PAY AWARD 2025 2026.

2. ALL external correspondence from the past 6 months on PAY AWARD 2025 2026.

3. ALL information held on PAY AWARD 2025 2026.

Response

You have requested information in relation to the SG Pay Award 2025-26 over the last 6 months. We have interpreted this request to cover the Scottish Government Core Directorates and those bodies which fall within the Scottish Government Main (SGM ) bargaining unit.

Within SGM a ‘pay award’ is reached once the relevant trade unions have completed their respective governance processes and indicated formal acceptance. The pay award was formally accepted on 29 October 2025. As such, we are providing you with information from that point in time.

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the costs of locating, retrieving and providing the information requested would exceed the upper cost limit of £600. The reason for this is that the breadth of your request is such that it would necessitate a comprehensive search across the whole of the SGM workforce to establish ‘ALL’ internal and external correspondence about the Pay Award 2025-26 (e.g. between individual staff) and all information held, which is not feasible within the resources permitted by the legislation. 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.

You may, however, wish to consider reducing the scope of your request in order that the costs can be brought below £600. For example, you could narrow the focus of your request to correspondence between specific parties or to particular information, as this may allow us to limit the searches that would require to be conducted.

You may also 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.

I have attached some centrally held information and correspondence in relation to the 2025-26 SGM pay award that falls within the scope of your request, such as correspondence between those who have been involved in the pay award process, emails relating to staff communications and extracts from our intranet.

An exemption under section 38(1)(b) of FOISA (personal information) applies to some of the information provided because it is personal data of a third party 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. Additional redactions have been made to documents that included information not relevant to the scope of this request.

In addition, an exemption under section 30(c) of FOISA (prejudice to effective conduct of public affairs) applies to the FOI submission – emails document. Disclosing this information would substantially prejudice our ability to carry out the effective conduct of public affairs. Providing details about the information you have requested into the public domain could, for example, subsequently be used by threat actors, building a picture of our security capability, to evade any controls we might or might not have in place. This could therefore enable them to target specific types of attack or data exfiltration methods and would constitute substantial prejudice to the effective conduct of public affairs.

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 202500492495 - Information released - Annex

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