Scottish Catholic Church communications regarding the COVID pandemic: FOI Review

Information requested

Original request 202500493077

All information and communications generated, received, sent and retained about the COVID Pandemic and/or the elderly, disabled and NHS Nursing personal between the Scottish Government and Scottish Catholic Church regarding the dates of 1/1/2020 all the way through to the date of 1/1/2023 that's a total of three years.

Response

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

All information and communications generated, received, sent and retained about the COVID Pandemic and/or the elderly, disabled and NHS Nursing personal between the Scottish Government and Scottish Catholic Church regarding the dates of 1/1/2020 all the way through to the date of 1/1/2023 that's a total of three years.

I have concluded that a different decision should be submitted. I am providing all information requested that was found to be in scope of your request.

The original response was based on over 8,000 documents being found using various combined search terms and an assessment of how long it would take to review that volume of documents. The search terms were a reasonable and justifiable way to try to identify potential documents.

I have, however, undertaken a different set of search terms, which included "covid", that identified a smaller set of documents. I also checked to ensure that were no documents being double counted across those different searches e.g. the same document might be found twice using searches including the term "elderly" and "disabled" if both terms were in the document.

This narrowed the number of potentially relevant documents down to 69 documents that were potentially in scope. Reviewing that number of documents was achievable within the cost limit. Having reviewed each of those documents, I identified that only one email was within the scope of the above request. I have provided a copy of that along with the guidance documents that were attached to the e-mail.

An exemption under section 38(1)(b) of FOISA (personal information) applies to a small amount of the information requested because it is personal data of a third party, ie names/contact details of individuals 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.

I note that your new, request with amended wording (Ref: 202500497916) has now been responded to also.

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 202500497845 - Information released - Annex

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