Staff feedback on election guidance: FOI release

Information requested

1) Any correspondence including Teams messages, emails, or intranet posts or comments on or to the Election 2026 Internal Readiness Project Board.

2) Any actions note, agendas, meeting minutes, or documents prepared for or distributed by the board, including any summaries of findings or survey results.

3) Any responses from civil servants to calls for responses or surveys or other types of information gathering from the Cabinet Secretariat in change of internal readiness for the Scottish Parliament's election in May, pr the internal readiness project board.

Response

I enclose a copy of some of the information you requested. As your FOI request was in three parts, I have explained the information released and exemptions applied for each part of your request.

Part 1- Correspondence

The cost exemption has been applied to the first part of your request, as the total cost to retrieve and release the information you have requested would exceed the cost limit of £600. To apply the exemption, we have conducted all the searches and calculated the time taken for a sample of the documents. It was estimated that your request would take between 84 and 152 hours to be completed as more than 1500 items of correspondence were identified. This means the total cost of your request would be between £1260 and £2280.

You can submit a new request and reduce the scope of your request, for instance by specifying a smaller time window, or specific correspondents.

Part 2- Board Documentation

The cost exemption has been applied to the second part of your request, as the total cost to retrieve and release the information you have requested would exceed the cost limit of £600. To apply the exemption, we have conducted all the searches and calculated the time taken for a sample of the documents. It was estimated that your request would take 43 hours and 20 minutes to complete, as 65 documents were identified, and all of them require redaction. It was estimated that each document would take an average of 35 minutes to physically redact and processed to be made ready for release. This does not include the time needed to do the searches and retrieve the documents. This means the total cost of your request would be around £650.

The request returned the following main types of documents: actions notes, substantive papers, update reports to senior leadership, email invitations to the Board meetings (which include updates with the agenda).

You can submit a new request and reduce the scope of your request, for instance by choosing a specific category of documents you are interested in from the list above.

Part 3- Surveys

This request returned one document in scope, which is the results of the survey conducted by Cabinet Secretariat as part of the delivery of sessions for all staff about the published Election Guidance.

While our aim is to provide all the information whenever possible, in this instance we are unable to provide some of the information you have requested because an exemption(s) under sections s.38(1)(b) (personal information) and s.30(b)(i)- free and frank provision of advice or exchange of views of FOISA applies to that information. The reasons why this latter exemption applies is explained below.

The s.30(b)(i) exemption is subject to the 'public interest test'. Therefore, taking account of all the circumstances of this case, we have considered if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exemption. We have found that, on balance, the public interest lies in favour of upholding the exemption. We recognise that there is some public interest in release because the people of Scotland are interest in the role of the Civil Service in the upcoming Scottish Parliament Election.

However, this is outweighed by the public interest in maintaining the possibility for civil servants to discuss policy activities in the lead to the election and to seek guidance from other parts of government.

I have attached the document with the exemptions marked to this email.

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 202600509907 - Information Released - Document

File type

Excel document

File size

45.5 kB