North Sea revenue statistics: EIR release

Information requested

Speaking in parliament on 23rd June 2026, Stephen Gethins said this:

“Scotland’s vast energy resources has contributed £400 billion to the Treasury, with very little back.”

Please provide the Scottish Government’s estimate of the “very little” back, along with the calculations and evidence which underpin the estimate.

Response

As the information you have requested is 'environmental information' for the purposes of the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 (EIRs), we are required to deal with your request under those Regulations. We are applying the exemption at section 39(2) of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA), so that we do not also have to deal with your request under FOISA.

This 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, because there is no public interest in dealing with the same request under two different regimes. This is essentially a technical point and has no material effect on the outcome of your request.

The figure quoted in parliament is an update to the £396 billion figure available at:
Building a New Scotland: Renewing democracy through independence. The update is based on UK North Sea Government Revenue Statistics published on the NSTA website (as at May 2026), with each year’s revenue deflated by the GDP deflator.

As set out in the Building a New Scotland document linked above, the revenue raised was used by the UK Government to finance spending across the whole of the UK, rather than being spent in Scotland

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.