Structure of Scottish International Offices: FOI release

Information requested

The staff structure/organogram (giving job titles, not names of individuals) for Scotland’s international offices, including both civil service and political staff, and (ii) the wider and complete political staff structure/organogram (special advisors).

The pay grades for each staff member in the international offices.

The international offices include the offices in Beijing, Berlin, Brussels, Copenhagen, Dublin, London, Ottawa, Paris and Washington DC.

Response

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the Scottish Government does not have some of the information you have requested. We do not have staff designated as political staff or special advisers. I therefore attach a table which provides the job designation of staff in all international offices split into Scottish Government staff (civil servants) and Country Based staff , who are recruited using the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) recruitment processes in each country.

All our international offices, with the exception of Scotland House London and Scotland House Brussels (for which we have provided you with the pay bands for each member of staff), have only 3 or 4 staff and providing the individual bands would make it relative easy to find out the pay rates for each individual in the specific band. Therefore while our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance we are unable to provide a small amount of the information you have requested because an exemption under section 38(1)(b) (personal information) of FOISA applies to that information. This is because it is personal data of a third party, specifically the salaries 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.

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at http://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.

202300358397_International Office Staffing

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4 page PDF

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