Total spending on all forms of healthcare and consultancy carried out on the Scottish Government's behalf by private health care firms and consultants in 2021/22: FOI Review

Information requested

Your initial request was:

Can you please confirm total spending on ALL forms of healthcare and consultancy carried out on the Scottish Government's behalf by private health / care firms and consultants in 2021/22.
Can you also provide spending by health boards on health care provided by private firms and consultants in 2022/22. It is my understanding that such spending by individual health boards is collated by the Scottish Government for data purposes.

In your review request, you asked for:

[A] headline figure which you have failed to provide.

Secondly, a headline figure should be easy enough to provide, if the ScotGov planning, audit, and spending reviews are thorough and robust. It would be vital for any government to know the total spend on private healthcare. If the Scottish Government don’t know what their total expenditure is in a large area of healthcare, then I would have to concur with the Auditor General in his scathing critique of how the Scottish Government Finances are managed.

Lastly, the links you provided do not explicitly detail spending in a manageable fashion, and would require an extraordinary amount of time for an external individual to determine.

It is my belief that you are being disingenuous by attempting to provide tenuous, lengthy, and cumbersome monthly data sheets under the pretext of providing the information requested, when in fact you will have the headline figure to hand. There is no question that your response has been calculated in such a way to hide the total spending, or at the very least, make it exceptionally difficult to obtain a headline figure without lengthy non-gov analysis.
 

Response

I have concluded that a different decision should be substituted.

In answering the first part of your original request "Can you please confirm total spending on ALL forms of healthcare and consultancy carried out on the Scottish Government's behalf by private health / care firms and consultants in 2021/22", the original response stated that this information is available in the public domain and directed you to the source.

Your review request has explained that you had asked for a headline figure. My review has concluded that we are unable to provide a headline figure in relation to this part of the request as such an analysis has not been undertaken. Therefore, this is a formal notification under section 17(1) of FOISA that the Scottish Government do not hold this information.

On the second part of your original request "Can you also provide spending by health boards on health care provided by private firms and consultants in 2022/22 [assumed to be 2021/22]. It is my understanding that such spending by individual health boards is collated by the Scottish Government for data purposes", the original response stated that the information is available in the public domain and directed you to NHS boards accounts available on individual boards websites. Your review request explained that you had asked for a headline figure. My review has identified that an exercise was undertaken to consolidate values from individual Boards accounts and I am copying the output below:

Private Spend From Board Accounts 2021/22
Board (£000)	21-22
Ayrshire & Arran	4,797
Borders	4,679
Dumfries & Galloway	2,818
Fife	3,813
Forth Valley	1,513
Grampian	9,869
GGC	19,766
Highland	12,064
Lanarkshire	18,612
Lothian	4,969
Orkney	812
Shetland	464
Tayside	8,087
Western Isles	1,576
Territorial total	93,839
NHS Education for Scotland	-
National Waiting Times Centre	2,293
Healthcare Information Scotland	2,626
National total	4,919
Total	98,758
% of resource budget	0.6%

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.