Documents or information on the potential impact on Scots from the cost-of-living crisis: FOI release

Information requested

Any reports, briefings, presentations, or other documents or information such as polling and analysis, on the potential impact on Scots from the cost-of-living crisis, sent to the finance secretary, first minister, deputy first minister, or ministers with responsibility for social security from April 1, 2022 to date.

Response

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the costs of locating, retrieving and providing the information requested would exceed the upper cost limit of £600. Given the breadth of your request a key word search returned an extremely high number of documents and emails which could potentially be within scope of the request. Responding to this request would therefore lead to a cost significantly in excess of £600. Under section 12 of FOISA public authorities are not required to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying would exceed the upper cost limit, which is currently set at £600 by Regulations made under section 12.

You may, however, wish to consider reducing the scope of your request in order that the costs can be brought below £600. This might be done for example, both by narrowing the request to one type of output (e.g. briefings) as well as reducing the timeframe to the last three months, which is the period that Ministerial private offices retain emails for. You may also find it helpful to look at the Scottish Information Commissioner's 'Tips for requesting information under FOI and the EIRs' on his website at: http://www.itspublicknowledge.info/YourRights/Tipsforrequesters.aspx.

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.