Transition Training Fund spend: EIR release

FOI reference: FOI/17/01842
Date received: 11 August 2017
Date responded: 1 September 2017

Information requested

How much of the £12,000,000 Transition Training Fund has been used to date.

Response

As the information that you have requested in 'environmental information' for the purposes of the Freedom of 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 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 test 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 Transition Training Fund is a £12 million fund, operating for three years, offering support with training grants to help individuals retrain, upskill or get accreditation or certification that could help individuals get a new job in oil and gas, the wider energy sector, or engineering and manufacturing.

The total expenditure on the Transition Training Fund in Year 1 for 2016-17, was £5.1 million.

The current expenditure for Year 2 of the Transition Training has been calculated from 1 April 2017 until end July 2017, this figure includes both the actual and committed expenditure of the Fund. This figure includes payments for approved training within 2017/18 where applicants / training providers have still to draw down, and the current estimate of the bulk of procured training which is still to be drawn down in 2017/18. The current expenditure for 2017-18 is £2,899,384.

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