Meetings between Head of Digital Services and Oxido: FOI review

FOI reference: FOI/17/02000
Date received: 4 October 2017
Date responded: 25 October 2017

Information requested

Details of supplier meetings between the Head of Digital Services and Mr Andrew (Andy) Syme (formerly of Exception UK Limited) and now of the company called Oxido including:

All meetings held between the above parties including dates, venues, duration. Names of all meeting participants and minutes or notes, including agenda items. Copies of emails between the Head of Digital Services and Andrew (Andy) Syme when he worked for either company or any other Oxido employees during 2016 and 2017.

Response

Further to our email of 4 October 2017, I have now completed my review of our response to your request under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA).

In your review request, you stated that:

"I do not accept the response of "no meeting requests have been accepted with Oxido employees" since there is information in the public domain that would appear to contradict this. Simply trying to avoid my clear request is both unhelpful and possibly obstructive."

I have concluded that the original decision should be confirmed with modification.

As a result of carrying out further searches related to your request, we are able to provide you with further information. I apologise that we did not identify this information when dealing with your original request.

The following information, together with our original response, constitutes all of the information held by Education Scotland within the scope of your request. Education Scotland does not hold any information related to the information you report is available in the public domain about these meetings.

As a result of these further searches, please see the enclosed meeting list (within Annex A), detailing meetings attended by Education Scotland's Head of Digital Services and Exception UK and/or Oxido in addition to those already provided to you. We have also provided information related to meetings which were planned but which did not take place, based on no relevant sign in entries in our visitor's book at The Optima Building. We have also provided a further two emails of 24 March 2017 and 14 July 2017 located by these additional searches (Annex B).

An exemption under section 38(1)(b) of FOISA (personal information) applies to some information which has been redacted from the enclosed emails. This exemption applies because the information is personal data of a third party and disclosing it would contravene the data protection principles in Schedule 1 to the Data Protection Act 1998.

This is because releasing this information could lead to the identification of staff members and members of the public.

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

FOI-17-02000 - Annex A meeting venues and Annex B related email correspondence.pdf

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