Cost of preparing the GERS report: FOI release

FOI reference: FOI/17/02045
Date received: 8 September 2017
Date responded: 5 October 2017

Information requested

The cost to the Scottish Government of preparing the Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (GERS) reports for 2015/16 and 2016/17.

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. The reason is that the Scottish Government does not record the amount of time which staff spend on specific areas of work, because it has no business need to do so.

Other than staff costs, the cost associated with publishing GERS 2015-16 was £3,462.50 and for GERS 2016-17 was £3,401.81. This cost includes the printing and delivery of physical copies of GERS, and conversion of the MS Word document to HTML for web publishing.

Some of the data used in GERS are provided to the Scottish Government by the Office for National Statistics as part of a Service Level Agreement. The cost of these data for GERS 2015-16 was £1,047.45 and for GERS 2016-17 was £1,067.02. However, please note that these data are also used in other publications, such as the Quarterly National Accounts (Scotland).

About FOI

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