Publication - FOI/EIR release

Trade union funding awards and conditions 2010/11 onwards: FOI release

Published: 16 July 2018
Topic: Public sector, Work and skills

Information request and response under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002.

FOI reference: FOI/18/01524
Date received: 25 May 2018
Date responded: 12 July 2018

Information requested

Information relating to funding the Scottish Government has awarded to the STUC, Unite, Unison, EIS, and GMB since 2010/11. You asked for the Scottish Government to provide the total funding to each organisation, to break down this amount down year on year, by amount per funding award, to specify the reason for each funding award and to supply any and all conditions of funding.

Response

I enclose a copy of the available information you requested. This reflects the information up to the 19 June 2018 when a search of our financial records was conducted. For the purposes of this response, we have taken "funding the Scottish Government has awarded" to mean grants. You should also be aware that awards from Education Scotland have not been included, as core Scottish Government does not include Executive Agencies or Non-Departmental Public Bodies (NDPBs).

Annex A provides an overview of grants awarded and paid by the Scottish Government to relevant organisations in the format you requested. Annex B provides the conditions of funding for those grants by financial year. The conditions of funding have been provided in the form of extracts as the remainder of the relevant documents are out of the scope of your request. For information relating to European Structural Funds, it may be helpful to know that payments are made in arrears. This means there are grants made in later years, though the projects were delivered between 2011-13.

The Scottish Government does not hold some of the information you have asked for on our systems. Where this is the case, it has been clearly marked in Annex A. This is a formal notice under section 17(1) of FOISA that the Scottish Government does not have the information you have requested.

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, to carry out parts of your request would require a search of all of the records of the Scottish Government as our current finance system has only been in operation since April 2012. The costs of locating, retrieving and providing the information requested for the financial years 2010/11 and 2011/12 would exceed the upper cost limit 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.

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