Legal advice to Ministers or provided by the Civil Service on the topic of a second independence referendum in 2020: FoI Appeal

Information requested

"any legal advice to Ministers or provided by the Civil Service on the topic of a second independence referendum in 2020"

Response

I have received decision 048/2022 from the Scottish Information Commissioner, which relates to your FOI request (202100164143) for “any legal advice to Ministers or provided by the Civil Service on the topic of a second independence referendum in 2020”.

As you will be aware, the Commissioner found that we were entitled to withhold some of the information falling within scope of your request under section 36(1) (legal advice), but that this exemption did not apply to all of the information previously withheld.

I now enclose below a copy of the information we are required to release in order to comply with decision 048/2022.

*Supplementary*
Further to our letter dated 7 June 2022 which related to your FOI request (202100164143) for “any legal advice to Ministers or provided by the Civil Service on the topic of a second independence referendum in 2020”, and after discussions with OSIC, I am writing to clarify a point regarding the information released to you.

Unfortunately, in the email from Graham Fisher (Deputy Director, Scottish Government Legal Directorate) to the Lord Advocate and Solicitor General on 28 February 2020 @17:21 (document 7), the recipients copied into this email were omitted from the extract in error.

I can confirm that this email was copied to the Legal Secretariat to the Lord Advocate, Solicitor to the Scottish Government, and Chief Parliamentary Counsel. Annex 1 to this letter has been updated to include this information in context.

I apologise that this information was omitted from our previous response.

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 Decision 0482022 - Information released

File type

2 page PDF

File size

409.5 kB