Funding to Scottish Business Resilience centre: FOI release

Information requested

1. How much money in total has the SBRC been awarded under tender over the last seven years please? Please provide dates and the amount each successful tender/contract was worth. NB - I am not referring to grant funding.

2. Can you specify what any successful SBRC tenders were for please?

3. Were any of the contracts won by SBRC put out to tender? If so, when, and how many other firms bid for them please?

4. Has SBRC been provided with seconded staff? If so, how many staff please and how long was each of them seconded to SBRC? Also, what was the cost to the taxpayer of each secondment?

5. Regarding the Digital Boost Development Grant and SBRC’s role, why is a private company being promoted by the Scottish Government – as per a specified webpage - to offer services that other private companies could provide? Also, was any tender put out to award said services?

Response

1/3. Contracts under tender are awarded after an Invitation to Tender (ITT) have been issued. ITT is a formal document issued by a procurement authority which outlines the scope of a project and invites organisations to submit a formal tender to bid for the work.

In the last seven years, between 5 January 2015 and 5 January 2022, the Scottish Government awarded £111,750 in total to SBRC under tender.

It was one contract, with a start date of 17 August 2020 and end date of 16 May 2021. The tender was for Cyber Exercising Project - facilitation of the National Criminal Intelligence Service Exercise in a Box toolkit to the Scottish public, private and third sectors. This was a short-term, high impact programme of work to drive up improvements in cyber resilience of Scottish organisations and businesses by undertaking cyber testing and exercising.

The Cyber Exercising Project was put out to tender on 26 June 2020 and 3 bids were received.

4. You have not provided a time frame for question number four. As your previous questions referred to last seven years, I assumed the same time frame for this question.

In the last seven years, the Scottish Government has not provided any seconded staff to the SBRC.

5. The webpage you refer to in question five is not the property of the Scottish Government. SBRC’s role in the delivery of the cyber security element of the Digital Boost Development Grant is subject to a commercial agreement between the fund managers (Lanarkshire Enterprise Services Limited) and SBRC.

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