Number of FOI/EIR's received annually and costs incurred for responding: FOI release

Information requested

1. Total cost, per calendar year, from Jan 1st 2015 to present date, incurred by the Scottish Government in answering FOI and EIR requests.
2. Total number, per calendar year, from Jan 1st 2015 to present date, of FOI requests received by the Scottish Government.
3. Total number, per calendar year, from Jan 1st 2015 to present date, of FOI requests answered by the Scottish Government.
4. Total number, per calendar year, from Jan 1st 2015 to present date, of EIR requests received by the Scottish Government.
5. Total number, per calendar year, from Jan 1st 2015 to present date, of EIR requests answered by the Scottish Government.
6. Median cost, per calendar year, from Jan 1st 2015 to present date, incurred by the Scottish Government in answering FOI and EIR requests.

Response

In response to question 1 and 6, while our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the Scottish Government does not have the information you have requested. There is no business requirement for officials to record the time spent processing FOI requests as it would mean manually asking each person who is allocated a case, the time spent working on the FOI and any additional resources they may seek to assist them. Due to differences in complexity of cases, this figure would fluctuate significantly and make reporting on it difficult and as such would not be easily quantifiable. These tasks are also completed as part of their normal duties along with other tasks appropriate to their role as a civil servant. Given we do not hold details of the time spent by individuals undertaking these tasks we are unable to provide the total cost figure per calendar year or the median costs associated with answering FOI and EIR requests. This is a formal notice under section 17(1) of FOISA that the Scottish Government does not have the information you have requested.

However, it may be of interest to you to know that we did publish reports with estimated costs of responding based on an exercise from carried out in 2012. This was a costing exercise to provide an estimate of the amount of money associated with responding to requests. Subsequent reports after the 2012 exercise used this as the basis to form estimated costs in the years following this. These are just estimates and would not provide the information that you have requested as no costing exercises have been carried out since 2012.

I will provide links to the reports we have from 2016- 2019 with the estimated costs in response to your other questions.

In response to your remaining questions, the figures from 2020-2023 (until 31/10/2023) are as follows:

Calendar Year	FOI Requests Received per Calendar Year	FOI Requests Answered by Calendar Year	EIR Requests Received per calendar year	EIRs Requests Answered by Calendar Year
2020	3075	2873	465	432
2021	4323	4055	514	513
2022	3788	4057	713	683
2023	3284	3239	991	960

As you have asked for the number of requests received and answered per year, please note that for requests received in the month of December, many will not be completed until January and will count towards requests answered in the following year.

Whilst our aim is to provide information where possible, we are unable to provide some of the information you have requested. We are unable to provide the breakdown between FOI and EIR requests received and answered for the years preceding 2020. This is a formal notice under 17(1) of FOISA that the Scottish Government does not have the information you have requested.

It may be helpful that I explain that in 2020, we introduced a new casehandling system to replace our legacy system, and we still use it to date. This means that we can pull information from 2020 onwards but prior to this we need to rely on our records from the time and there was no reporting requirement to record the breakdown between FOI and EIRs received or answered. However, we can provide some information that may be of interest to you in our published reports for the years 2016-2019 here, which include the number of combined FOI and EIR requests received in each of these years :

• Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 - information request handling: annual report 2019 - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)
• Information request handling: annual report 2018 - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)
• Information request handling: annual report 2017 - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)
• Information request handling: 2016 annual report - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)

 

We also publish monthly performance statistics, since April 2017 : Freedom of Information (FOI) reporting - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)

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.