Scottish Enterprise grants to companies and their Human Rights Due Diligence Process: FOI release

Information requested

Any information or communication held related to discussions between the Scottish Government and Scottish Enterprise since January 2018 regarding:

a) the provision of Scottish Enterprise grants or services to companies involved in the research, development, manufacture and supply of arms to the Israeli military.

b) the provision of SE grants or services to companies operating in the within the aerospace, defence and marine (ADM) sectors, including: Airbus SE (Airbus), BAE Systems plc (BAE Systems), Leonardo S.p.a (Leonardo), the Lockheed Martin Corporation (Lockheed Martin), the Raytheon Company (Raytheon), Rolls-Royce, the Saab Group (Saab) and the Thales Group (Thales).

c) Scottish Enterprise’s Human Rights Due Diligence Process.

Response

I will answer to each of your questions in turn:

a) The Scottish Government provides business support primarily via its enterprise and skills agencies. With specific regard to those companies that operate either partially or wholly in defence markets, it remains the long-standing position that funding support is not provided for the direct manufacture of munitions.

Support for companies operating in these markets is, therefore, predominantly focused on helping them diversify away from core defence market activity. This is to ensure that Scotland continues to benefit from significant economic returns, by continuing to secure the thousands of jobs in the defence, aerospace and shipbuilding sectors and maintain the considerable economic contribution they make to the Scottish economy.

Consequently, there are no documents held that fall within the scope of this request.

Scottish Enterprise have, for several years, released information on general support provided to companies in the aerospace, defence and shipbuilding sectors, which can be found here.

b) While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the costs of locating, retrieving and providing the information requested would exceed the upper cost limit of £600. The reason for this is that, due to the broad scope of your request and the Scottish Government’s statutory obligation to respond accurately and compliantly, to locate and retrieve the requested information we would need to conduct a wide series of comprehensive searches of all the records that the Scottish Government holds.

Under section 12 of FOISA, public authorities are unable 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. In this case, to locate, retrieve, and provide all the documents that fall within the scope of this request, within the statutory timescale of 20 days, we would require searches and collation of data by several FOI caseworkers over several weeks. This would mean that costs would exceed the £600 statutory limit.

We would recommend that for future requests you may wish to consider reducing or narrowing the scope of your query in order that the costs can be brought below £600. This would greatly assist FOI case handlers in answering your query compliantly and timeously.

c) I attach a copy of the information that you requested (see Supporting Document 1). While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, an exemption under section 38(1)(b) (personal information) of FOISA applies to some of the information you have requested as it is personal data of a third party and disclosing it would contravene the data protection principles in Article 5(1) of the General Data Protection Regulation and in section 34(1) of the Data Protection Act 2018. This exemption is not subject to the 'public interest test', so we are not required to consider if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exemption.

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 202400422636 - Information Requested - Supporting Document 1

File type

21 page PDF

File size

498.5 kB