NHS Borders financial issues, meetings, Annual Draft Delivery Plan and Performance Escalation Framework: FOI release

Information requested

All communication between the Scottish Government and NHS Borders in relation to the financial issues facing the health board since 2018;

The dates of all meetings between the Cabinet Secretary and NHS Borders, since 2018, including those in attendance, briefing notes, agenda;

All communication within the Scottish Government relating to NHS Borders Annual Draft Delivery Plan 2024/2025; and

All communication within the Scottish Government relating to NHS Borders and the Scottish Government Performance Escalation Framework in ‘relation financial sustainability’ since first being escalated to Stage 3.

Response

There are four different elements to your request and I enclose a copy of some of the information you requested for the third part of your request: All communication within the Scottish Government relating to NHS Borders Annual Draft Delivery Plan 2024/2025. Please see attached, noting that the attachments referred to are attached separately.

An exemption under section 38(1)(b) (personal information) of FOISA applies to some of the information you have asked for; and some of the information contained within the exchanges are “out of scope” e.g reference to other NHS Boards, and have therefore been marked as such.

The second part of your request is for: The dates of all meetings between the Cabinet Secretary and NHS Borders, since 2018, including those in attendance, briefing notes, agenda.

In terms of Ministerial meetings, most of the dates are available via:
https://www.gov.scot/collections/ministerial-engagements-travel-and-gifts/. Under section 25(1) of FOISA, we do not have to give you information which is already reasonably accessible to you.

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, the costs of locating, retrieving and providing the remaining information under the second part of your request would exceed the upper cost limit of £600. The reason for this is that in order to locate and retrieve that information, we would need to conduct a search of all records held by the Scottish Government. 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.

The same section 12 exemption applies to the first and fourth parts of your request:

• All communication between the Scottish Government and NHS Borders in relation to the financial issues facing the health board since 2018; and
• All communication within the Scottish Government relating to NHS Borders and the Scottish Government Performance Escalation Framework in ‘relation financial sustainability’ since first being escalated to Stage 3.

You may, however, wish to consider reducing the scope of parts one, two and four of your request in order that the costs can be brought below £600. For example, you could narrow the timeframe you are interested in as this would allow us to limit the searches that would require to be conducted.

You may also find it helpful to look at the Scottish Information Commissioner’s ‘Tips for requesting information under FOI and the EIRs’ on his website at: http://www.itspublicknowledge.info/YourRights/Tipsforrequesters.aspx.

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 202400426155 - Information released - Annex

File type

44 page PDF

File size

1.4 MB