Private Consultants expenditure: FOI release

Information requested

1. The total expenditure by the Scottish Government on private consultants, broken down by financial year, for each of the last five financial years (from 2018-19 to 2022-23).
2. A breakdown of these consultancy costs by department, including the name of the consultancy firms used, the nature of the work undertaken, and the corresponding costs.
3. A breakdown of the consultancy costs related to any significant government projects or programmes, such as (but not limited to) the National Care Service, the Deposit Return Scheme, and the implementation of the Scottish Child Payment.
4. Information on any contracts awarded to private consultants without a competitive tendering process, including the reasons for doing so, for the same period (2018-19 to 2022-23).
5. Details of any future projections or budget allocations for consultancy services over the next two financial years (2023-24 and 2024-25), if available.

Response

In support for request no.1 attachment 1 provides a breakdown of the total expenditure by the Scottish Government on private consultants. This has been broken down by financial year for each of the last five financial years (2018-19 to 2022-23), using the Vendor Category commodity as the identifier, the information is taken from the Scottish Government’s Procurement Hub.

To support request no.2, we have broken down consultancy costs by Directorate, including the name of the consultancy firm used, this can be seen in attachment 2. Again, all the data has been downloaded from the Scottish Government’s Procurement Hub and filtered on consultancy suppliers to provide all the requested data.

For request no.2 this has been broken down to Directorate level only as due to the high volume of transactional data requested, to carry out the necessary data analysis of providing line-item detail (e.g. for 8,084 transactions) would mean that Section 12 of Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA) would apply, meaning the time taken to carry out this analysis would be too time consuming and would breach the cost criteria limit and take more than the 60 hours to collate and analyse.

The scope for your 3rd request is too far reaching and to provide this data it would take this past the limit set out in Section 12 of Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA). However, to support an element of your ask, data has been provided on the listed projects and programmes as detailed within request no.3 Should you still wish to obtain this data you can submit a further FOI however reducing the parameters e.g. shorter time period, only Scottish Government data.

In response to request no.4 the following information has been provided, please see attachment 4. Where appropriate the names have been redacted as per section 38(1)(b) of FOISA (personal information) which applies to a small amount of the information requested because it is personal data of a third party i.e. names of individuals. Disclosing this information 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.

Regarding your request no.5 details regarding budgets and projections on consultancy spend would not be available at this time given where the Scottish Government are in the budget cycle. The Scottish Government forecast at a high level on budgets, but these forecasts and budgets are not broken down into categories as granular as identifying consultancy spend.

All data has been reviewed and specific names of individuals have been redacted to adhere to General Data Protection Regulations.

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at https://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.

FOI 202400432841 - Information Released - Annex

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