Meeting of the Parliament 21 June 2017
I thank Mr Mountain for giving us the opportunity to discuss how we might improve openness and transparency.
First I want to address our performance. Twelve years on, the statutory right to request information from a public authority—and be given it—has been embedded in our culture. People understand their rights and that has led to a steady increase in requests. FOI requests are also becoming more complex, with the average FOI response requiring seven hours of staff time.
Although there is some surprise that the Government is accepting the Conservative motion, anyone who has been listening to the on-going debate will know that we accept that our recent performance has not been good enough and we are working to improve it. It is a pity that the UK Government, which has more civil service resources in Scotland than the Scottish Government, does not accept that it needs to improve its performance.
The work to improve our performance is being undertaken in tandem with assessments of our performance by the Office of the Information Commissioner—in effect, that is an on-going independent inquiry. The Scottish Information Commissioner is selected by a cross-party panel. The commissioner is independent of the Government and has always performed their function without fear or favour. A new commissioner will be appointed by Parliament next week and whoever is selected will no doubt want to continue that assessment to ensure that we are taking the correct steps to meet the standards expected of us.