Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee 27 November 2025
The only new designations that would automatically take place as a result of the bill would be those under section 3, on publicly owned companies. People can already make FOI requests about those companies, but any requests would have to be made to the public body that owned the company in question. We hope that there will be savings, because it will no longer be necessary to go to the parent body, which would otherwise have to retrieve the information from the publicly owned body and then provide it to the member of the public or whoever made the FOI request. In drafting the financial memorandum, we looked at those organisations. We costed in that there may be a cost for the publicly owned body, but we hope that that cost would be transferred from the organisation that owns it.
The evidence that the committee has heard and, indeed, the evidence that was put before me is that there is a very wide range of views and evidence on the cost of an FOI request. The amount that different organisations spend varies tremendously. Sometimes, the cost is said to be related to the efficiency of the organisation’s systems and the amount of resource that it decides to put into FOI compliance.
The policy intention behind the bill is to reduce cost, and we hope that that will happen through standardisation and the codes of practice. However, we recognise that when there is a designation of a new body—it could be a very large body—there will be costs for that body, and we have outlined those in the financial memorandum.
In general, those costs will not be borne directly by the Scottish Government; they will be borne by the new body. That body might be a multinational company, a third sector organisation or a charity. It could also be a private body—for example, it could be a privately owned care home, if the Parliament decided to go down that path. However, all those matters will be looked at by the Parliament when the Scottish ministers come forward with a recommendation for a designation or, indeed, if the Parliament decides to use the designation mechanism that is proposed in the bill.