Fresh transparency row over First Minister’s Covid briefing papers
Nicola Sturgeon has been accused of presiding over a government where secrecy is “all too commonplace” after officials claimed thousands of emails would have to be searched to retrieve Covid-19 briefing papers given to the First Minister.
Officials also claimed 40,000 emails would have to be searched to provide less than a month’s worth of briefings given to senior ministers, including Ms Sturgeon, Covid recovery secretary John Swinney, and health secretary Humza Yousaf.
Opposition politicians rubbished the responses and said the public deserved answers about the information used by the First Minister to reintroduce restrictions due to the omicron variant.
The Freedom of Information requests asked for less than one month’s worth of Covid-19 briefings to the three most senior ministers, and a week’s worth of briefings sent to the First Minister by officials and advisers.
In the response, officials said: “‘Clinical advice’ is received in a number of formats and is not always signposted, therefore could be included in any of these emails.
“In order to provide the information requested, approximately 40,000 emails would require to be located, reviewed and potentially redacted.”
They added both requests for the information would cost more than £600 to answer – the limit over which public bodies can refuse requests.
Murdo Fraser, the Scottish Conservatives Covid recovery
spokesman, called on ministers to do more to make information available to the public.
He said: “It is clear that secrecy is all too commonplace within the SNP government. Perfectly reasonable questions continue to be stonewalled and the public are left in the dark as a result.
“Given the importance of transparency and scrutiny around Covid-related decisions, eyebrows will be raised as to why this information is
not being made freely available.”
Alex Cole-hamilton, leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats, said the public “deserves answers”.
He said: “The Scottish Government has always had a loose relationship with the requirements placed on it by Freedom of Information legislation, but this takes the biscuit. It obviously only takes a week to pull together a week’s worth of Covid briefings, so it
shouldn’t take much longer than that to produce the information surrounding them.”
The fresh concerns around transparency come just a month after the Scottish Government was judged to have acted unlawfully by withholding Covid-19 death and case modelling ahead of the second wave.
A Scottish Government spokesperson said: “We provide information whenever possible and in 2021 we handled
more than 4,000 FOI cases – 25 per cent more than in 2020 – and issued 86 per cent on time.
“Where the cost of locating, retrieving and providing the information requested exceeds the upper cost limit of £600, requesters are asked to narrow their request in line with guidance outlined in the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002.”