Freedom of Information> Legislation

The Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA) "...provides a right of access to information held by Scottish public authorities." Full implementation of the Act started from 1st of January 2005, in line with full implementation of the UK Freedom of Information Act 2000.

Some important points to be noted about the FOISA are:

• A central concept of the FOI is providing access to information which is in the 'public interest'
• For the purposes of FOI, "information" is defined as that which is held in a recordable format e.g. hard copy, electronically held information (including e-mail), video and audio formats (including CCTV). Most importantly, it refers to pieces of information, not whole documents and specifically to non-personal information. The Act covers all information already held by public authorities, not just that created after 1 Jan, 2005.
• In Scotland the FOI legislation is different from that of England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
• Charitable organisations are not covered by FOI.

Related legislation

Data Protection Act 1998

Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Regulating FOI in Scotland

The role of regulator for FOI in Scotland is held by the Scottish Information Commissioner (SIC), who was appointed in February 2003. The Commissioner enforces and promotes the right of access to information held by public authorities.

FOI exemptions

Some FOI requests are refused on the grounds of legal exemptions. The main exemption to the FOI is that of data protection, i.e. the requested information contains the personal details of an individual.

Other reasons why requests may be refused are:

• if the organisation does not hold the information requested;
• if releasing the information is not in the comercial interest of the organisation;
• if the information is already considered reasonably obtainable elsewhere;
• if the person has submitted a repeated request; and
• if a person is being unreasonable in their request, although this may be hard to prove.

If a request is refused the reason for this must be explained to the requester. If the requester is not happy with the reason or with the information supplied then he or she has the right to appeal to the SIC.

Requested information may be redacted, e.g. people's names and other personal information blanked out. The required information can also be extracted from a document, i.e. an excerpt made. In some cases, however, the information is so redacted that it is completely incomprehensible. This information might not therefore be supplied.

The SIC has produced a series of briefings on exemptions and key concepts of the FOISA and EIRs. There is also a fully searchable database available detailing all the decisions made by the SIC since 2005.