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By Professor John Robertson OBA, Research Ethics Chair, Faculty of Media, UWS

According to the Daily Record today:

A Tory MSP cost the taxpayer over £100,000 after tabling almost one thousand “spurious” parliamentary questions. Douglas Lumsden was accused of a “flagrant abuse” of public resources after submitting queries on flagpoles, light bulbs and jars of honey in the Holyrood shop, according to the Sunday Times. Written questions are a way of obtaining information for the public on the Government and parliament, but MSPs exercise caution given the pressure on the public purse.

Lumsden, MSP for North of East Scotland, submitted 987 written questions to officials in January, more than half of the total asked by all 129 MSPs. Michael Marra, Scottish Labour’s finance spokesman, said: “This a flagrant abuse of taxpayers’ money. Given the content of many of these questions, this is clearly for no purpose other than that the amusement of the Tory member.

Newspaper reports suggested some of his questions may have been generated by AI. In 2008, it was estimated that answering a single parliamentary question cost £98.51.

https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/tory-msp-cost-taxpayer-100000-34643074

Leaving aside the obvious question of why a Labour MSP is lambasting a Tory for something his own party does all the time [Only 6 days ago – ‘how many patients died before an ambulance arrived or paramedics failed to resuscitate them’ ¹– has the Record missed an opportunity for a bigger headline number by using the 17 year-old 2008 costing?

From University College, London², in 2010:

I’m not clear, nor are the authors, as to why the estimates vary so dramatically, especially when the average cost in time is estimated at 7hrs 22min, but let’s accept the Scottish figure.

Adjusted for inflation, the Scottish figure for 2023 is £328.86.

So, for Douglas Lumsden, the 2023 price for his 987 FOIs would be £325 000!

But it’s not just the MSPs digging for dirt on the SNP. You will not be surprised to know that journalists have been at this on a regular basis digging in the dirt, they hope.

From a Freedom of Information request published in April 2024, by the Scottish Government, we can see a major, 42%, surge in the number of such requests responded to:

2020 – 3121
2021 – 4160
2022 – 4131
2023 – 4454

£1.5 million in 2023! More than £5 million since 2020.

Who is making these requests? I can find no data on this and previous attempts by me to find out have come up against data protection laws. However, judging by their appearance in the MSM, the opposition parties and BBC Scotland are making regular trawling requests in the hope of bad news for the Scottish Government.

Sources –

1. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/number-of-patients-dying-before-reaching-hospital-surges-by-over-80-in-five-years/ar-AA1yiFi9?ocid=BingNewsVerp
2. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/constitution-unit/sites/constitution-unit/files/cost-of-foi.pdf
3. https://www.gov.scot/publications/foi-202400397701

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