The Talking-up Scotland fund raiser, finishing in 4 days, to enable the recruitment of some research assistance, in order to take pressure off me [74 in June and tiring] and hopefully to further improve the blog, has made a good start. To contribute, only if you can (!) go to: Talking-up Scotland - a Politics crowdfunding project in Ayr by Professor John Robertson

By Professor John Robertson OBA, former Faculty Research Ethics Chair, UWS

From a Freedom of Information request to Police Scotland, published today, we see:

A total of 1639 incidents of anti-social behaviour in Elgin in 2024, down from 1828 the previous year and down 11% from 1839 in 2020, after the pandemic

Within this, public nuisance was down from 470 to 419, noise down from 295 to 150, drinking in public down from 4 to 1 and neighbour dispute down from 118 to 97.

Source: https://www.scotland.police.uk/access-to-information/freedom-of-information/disclosure-log/disclosure-log-2025/january/25-0057-incident-stats-anti-social-behaviour-elgin-6-yrs/

We don’t know who made the FOI request in this Conservative constuency, but I feel sure they’re disappointed.

How much do these cost on average?

£1.4 million of public funds and 32 000 staff hours used to meet Freedom of Information requests such as those by BBC Scotland, Labour, Cons and Lib Dems trawling for SNP-bad news

From a Freedom of Information request published on 10 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

From University College, London, 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, in 2023, £1.4 million of public funds and 32 514 hours of staff time (20 FT staff?) were used to meet these requests, up from £1 million in 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:

https://www.gov.scot/publications/foi-202400397701

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/constitution-unit/sites/constitution-unit/files/cost-of-foi.pdf

https://iamkate.com/data/uk-inflation

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