Freedom of Information (Scotland) Statistics

This is a dashboard cross-referencing Office of the Scottish Information Commissioner statistics with WhatDoTheyKnow FOI requests.

The OSIC releases quarterly statistics of the number of FOI requests received - and how they were processed - by a variety of public authorities covered by the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA) or the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004.

The data is submitted directly to the portal by public authorities and is not verified. It shows 'actual activity' in the time period, so decisions early in 2019 may refer to requests made in 2018. For the purpose of year by year analysis, these are presented as related values but this is not strictly the case.

When multiple authorities are covered by a single entry in the OSIC data, their WhatDoTheyKnow counts are combined.

There may be reports made on WhatDoTheyKnow to s5. designated bodies not covered if these did not report their statistics. In other cases, there are some 'impossible' results (where 300% of requests are made through WhatDoTheyKnow), showing how different timescales or reporting standards make comparisons of very small numbers of reports difficult.

Statistics are available for: 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and all time.

You can also see statistics for requests made to all authorities.

Statistics by sectors

Statistics by authority

Educational Institutions

Local Government

Ministers/Parliament

National Health Service

Non Ministerial Officeholders

Others e.g. NDPBs

Police

s.5 designated body