Freedom of Information Request - Fair Trade Purchasing
Date: 16 December 2024
Our ref: SIR178122/A4870074
Information Request – Fair Trade Purchasing
Your Request
Can you kindly provide data on your organisation’s annual spend on fair trade goods across the April 2023 – March 2024 financial year?
Please include the below information, and please return the data in the attached template:
• Vendor name
• Whether they were contracted/non-contracted
• A description of item(s) purchased
• The total value per order
• Items purchased for resale (if applicable)
Please also provide your general policy on the procurement of fairly and ethically traded goods and services, in line with section 15(5)(b)(v) of the Procurement Reform (Scotland) Act 2014., if it is hosted online, please kindly share the link.
Our Response
We have carried out detailed searches of within our corporate financial system. The searches undertaken on that system rely on what information is recorded there by staff when adding the information to the system. We undertook searches using the description field, and using fair, ethical, fair trade, fairly, traded and trade, as the key terms, to search for goods/services that were procured during 2023-2024. Unfortunately we have been unable to identify any information that could meet this part of your request, this means we have to apply the following exemption from FOISA, Section 17(1) – Information not held, for this part of your request.
We may hold further details on individual invoices, but the only way for us to determine that and provide any further relevant information, would be to carry out a manual search and review of all the invoices. It would take an excessive amount of staff time to do this and the scale of the task is too big for us to be able to deal with. It would not be in the public interest for NatureScot to divert such a significant amount of our staff time to this work as it would impede our ability to carry out our other statutory duties.
You have also requested information relating to our general policy on procurement of fairly traded and ethically traded goods and services. The following link will take you to a summary of our Statement of Sustainable procurement policy and practice statement which is available on our website.
How We Handled Your Request
We believe you have asked for environmental information as defined in the Environmental Information (Scotland Regulations 2004 (‘the EIRs’), so we are dealing with your request under those regulations. To be able to use the EIRs, we must apply an exemption under section 39(2) of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (‘FOISA’). The Scottish Information Commissioner’s guidance recommends that public authorities apply this exemption to environmental information and handle request under the EIRs.
If you would like to find out more about the access to information legislation, there is a guidance booklet available on the Scottish Information Commissioner’s website.
Review and Appeal
I hope this information meets your requirements, but if you are dissatisfied with how we have responded to your information request, please write to us within 40 working days explaining your concerns. You can contact us at Battleby, Redgorton, Perth, PH1 3EW or email us at [email protected]. We will carry out a review of our response and contact you with our findings within 20 working days.
If you are not satisfied following this, you can make an appeal to the Scottish Information Commissioner within 6 months. The Scottish Information Commissioner can be contacted at:
Scottish Information Commissioner
Kinburn Castle
Doubledykes Road
St Andrews
Fife
KY16 9DS
Telephone: 01334 464610
Yours sincerely
FOI Officer,
NatureScot