Office of the Queen's Printer for Scotland
Last Updated: 30/05/2008
3.1 A Publication Scheme must state whether documents in the Scheme will be available free of charge or for a charge.
3.2 The Environmental Information Regulations (EIRs) permit charges in respect of costs reasonably attributable to the supply of information, provided a schedule of the charges that may be levied is made available to all persons requesting environmental information. The EIRs apply to both published and unpublished information, including environmental information supplied under other enactments. (Public authorities will be provided with further advice on charges for environmental information when the new Scottish EIRs, which will come into force on the same day as the Act, are complete.) Some organisations may also have legislation on non-environmental matters under which they publish certain information.
3.3 The FOI (Scotland) Act does not require that a schedule of charges is included within the Publication Scheme, but only that the Publication Scheme specify whether the material is, or is intended to be, available free of charge or on payment. This is important as publication schemes will in most cases remain approved for a number of years. (The Scottish Information Commissioner’s guidance on publication schemes states that initial schemes will, in general, be approved for a period of not less than four years). Public Authorities will therefore be seeking in their classes of information to anticipate the document types or subject areas which the department will be publishing during that period, although it is unlikely to be either practical nor possible to anticipate every future title or charge.
3.4 In their Publication Schemes, public authorities should set out their charging policy, but indicate, where charges are made, that the charge for each publication will be listed by the title of the publication on the up to date publications list. A link to the up to date list or a note of where it can be obtained should be provided. For information published under another enactment, this may in some cases take the form of a link to the relevant Fees Order.
3.5 For the purposes of defining the potential coverage of a Publication Scheme, both section 23 and section 25 of the FOI (Scotland) Act apply. Section 25 indicates that where information is available from the public authority on request, it can be regarded as reasonably accessible to the applicant when it is made available in accordance with the authority’s Publication Scheme. Any payment required is specified in, or determined in accordance with, the Scheme.
3.6 For the purposes of charging, HM Treasury assumes that a publication is material which:
Information which is held by an organisation, but which is not intended for publication, and has to be extracted specifically for the requestor, is not covered by a Publication Scheme.
3.7 A possible approach is to describe broad pricing categories which could be applied either to an organisation’s Publication Scheme as a whole or to individual classes. A single pricing category may apply to a particular class, but two or more pricing categories to other classes.
3.8 Annex B contains a suggested form of words that assumes that any payment can be requested in advance before a publication is supplied, but this is not yet certain for information supplied under the revised EIRs. Square brackets indicate where Crown bodies or Non-Departmental Public Bodies (NDPBs) are most likely to need to adapt the wording to their own circumstances.