Publication Scheme
Under the terms of section 23 of FOI(S)A, SPSA must in adopting or reviewing its publication scheme have regard to the public interest in allowing public access to information about:
- the services provided by the organisation;
- the costs of those services;
- the standard attained by those services;
- the facts which form the basis of decisions taken by the organisation which are of importance to the public; and
- the publication reasons for decisions made by it.
The following steps were taken to prepare this publication scheme:
- SPSA had initial consultation with the organisations previously known as the "common police service organisations" (the Scottish Criminal Record Office, the Scottish Police Information Strategy, the Scottish Police College and the Scottish Crime & Drug Enforcement Agency) which now form part of the new organisation's service provision. Although formally part of the Scottish Executive prior to 31 March 2007, these organisations all had their own individual publication schemes. These will be retained for reference purposes only with all relevant information consolidated within this publication scheme.
- SPSA carried out a review of the most common requests for information received by the organisations now part of SPSA. This review was used to inform the development of this publication scheme.
- Benchmarking was carried out on other publication schemes within SPSA's stakeholder community and with other non-departmental public bodies. This exercise also informed the development of SPSA's publication scheme.