You asked
Please provide all correspondence to and from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) between it and the Scottish Government, the Scottish Futures Trust and Transport Scotland concerning the ONS review of the Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route (AWPR) and the application of the Eurostat ESA10 regulations under National Accounts Classification rules.
We said
Thank you for your request. Please find attached a document containing correspondence between ONS and the Scottish Government, Transport Scotland and the Scottish Futures Trust concerning the ONS review of the Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route (AWPR) and the application of the Eurostat ESA10 regulations under National Accounts Classification rules.
Accompanying the correspondence document is a number of documents that were sent as attachments with some of the emails.
Some information has been withheld under exemptions within the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act. Where documents have been wholly withheld, these have not been included within the response.
All personal information has been withheld from disclosure under s.40(2) of the FoI Act. The personal information includes individual names of staff. Although staff at a senior level would have an expectation that their names may be made public, at lower level, colleagues would not have the same expectation and it would therefore be unfair to disclose this information.
Information held by ONS in relation to specific businesses is protected from disclosure under s.39(1) of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007, and is therefore exempt from disclosure under s.44(1) of the FoI Act. s.44 exempts the disclosure of information if it is prohibited by or under any enactment.
Some of the information within this document has been withheld under s.43(2) of the FoI Act. Much of this information relates to contractual agreements, financial information and project documentation. s.43(2) specifies that information is exempt if its disclosure would or would be likely to prejudice the commercial interests of any person. The disclosure of the information would likely prejudice the commercial interests of various organisations as its release could be detrimental to future contractual negotiations and release of financial information and project documentation could provide competitors with an unfair advantage.
In coming to this decision ONS has considered the public interest in disclosure of the information. Whilst we recognise that there is always an interest in public transparency and the allocation of public funds, we believe that this is outweighed in this instance by the impact that disclosure would have on the future contractual negotiations of the organisations involved and their future competitive ability.