Request:
In excel spreadsheet form, please list any public relations, communications, media consultancy or lobbying firms hired by your organisation in the last five years:
Please provide:
– The name of the firm (or individual/freelancer)
– The contract number
– The start and end date of each contract
– The amount of money paid to each firm (including VAT)
–The remit/purpose of the hire, and detail of what activities they undertook for your organisation
For avoidance of doubt, please provide more detail than, for example, "communications and PR support". Instead, please detail what specific issues were communicated and how this was done.
Response:
The attached spreadsheet contains some of the information requested. Please note, some of this information has been withheld under Section 33(1)(b) of FOISA as disclosure of this information would (or would be likely to) prejudice substantially the commercial interests of the organisations. As it remains our obligation to provide as much information as possible, we have provided the information in full for most of our stakeholders that relate to this request, however, for three of the organisations we have instead included a brief description of the work undertaken and aggregated annual totals. For one other, we have included the details of the work but removed the gross amount paid to that organisation.
This information runs from 01 April 2017 (when Crown Estate Scotland was established) up until 30 August 2021.
