Temporary Office Closure

18 March 2020

The announcement below was made on 18 March 2020. Visit our contact us page for the latest updates on our office closure.

We have had to make the difficult decision to close the office from Monday 23 March, due to the impact of the coronavirus Covid-19 virus. The closure is expected to last for two weeks, however this may be extended if required in accordance with the relevant government guidance. We will share updates as soon as we are able.

We will aim to have a small team monitoring and responding to urgent enquiries and undertaking essential activities. These staff will be working remotely, however, so capacity and access to our usual systems will be significantly limited. As a result there will be significant change in the services we are able to provide.

Details regarding Scottish Information Commissioner services during closure include:

Enquiries service
While the office is closed, we encourage you to use our website wherever possible for information and guidance on issues related to FOI. Information on using FOI is available on our Your Rights pages, while support and guidance for public authorities on responding to requests can be accessed on our public authority pages.

If you do have an urgent enquiry, and you can’t find the answer on our website, you can email enquiries@itspublicknowledge.info. We will not be able to take enquiries by phone, or via individual staff email addresses.
We will do our best to respond as soon as we can, but please bear in mind that a response may take some time.

Appeals (applications) to the Commissioner
We would encourage anyone making a new appeal to the Scottish Information Commissioner to do so via our appeals portal. We will respond to you as soon as we are able, but please be aware our capacity and access to systems is limited while our office is closed. If you have an urgent query regarding an existing appeal to the Commissioner, please email your query and reference number to enquiries@itspublicknowledge.info and we will do our best to respond.

We will be progressing work on applications as much as possible while our office is closed. Please note however that during this time the Commissioner will be unable to issue decisions, and staff will generally not have access to case files.

Support for public authorities (including statistics returns)
If you have an urgent query regarding your public authority, please email enquiries@itspublicknowledge.info and we will do our best to respond. At this stage public authorities should expect to submit freedom of information statistics as usual each quarter; we will contact authorities if this changes.

Requests for information from Scottish Information Commissioner
If you would like to make a request for information to the Scottish Information Commissioner or wish to make a subject access request for your own personal data, please email enquiries@itspublicknowledge.info and we will respond as soon as we are able. Please note that access to our usual systems will be limited while our office is closed.

Media enquiries
Our media enquiry phone is currently unavailable. Please email any urgent media enquiries to enquiries@itspublicknowledge.info and we will respond as soon as possible.

We will share further updates and additional information about this situation as they are available at www.itspublicknowledge.info/news.