Question to the Scotland Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Scotland, how many staff within his Department are reliant on a visa for employment.

The Scotland Office has the information that you have requested. However, if a request is made for information and the total figure amounts to five people or fewer, the Scotland Office must consider whether this could lead to the identification of individuals and whether disclosure of this information would be in breach of our statutory obligations under the General Data Protection Regulation and/or the Data Protection Act 2018.

We believe that the release of this information would risk identification of the individual/s concerned. For this reason, the Scotland Office has chosen not to provide the information requested. However, it should not be assumed that the actual figure represented falls at any particular point within this scale; 'five or fewer' is used as a replacement value from which it would be difficult to isolate or extract any individual data.