Your request was about the following information:
I am writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. Please may you provide me with:
Q1. The total amount spent in the last five financial years on public relations, both in-house and externally (split if possible).
Q2. The total number of public relations officers or communications officers employed by your organisation over the last five years.
A1. Attached you can find the table that details the communication staff numbers and grades and the amount spent with a third party on PR dating back to 2018. Information is broken down by financial year (April to March) and the staff numbers are approximate given in Food Standards Scotland (FSS) we had people leave and get replaced in year in some instances.
A2. In FSS our agency for the full 5 years was 3X1 who are on the Scottish Government Framework. Their contract came to an end in July 2022 and FSS did not procure a new agency. This decision was due to uncertainty of budgets and priorities at that time, and the fact that FSS significantly clawed back on advertorial and paid PR activity.
The agency was on retainer at a cost of £39,600 pa and additional fees were incurred for paid advertorial, campaign support and incident comms as needed.
