Question reference: S5W-22837
- Asked by: Miles Briggs, MSP for Lothian, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
- Date lodged: 26 April 2019
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Current status: Answered by Jeane Freeman on 22 May 2019
Question
To ask the Scottish Government how many non-disclosure agreements have been agreed by each NHS board in each year since 1999.
Answer
This information is not collected or held centrally.
In February 2014, following concerns around the use of confidentiality clauses in settlement agreements, Scottish Ministers announced the expectation of a presumption against the use of any confidentiality clauses in NHS Scotland settlement agreements, unless there were clear and transparent reasons for inclusion. Any confidentiality clause which seeks to prevent an individual from raising a protected whistleblowing disclosure is illegal, under the Public Interest Disclosure Act (PIDA) 1998, and would make any agreement unenforceable.
From 2014, NHS Boards have been required to provide settlement agreement information for a Report to the Public Audit Committee. This material is only compiled in summary form, at national level, not by individual Health Boards. From this data, we can ascertain that the number of confidentiality clauses, or non-disclosure agreements, employed in NHS Board settlement agreements has been falling since 2014.
Pre-2014 Position:
Information on the pre-2014 position is not gathered centrally. However, from records available between 2007-08 and 2013-14, 315 settlement agreements containing confidentiality clauses were agreed. This information is at national not health board level, and is given in the following table:
07-08 | 08-09 | 09-10 | 10-11 | 11-12 | 12-13 | 13-14* | Total | |
Number nationally |
18 |
36 |
47 |
46 |
56 |
63 |
49 |
315 |
*to 21-03-14
Post-2014 Position
The following table indicates the total number of confidentiality clauses in settlement agreements notified to Scottish Government for each of the reported years since 2014.
Financial Year |
Number of settlement agreements containing confidentiality clauses |
2014-15 | 13 |
2015-16 | 1 |
2016-17 | 2 |
2017-18 | 3 |
As regards severance arrangements, these are matters between the Health Boards as individual employers and their NHS employees, and we do not collect data centrally.