Freedom of Information Officer
Scottish Parliament

Steven T

00:00:02 My name is Steven T and I work as a Freedom of Information Officer at the Scottish Parliament.

00:00:08 I’m responsible for first of all ensuring that any requests that come in are logged properly on the parliament database. And also ensuring that those requests are answered by either myself or somebody else in the organisation.

00:00:25 There’s a lot, an awful lot of media scrutiny of the parliament, and, and we get an awful lot of requests from journalists and, you know who are looking for a good story, usually story, a negative story about the parliament, and you know trying to deal with that aspect of things can be, can be tricky sometimes.

00:00:47 I think a lot of other jobs in the parliament you can be quite narrowly focused on one thing and, you, you know you only speak to your, your immediate colleagues and, you know and your, your team of maybe you know a few people, but in this job I tend to you know get out and, and meet people across the parliament in different departments which is nice. You get, you get a very good idea of what’s going on.

00:01:11 Probably at the time when I was in school what I really wanted to be a musician. I probably wanted to be in a band or something like that, so, I wouldn’t say this is something that I’ve, you know I didn’t sort of see myself as working in the Scottish parliament you know when I was, when I was you know in my teens or something like that.

00:01:29 You know I still play guitar, and, you know, well I just really love music, so I’d have, you know I’d love to be in a rock band. But, obviously it’s not the case so there you go.

00:01:44 All my friends went to university but I didn’t because I don’t know I think I, in a lot of ways I had my head in the clouds, so, you know I didn’t really, I think I probably what I’d have liked to have done at that stage other than being a musician would, would have been to go to university and, and do English literature or something like that. But again, I, it didn’t turn out that I did that.

00:02:07 I don’t think my grades were all that good, and, I think, I’d, if I’d want, if I was going to do it, I’d have wanted to have gone to what I thought at the time was a probably a proper university like Edinburgh university or something like that, and, so no, as it turned out I ended up just getting a job after I left school so.

00:02:24 Got a job in a library. So which was you know I quite enjoyed, I started working in a library just, part time actually when I, in my final two years of school and, you know after leaving school I needed to get a job and, the library was the obvious candidate so that’s what I, that’s what I went for.

00:02:47 One of my interests was English literature and, you know obviously you know, obviously read quite a lot, so, working in a library is obviously you know a good place to be if you’re, you’re interested in those, those sorts of things.

00:03:00 Getting a job at the parliament actually I think is probably the turning point, but I moved from, from Perth, you know I was staying at home, and I moved to Edinburgh so finally I got out you know the sort of family home etc and, you know as, as I say since I worked start, I’ve been working in the parliament I think you know a whole lot of new sort of avenues have opened up to me in terms of career. So I’d say that’s probably a turning point.

00:03:27 You know if somebody had said to me, before you know a couple of years before I got the job in the parliament, if somebody had said to me, you’ll work at the Scottish parliament I’d have been sort of you know kind of wow, it must be you know amazing you know how d’ you get a job there, you know. Of course yeah, here, I’ve been working here since 1999 now you know so, it’s, you know I think it’s, you know it’s been great actually.

00:03:52 END