FOI – 2025-3121 Pest Control Services (HTML)

Date received – 02 October 2025 | Date responded – 30 October 2025

Request

To whom it may concern,

Please provide the following information for the period 1 April 2020 to 31 March 2025, broken down by financial year:

1. Total expenditure by the Trust/organisation on pest control services, including both in-house provision and external/contracted services.
2. If any services are contracted out, please provide the supplier name(s) and the contract value(s).
3. The number of call-outs/treatments by species category (e.g. rats, mice, pigeons, gulls, foxes, grey squirrels, wasps, bedbugs, cockroaches—please use your own categories if recorded differently).
4. For any lethal control commissioned or carried out by the Trust/organisation, the number of animals killed by species and, where recorded, the method used (e.g. trapping, poisoning, shooting).
5. A copy of any policy, guidance, or standard operating procedure relating to the Trust/organisation's pest control service or contractors.

Please also provide the information in CSV, Excel, or another machine-readable format where possible.

If any part of this request is unclear, or if fulfilling it would exceed the statutory cost limit, please provide advice and assistance on how I can refine it.

Response

I refer to your freedom of information request that we received on 02 October 2025 requesting the following information:

To whom it may concern,

Please provide the following information for the period 1 April 2020 to 31 March 2025, broken down by financial year:

1. Total expenditure by the Trust/organisation on pest control services, including both in-house provision and external/contracted services.
2. If any services are contracted out, please provide the supplier name(s) and the contract value(s).
3. The number of call-outs/treatments by species category (e.g. rats, mice, pigeons, gulls, foxes, grey squirrels, wasps, bedbugs, cockroaches—please use your own categories if recorded differently).
4. For any lethal control commissioned or carried out by the Trust/organisation, the number of animals killed by species and, where recorded, the method used (e.g. trapping, poisoning, shooting).
5. A copy of any policy, guidance, or standard operating procedure relating to the Trust/organisation's pest control service or contractors.

Please also provide the information in CSV, Excel, or another machine-readable format where possible.

If any part of this request is unclear, or if fulfilling it would exceed the statutory cost limit, please provide advice and assistance on how I can refine it.

We have now completed the search of our records and can provide you with the following information:

1. Total expenditure by the Trust/organisation on pest control services, including both in-house provision and external/contracted services.

Under Section 17(1) of the Freedom of Information Scotland Act, 2002 (FOISA) an organisation does not have to provide that information if it does not hold it. NHS National Services Scotland (NSS) do not hold the requested information for financial year 2020-2021 as this was not data we recorded at the time.

What we can provide is Appendix 1 – Total expenditure by NHS NSS on pest control services, detailing the requested information from financial year 2021/2022 onwards.

2. If any services are contracted out, please provide the supplier name(s) and the contract value(s).

All NSS services are contracted out. Our suppliers’ name is Pest Solutions and the annual contract value is circa £10k.

Full supplier details are as follows:

3. The number of call-outs/treatments by species category (e.g. rats, mice, pigeons, gulls, foxes, grey squirrels, wasps, bedbugs, cockroaches—please use your own categories if recorded differently).

Please find attached Appendix 2 – Pest Solutions visits to NHS NSS, providing the requested information.

4. For any lethal control commissioned or carried out by the Trust/organisation, the number of animals killed by species and, where recorded, the method used (e.g. trapping, poisoning, shooting).

Under Section 17(1) of FOISA an organisation does not have to provide that information if it does not hold it. NSS does not record the requested information, all NSS pest control services are contracted out with our suppliers. You may be able to obtain this information from the supplier directly at the following email address: info@pestsolutions.co.uk.

5. A copy of any policy, guidance, or standard operating procedure relating to the Trust/organisation's pest control service or contractors.

Please find attached Appendices 3-13, which outline the NSS Estates & Facilities - SNBTS Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) document and also the individual Quality Technical Agreements (QTA’s) that are in place between SNBTS and NSS Estates & Facilities. Please refer to Section 11 of the SNBTS MOU the SNBTS regulatory requirement that services are delivered to Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) standards that this includes the current pest control services delivered by Pest Solutions on the SNBTS buildings.

Some of the documentation being released includes personal data of third parties, specifically, email addresses and telephone numbers of individuals which have not been released into the public domain. Where this is the case, these details have been redacted in line with exception Section 38 ((1)(b)) of FOISA.

I trust you will find the information of assistance and if you require any further information, please do not hesitate to contact us.

If you are unhappy with any aspect of how we have dealt with your request, you can make representations to us asking us to review the handling of your request.

If you require any further information, please contact the Associate Director Governance and Board Services (Board Secretary) within 40 working days of the date of this correspondence.

Contact

Address

If after a review you are still unhappy, you also have the right to apply to the Scottish Information Commissioner, who can be contacted at Kinburn Castle, St Andrews, Fife, KY16 9DS, or via their application form.

National Services Scotland (NSS) is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. You can view all FOI responses within our FOI Publications repository.