Scottish Government funded supported schemes for domestic owner occupiers: EIR release

Information requested

Information on Scottish Government funded support schemes for domestic owner occupiers.

This was in follow up to a previous EIR (reference: 202300388440) received on 07 December 2023 which asked for:

• 1. The number of applications approved for installing a heat pump in the financial years 2021-22; 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 (to date)?
• 2. The number of applications for installing energy storage systems in the financial years 2021-22; 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 (to date)?

 

Response

As the information you have requested is ‘environmental information’ for the purposes of the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 (EIRs), we are required to deal with your request under those Regulations. We are applying the exemption at section 39(2) of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA), so that we do not also have to deal with your request under FOISA.

This exemption is subject to the ‘public interest test’. Therefore, taking account of all the circumstances of this case, we have considered if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exemption. We have found that, on balance, the public interest lies in favour of upholding the exemption, because there is no public interest in dealing with the same request under two different regimes. This is essentially a technical point and has no material effect on the outcome of your request.

As per my acknowledgement sent on 12 January 2024, I have interpreted ‘Scottish Government funded support schemes for domestic owner occupiers’ as the Home Energy Scotland (HES) Loan and Cashback Scheme and its replacement the HES Grant and Loan Scheme, which was launched on 02 December 2022.

Over the time periods in the above request, these schemes offered funding to homeowners in Scotland for clean heating and energy efficiency measures.

The most recent whole quarter which the Scottish Government holds measure level data on applications approved at the time of this request is July - September 2023, this is reflected in the figures provided in this response.

The requested figures are as follows:

Financial Year 2021 - 2022	Financial Year 2022 - 2023	Financial Year 2023 - 2024*
1837	2216	1460
*Figures available to 30 September 2023.

 

Energy Storage Applications Approved
Financial Year 2021 - 2022	Financial Year 2022 - 2023	Financial Year 2023 - 2024*
442	2610	2120

These figures reflect applications where an applicant has submitted all required documentation, these have been processed and a funding agreement has been issued.

Note that the number of applications approved in each financial year may differ from the actual number of applications received, number of measures installed and funding claimed as published previously.

This can be due to a variety of reasons including applications waiting for additional information from applicants before they can be processed further and applicants having 9 months to claim their funding after a funding agreement has been issued. This could result in different steps of the applicant journey falling into varying financial years.

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at http://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.