Offshore wind and marine renewables health and safety: EIR release

FOI reference: FOI/17/01804
Date received: 4 August 2017
Date responded: 18 August 2017

Information requested

"… all health and safety breaches must be reported to yourselves and Scottish Ministers, then please provide, under the FOI, a copy of such report. Further to this, I'm also advised that the aforementioned lidar device broke anchor and ended up in Collieston Bay. Once again, another serious breach of health and safety and a hazard to other users of the sea. Please provide a copy of the health and safety report for this incident also."

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.

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the Scottish Government does not have the information you have requested. Therefore we are refusing your request under the exception at regulation 10(4)(a) of the EIRs.

The reasons why that exception applies are explained below.

Although the Scottish Government does not have the information you requested, we do have an "Offshore Wind & Marine Renewables Dropped Objects Form" for a waverider metocean buoy and I enclose a copy of this information. We are unable to provide some of this information because an exception(s) under regulation(s) 11(2) (personal information) of the EIRs applies to that information. The reason why that exception applies is explained in the Annex to this letter.

Reasons for not providing information

The Scottish Government does not have the information.

Under the terms of the exception at regulation 10(4)(a) of the EIRs (information not held), the Scottish Government is not required to provide information which it does not have. The Scottish Government does not have the information you have requested. We do not have any information regarding a floating device that "became unstable and crashed through the window of the deploying vessel", as referred to in your request, and we do not have any information that the "lidar device broke anchor and ended up in Collieston Bay", as referred to in your request. As we understand, the LIDAR device has been anchored in position at the offshore site since deployment.

However, the Scottish Government has an "Offshore Wind & Marine Renewables Dropped Objects Form" for a waverider metocean buoy, a copy of which is attached to this response.

This exception 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 exception. We have found that, on balance, the public interest lies in favour of upholding the exception. While we recognise that there may be some public interest in information about, clearly we cannot provide information which we do not hold.

Personal data

An exception under regulation 11(2) of the EIRs (personal information) applies to some of the information because it is personal data of a third party and disclosing it would contravene the data protection principles in Schedule 1 to the Data Protection Act 1998. This exception is not subject to the 'public interest test', so we are not required to consider if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exception.

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

foi-17-01804 Offshore wind and marine renewables dropped objects form - information.pdf

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4 page PDF

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