Outstanding Common Agricultural Policy payments: EIR release

FOI reference: FOI/17/01921
Date received: 22 August 2017
Date responded: 7 September 2017

Information requested

You have asked for information on outstanding Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) payments, and in particular a breakdown of the 971 outstanding payments as at 4 August 2017, and also a breakdown of the outstanding payments as at 21 August 2017.

Response

As advised in my acknowledgement letter on 22 August the information you have requested is 'environmental information' therefore, 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 we are unable to provide some of the information you have requested because an exception under Regulation 10, paragraph 4 (a) (Exceptions from duty to make environmental information available) of the EIRs applies to that information. This is because we do not have the information from 4th August. The reasons for this are that the design of our system provides for snapshots of detailed information at the current time used for future planning rather than out of date information that has little value.

We can however confirm that as at 22 August 2017 there were 880 BRNs outstanding, broken down as follows:

118 BRNs outstanding a payment on that date were inspection related cases.

576 BRNs of the remaining 762 BRNs were flagged ready for payment at 22 August. The majority of these have subsequently issued in payment runs activated since 22 August, however, a number are held for a range of reasons, such as, land parcel updates, transfer of entitlements, or incomplete Single Application Forms (SAFs), and require further assessment before any payment can be made.

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