Deaths of farmed salmon on Colonsay during 2017: EIR release

FOI reference: FOI/18/00471
Date received: 13 February 2018
Date responded: 9 March 2018

Information requested

Information on deaths of farmed salmon at Marine Harvest salmon farm on Colonsay during 2017.

Please include mortality event reports, disease reports, emails, inspection visits and other details.

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.

I can advise you that Marine Scotland's Fish Health Inspectorate (FHI) have not recieved any mortality reports during 2017 relating to the Colonsay site operated by Marine Harvest. Any information relating to mortality which we do have will be connected to cases conducted by the FHI and will either be already published, or will be published in due course in accordance with the active publication plan. This, as you will be aware, involves the publication of case information relating to aquatic animal health surveillance in Scotland.

Information is published on a quarterly basis, three months in arrears: http://www.gov.scot/Topics/marine/Fish-Shellfish/FHI/CaseInformation

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