East Lothian Council/Inch Cape Offshore Windfarm: EIR release

FOI reference: FOI/18/01117
Date received: 11 April 2018
Date responded: 6 June 2018

Information requested

Correspondence between Scottish Government Ministers/officials and East Lothian Council regarding the Inch Cape Offshore Windfarm Development and associated Onshore development in East Lothian over the past 12 months.

As the information you have requested is 'environmental information' for the purposes of the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 (EISRs), 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.

Response

Please see attached a copy of most of the information requested.

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 11(2) (personal information of a third party) of the EISRs applies to that information. The reasons why this exception applies are explained below.

Regulation 11(2) – personal information of a third party. An exception under regulation 11(2) of the EISRs (personal information of a third party) applies to some of the information requested because it is personal data of a third party and disclosing it would contravene the data protection principles in Article 5(1) of the General Data Protection Regulation and in section 34(1) of the Data Protection Act 2018. 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

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Attachment 1 FOI-18-01117.pdf

File type

39 page PDF

File size

5.5 MB

Attachment 2 FOI-18-01117.pdf

File type

34 page PDF

File size

4.0 MB