Processing information relating to specified Mortality Event Reports: EIR release

Information requested

 

You asked for the following information in relation to Mortality Event Reports MRT00751, MRT00797, MRT00806, MRT00814:

• The date Marine Scotland/FHI was notified and/or became aware of each mortality event.
• The method of communication by which the mortality event came to be known by Marine Scotland/FHI.
• Please provide the time, date and contents of the communications received by Marine Scotland/FHI which notified of the mortality events.
• Please provide any and all communications to date (11 March 2019), between Marine Scotland/FHI and other party in relation to any of the aforementioned Mortality Events.
• Please provide any supplementary documentation currently held by Marine Scotland/FHI in relation to any of the aforementioned mortality events.

 

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.

 

In relation to MRT00751, this information was collected through the visit that the Fish Health Inspectorate made to the site in question, reported through case reference 20180429.  This case is published through the link provided below and has also been released to you in response to an earlier request (FoI/18/02916).

https://www2.gov.scot/Topics/marine/Fish-Shellfish/FHI/CaseInformation

The remaining events (MRT00797; MRT00806 and MRT00814) were notified to Marine Scotland by telephone.  The information provided was subsequently recorded in the Mortality Event Reports as referenced in your request. Marine Scotland’s FHI Mortality event reports are now published pro-actively and that information contains the ‘date reported’ in relation to each event. You can access this information through the link above. In these cases, the mortality event reports contain all of the recorded information which we hold in relation to the mortality events reported to the FHI.

Marine Scotland’s FHI holds no additional information in relation to further communications or documentation in relation to the specified mortality reports, aside from information previously released to you through our response to FoI/18/02916 and information actively published through the process detailed above.

Published responses to FoI requests handled by Scottish Government are available online:

https://www.gov.scot/publications/

 

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.