Sea Lice data regarding Dawnfresh Loch Etive trout farms: EIR release

Information requested

All information, including any correspondence with any party, as may be held by the Fish Health Inspectorate and/or Marine Scotland and/or the Scottish Government on:

1. The reporting of and/or publication of on-farm sea-lice data by Dawnfresh in relation to that company’s rainbow trout farms on Loch Etive.

2. Any on-farm sea lice data, or sea lice treatment information, held concerning those farms.

Response

Please find attached relevant information to your request. This includes communications between Marine Scotland’s Fish Health Inspectorate (FHI) and Dawnfresh over their sea lice count strategy and communications between Marine Scotland and yourself concerning the publication of sea lice data with respect to Loch Etive.
In relation to the fish farm site Etive 4 (FS1112) we hold some sea lice information relating to week 49 of 2016 and week 1 to week 3 of 2017. This has been released through a response issued to FoI/17/02754 and is available through the Scottish Government website - https://www.gov.scot/publications 

There may also be some information obtained through surveillance activity conducted by the FHI. The results of this surveillance are actively published, with publication dating back to 2013 and can be found on the following web page - https://www2.gov.scot/Topics/marine/Fish-Shellfish/FHI/CaseInformation

Sea lice data, reported to the FHI through the voluntary reporting regime, in association with Marine Scotland’s policy on the regulation of sea lice in Scotland, has been actively published since the beginning of 2019. This is available through the case information web page detailed above.
Marine Scotland Science, acts as a statutory consultee to the planning process associated with aquaculture developments. Consultations received from Argyll and Bute Council and the documents associated with applications are available on the website, along with the comments which MSS have submitted, some of this information may be relevant to your request:  https://publicaccess.argyll-bute.gov.uk/online-applications/

While we provide information where possible, in this case an exception under regulation 11(2) (personal data) applies to some of the information requested. The reasons why this exception applies are explained in the Annex to this letter.
Under regulation 6(1)(b) of the EIRs, we do not have to give you information which is already publicly available and easily accessible to you in another form or format.

REASONS FOR NOT PROVIDING INFORMATION

An exceptions applies
An exception under regulation 11(2) of the EIRs (personal information) 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

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-19-01570 Information released

File type

5 page PDF

File size

126.7 kB