Number of houses granted planning permission under appeal 2017-18: EIR release

Information requested

• The number of homes which have received planning permission to be built. Please provide data from 2017-18, with a breakdown by fiscal year.
• The number of these homes which have been completed. Please provide data from 2017-18, with a breakdown by fiscal year.

You subsequently clarified that your request related to the number of houses that have been granted planning permission under appeal, specifically decisions made by reporters from the DPEA.

Response

If I might firstly explain that, because, the information you have requested is ‘environmental information’ for the purposes of the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 (EIR’s), 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 to your request

With regard to your first point, I can confirm that in the fiscal years from 2017 to present, planning permission for 21,979 houses has been granted through appeal.

For ease I have enclosed a table detailing the breakdown of the house numbers per fiscal year, as requested.

Year	Number of Houses Granted Planning Permission Under Appeal
2017-18	2616
2018-19	1719
2019-20	9410
2020-21	2258
2021-22	1851
2022-23	3700
2023-24 to date	425
Total	21979

With regard to your second point, under the terms of the exception at regulation 10(4)(a) of the EIRs (information not held), the Scottish Government is not required to provide information which it does not have. The Scottish Government does not have the information you have requested because this information is not collected by the Scottish Government.

This exception 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 exception. We have found that, on balance, the public interest lies in favour of upholding the exception. While we recognise that there may be some public interest in information about planning applications and appeals clearly we cannot provide information which we do not hold.

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.