Agriculture and Rural Economy event invitation statistics: EIR release

Information requested

(i) How many invitations has the Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs, Land Reform and Islands received to speak at or attend an event relating to Agriculture and the Rural Economy in the last 12 months?

(ii) Of those invitations, how many have been accepted, and how many have been rejected?

(iii) How many invitations has the Director of Agriculture and Rural Economy in the Scottish Government received to speak at or attend an event relating to Agriculture and the Rural Economy in the last 12 months?

(iv) On how many occasions in which an invitation has been declined on behalf of the Cabinet Secretary has the Director of Agriculture and Rural Economy in the Scottish Government spoken at or attended an event in her place?

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.

Response to your request
(i) The Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs, Land Reform and Islands has received 79 invitations to speak at or attend an event relating to Agriculture and Rural Economy in the last 12 months.

(ii) Of those invitations:

Accepted	Declined
36	43

(iii) The Director of Agriculture has received 64 invitations to speak at or attend an event relating to Agriculture and Rural Economy in the last 12 months.

(iv) There have been 4 occasions in which an invitation has been declined on behalf of the Cabinet Secretary where the Director of Agriculture and Rural Economy has spoken or attended an event in her place in the last 12 months.

Please note there are very rare occasions when, due to the need to expedite a response, invitations can be received and responded to directly from Private Offices and/or policy teams. When these instances occur there are no routes to readily collect the data. However, this would only make a modest increase to the number of cases identified in points (i) and (ii) and would not affect the other responses.

It is also worth noting that the Director of Agriculture and Rural Economy is invited, in that capacity, to many of the same events relating to Agriculture and Rural Economy as the Cabinet Secretary, so therefore these instances would not appear in answer (iv).

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.