Publication - FOI/EIR release

Rural business inspections data: EIR release

Published: 13 August 2024
Directorate: Agriculture and Rural Economy Directorate
Topic: Farming and rural, Public sector
FOI reference: EIR/202300377826
Date received: 25 September 2023
Date responded: 20 October 2023

Information request and response under the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004.

Information requested

Data relating to inspections made for businesses in receipt of rural payments, referred to on this page. In particular you asked for data for the last five years, detailing the number of inspections and including the following criteria -

Date of inspection
Name/address of business inspected
Name/address/coordinates of land inspected
Result of inspection
Action taken if breach found

You also asked for the total number of businesses that received a rural payment in the last five financial years.

Response

The webpage related to the link you provided shows twelve headings. The following headings relate to inspections made for businesses in receipt of rural payments -

Cross Compliance inspections
Livestock inspections
Land inspections
Capital inspections - Crofting Agricultural Grant Scheme, New Entrant Start Up Grant, New Entrant Capital Grant, Small Farm Grant Scheme, Young Farmer Start Up Grant, Agri - environment and Climate Scheme Capital Grants
Forestry inspections

Note -

Cross Compliance inspections are split into 5 inspection types -

- Land related covering: GAEC1, GAEC4, GAEC5, GAEC6, GAEC7, SMR1, SMR2, SMR3, SMR4, SMR9 & SMR10

- Abstraction covering: GAEC2

- Groundwater covering: GAEC3

- Hormone covering: SMR5

- Animal welfare covering: SMR11, SMR12 & SMR13

The remaining Cross Compliance requirements Pig identification and registration (SMR6), Cattle identification and registration (SMR7) & Sheep and goat identification (SMR8) are inspected under Livestock inspections.
A small number of inspections selected in one year were completed early the following year.
Details of the full range of Cross Compliance requirement can be found on these pages - Good Agricultural and Environmental Conditions (GAECs) & Statutory Management Requirements (SMRs)

The attached spreadsheets show the 'Number of inspections', 'Date of inspection', 'Result of inspection' & 'Action taken if breach found'* for each inspection type for last 5 years.

An exception under regulation 11(2) of the EIRs (personal information) applies to the 'Name/address of business inspected' and 'Name/address/coordinates of land inspected' information you 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. The exception has been applied based on information provided by the Information
Commissioner's Office (ICO) - "information about companies or public authorities is not personal information. However, information about individuals acting as sole traders, employees, partners and company directors where they are individually identifiable and the information relates to them as an individual may constitute personal data" - What is personal information: a guide | ICO

In lieu of business names, businesses are identified with a unique reference numbers.

* Details of the 'Action taken if breach found' for Cross Compliance and Livestock inspections is already published on the Rural Payments and Services (RP&S) website on this page Cross Compliance inspection statistics (ruralpayments.org).

The reference numbers shown on the attached spreadsheets can be cross-check and matched with the reference number on the RP&S website.

The total number of businesses that received a rural payment in the last five financial years are set out in the following table -

Year	Number of businesses
2022	18208
2021	18333
2020	18292
2019	18711
2018	18812

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.