Scottish Government correspondence with Keep Scotland Beautiful: EIR release

Information requested

You asked for all Scottish Government correspondence (including Ministers, Civil Servants, Special Advisers, and Press Officers) with employees of Keep Scotland Beautiful, 1st January 2022 - date.

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.

I enclose a copy of some of the information you have requested in Annex B. 

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance we are unable to provide some of the information you have requested because exceptions under regulations 10(4)(d) (materials in the course of completion), 10(5)(d) (confidentiality of proceedings), 10(5)(e) (confidentiality of commercial or industrial information), 10(5)(f) (third party interest) and 11(2) (personal information) of the EIRs applies to that information. The reasons why these exceptions apply are explained in the attached Annex A.

*Due to the size of the files we are unable to upload the documents referred to above. If you wish to consider, please contact us at the address below and we will be happy to provide.

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.