Highly Protected Marine Areas spend: EIR release

Information requested

How much has been spent to date since the Scottish Government announced plans for Highly Protected Marine Areas. Could this be broken down by the amount spent on consultants and on the consultation itself as well as anything else where costs were incurred.

Please can you also provide me with any ministerial correspondence since December 2022 relating to HPMAs.

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
Your request has been divided into two parts which will be responded to separately.

Part 1
You asked: “How much has been spent to date since the Scottish Government announced plans for Highly Protected Marine Areas? Could this be broken down by the amount spent on consultants and on the consultation itself as well as anything else where costs were incurred.”

Please find the details of most of the information you have requested in table format below. The table provides the total cost to date for each category, up to and including the date of your request (7 November 2023).

Cost	Value (incl VAT)
Sustainability Appraisal	£54,367
Publication Cost of Consultation Documents	£6,656.29
Newspaper notice of Environmental Report publication	£515.09
Consultation Analysts	£35,100 (excl VAT)
Contractors for assisting with the Moderation of Consultation Responses	£2,232.43
Total	£98,870.81

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the Scottish Government does not have some of the information you have requested. Therefore we are refusing part of your request under the exception at regulation 10(4)(a) of the EIRs. The reason why that exception applies is explained below.

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 for two reasons:

(i) Civil Servants operate flexibly across a range of policies and programmes according to the specific requirements of their work at any given time. They do not, as a matter of course, record the proportion of their time spent working on particular matters. It is therefore not possible to provide an expenditure figure regarding how much the Scottish Government has spent on work by Civil Servants involved with Highly Protected Marine Areas.

(ii) The Joint Nature Conservation Committee and Nature Scot provided advice in the development of consultation documents and during the consultation process, however there is no business requirement for officials of either body to allocate their time spent working on tasks for the Marine Directorate between different tasks they perform for us, for example time spent on tasks relating to the consultation, or their work more generally. Given we do not hold details of the time spent by individuals undertaking these tasks, we are unable to provide details of the total costs that you have specified.

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 the costs associated with the work done by Civil Servants, the Joint Nature Conservation Committee and Nature Scot regarding Highly Protected Marine Areas, clearly we cannot provide information which we do not hold.

Under regulation 9 of the EIRs (our duty to provide advice and assistance) I would like to refer you to some previous EIR requests we have handled which may be of interest to you:

(i) The Scottish Government has already published its costs for the development of the Highly Protected Marine Areas policy in the 2022-2023 financial year under its response to a previous EIR request dated 7 August 2023 and handled under case reference number 202300368709. I have included the total cost for this financial year in the table above for completion, but if you would like to view the full breakdown of those costs for the 2022-2023 financial year, then please use the following web link: Development of Highly Protected Marine Areas (HPMAs): EIR release - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)

(ii) Below is a web link to a previous EIR response we answered under case reference 202300352032 on 17 May 2023, which may be of interest to you. Our response here specifically provides the costs associated to date (up to and including 17 April 2023) in the Consultation Process relative to the plans to make at least 10% of Scottish Seas Waters Highly Protected Marine Areas: Cost to date associated with Scottish Highly Protected Marine Areas: EIR release - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)

(iii) Finally, you may be interested in a related recent EIR response we responded to on 21 November 2023, regarding the spending over the last four financial years in various policy areas handled under case reference 202300383393. Our response will be available shortly to search for and view at the following website: Publications - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)

Part 2
You asked: “Please can you also provide me with any ministerial correspondence since December 2022 relating to HPMAs.”

1. I enclose a copy of most of the information you requested. Please find enclosed 99 items released in full or in part. I am providing a copy of most of the information you requested. There are 99 redacted items that have been released to you in our response, however they are not labelled 1 to 99 in numerical order because 5 items have been withheld in full due to exceptions applied under the EIRs that have been referred to below and a further 3 have been provided as extracts below.

2. *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.

3. Some of the information you have requested has been provided as extracts, rather than us releasing the full documents to you. The reason for this is because a large portion of these documents would require redaction - as the content of the document is multi-topic and so mostly out of scope of your request. We have provided the in scope information below as extracts with reference to the source document where the extract has been taken from.

• Extract #1: Ministerial Correspondence (handled under case reference number 202300377567), dated 17 October 2023, sent from the Private Secretary of Gillian Martin MSP/BPA, Minister for Energy and the Environment to the Scottish Creel Fisherman's Federation (SCFF) in response to a letter containing multi-topic queries. This response was provided to the request we have released to you as item 84:

“Regarding the road ahead for enhanced marine protections, we are committed to taking action that is proportionate to the scale of the climate and nature crisis, but is just and empowering for  rural communities. These proposals will be developed in collaboration with communities, rather than  being imposed from a distance. Over the summer, the Cabinet Secretary for Transport, Net Zero and  Just Transition has been meeting with communities to hear directly views on how local people should  be involved in marine protection. This has included learning about different models of  community-led marine protection in Scotland, such as the Berwickshire Voluntary Marine Reserve and  the Solway Firth Partnership. This is being brought together with views expressed in the HPMA  consultation analysis to develop proposals for how the Scottish Government best supports  community-led marine protection.”

• Extract #2: Ministerial Correspondence (handled under case reference 202300362136), dated 24 May 2023, sent from Lorna Slater MSP/BPA, Minister for Green Skills, Circular Economy and Biodiversity to a private individual in response to a query on National Parks and Marine National parks. This response was provided to the request released to you as item 66:

“We are analysing the responses to the HPMA consultation and will consider these very carefully as we develop next steps. The Cabinet Secretary for Net Zero and Just Transition has committed to visiting coastal and island communities in the coming months to hear directly from them as part of this process.”

• Extract #3: Ministerial Correspondence (handled under case reference 202200336258), dated 21 December 2022, sent from Oceana to Mairi Gougeon MSP/BPA, Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs and Islands regarding offshore Marine Protected Areas. This extract made up a small amount of that letter:

“Highly Protected Marine Areas
Notwithstanding the above we welcome your consultation on HPMAs which we will review and respond to in the New Year. We very much welcome the Scottish Government’s commitment to 10% HPMAs and hope these are largely in the inshore zone where they can have most ecological, fish recovery and spatial management benefit.”

4. 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.

5. Some of the information you have requested is available online because these items of ministerial correspondence were responses to the Scottish Highly Protected Marine Areas consultation and permission was already given as part of this process to publish these. Therefore these are already available online at the following links:

• Item 18, consultation response from Alasdair Allan MSP, Ministerial correspondence reference number: 202300349559: Response 495288972 to Scottish Highly Protected Marine Areas (HPMAs) - Scottish Government consultations - Citizen Space
• Item 36, consultation response from individual, Ministerial correspondence reference number: 202300352175: Response 836707921 to Scottish Highly Protected Marine Areas (HPMAs) - Scottish Government consultations - Citizen Space
• Item 44, consultation response from Argyll and Bute Council, Ministerial correspondence reference number: 202300353344: Response 180961228 to Scottish Highly Protected Marine Areas (HPMAs) - Scottish Government consultations - Citizen Space.

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. If, however, you do not have internet access to obtain this information from the website(s) listed, then please contact me again and I will send you a paper copy.

6. Some of the information you have requested is available from the sender’s website. This is item 22, Ministerial correspondence reference 202300350530. The response to this has been released to you as item 23 Response-202300350530_Redacted. However, please find a link to where the correspondence is also available here: 2023 03 marine stakeholder letter to CabSecRALRI on HPMAs (scotlink.org)

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.