Cost of visits to Loch Creran: EIR release

Information requested

We're still wondering how much each of these visits cost, which is our right to know under the Freedom of Information Act.

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.

As our response to this EIR request will be published, after issue to you in due course, I wanted to clarify, for context, that the visits being referred to are the annual Marine Directorate scientific surveys of the shellfish farm at Caledonian Oyster Company Ltd. to assess the impact of the invasive non-native tunicate Carpet Sea Squirt (Didemnum vexillum) on the site between 2016 and 2023.

For your information only, I wanted to advise you that all EIR releases (where information is released) are published on the Scottish Government publications page at the link provided here: Publications - gov.scot (www.gov.scot).

On 24 January 2024, I wrote to you to seek clarification regarding the scope of your request. I asked you: “in order to answer your question comprehensively and within the timescales set out by the EIR protocols, could you specify the time period that you wish to have this information for i.e. which visits do you want to know the costs for? It would be helpful also if you could provide any specific clarification about the visits e.g. survey related work, to ensure there is no dubiety about the context of the query.”

You responded to me on 2 February 2024 to say: “I think it would be best to have the data from 2016 to the present. We would like to know the costs of transport and accommodation for the attendant scientists and officers; survey related work, including salaried time for write up, and consumables for lab work; salaried time and consumables during the survey.”

Response to your request

Please find the details of most of the information you have requested in table format below. The attachment (Annex A) provided shows the total cost estimates for each category you specified, from the first survey carried out in 2016 up to the last survey carried out in 2023.

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 all the information you have requested because:

• Civil Servants (including scientists, Compliance Officers and policy staff) 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 individual activities. For scientists more granularity in data exist with the staff costs captured at the project level. However each project captures multiple surveys, depending on their purposes, and it is not possible to accurately allocate costs for each of these surveys ongoing under each project. We have interrogated our data and restricted the searches to 2 weeks prior to the survey and 2 weeks after the survey to capture the time spent on survey preparation and data analysis as requested. Therefore only estimated staff time of scientists is made available to you in the table provided.
• Consumables costs are not held in a form where they can be associated with individual activities or surveys. Consumables as often bought in bulk and shared between individual surveys and between different years. Hence this information is not available and not provided.
• Not all information related to travel & overtime (if overtime was claimed or not) is held at project level. Where information was available at project level it is provided in the table.
• We have indicated on the table where information is not held.

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 of transport and accommodation for the attendant scientists and officers; survey related work, including salaried time for write up, and consumables for lab work; salaried time and consumables during the survey, 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.

FOI 202400395329 - Information released - Annex 1

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1 page PDF

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115.4 kB