Home Energy Scotland fund: EIR release

Information requested

Each year since the beginning of the Home Energy Scotland scheme to provide grants and loans for energy systems, insulation etc., how much investment did the Scottish Government provide for this, and how much was actually spent.

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.

An annual capital and financial transactions budget is allocated to the Heat in Buildings programme, which covers a range of funding programmes. Within this, the Home Energy Scotland (HES) Grant and Loan Scheme is allocated an element of this budget based on likely levels of expenditure across schemes within the wider programme.

The HES Grant and Loan Scheme launched in December 2022. We have therefore provided the data requested for financial years 2022-23 and 2023-24 up to the end of Quarter 3, December 2023. The 2022-23 data is for the full year and includes the budget allocation and total funds paid for the predecessor scheme, HES Loan and Cashback.

The total funds paid includes applicants that have fully claimed their funding and those that have partially drawn down funding, but have yet to claim the full amount as per their committed offer.

Financial Year 2022-23:

Budget Allocation	Total Funds Paid
£42 million	£39,534,966.98

Financial Year 2023-24, up to the end of Quarter 3 (December 2023):

Budget Allocation	Total Funds Paid
£56 million	£54,080,923.16

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.