National Park status for the Isle of Skye, Rassay and Rona: EIR release

Information requested

I am writing to ask for copies of all correspondemce between yourselves and Highland Council concerning a forthcoming application for National.Park status for the Isle of Skye, Rassay and Rona.

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

Annex A of this response contains all correspondence that is held by the Scottish Government and is considered to be in scope of your request.

An exception under regulation 11(2) of the EIRs (personal information) applies to some of the information requested because it is personal data of third parties 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. You will note that this information has been redacted throughout the disclosed documents.

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. Therefore, the attachment to the email of Monday, 20 November 2023 at 5:06 PM has not been attached. In the interests of disclosure, it is available here on Highland Council’s public website.

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 202400395947 - Information Released - Annex A

File type

32 page PDF

File size

524.3 kB