Tunnels and underpasses approved by the Scottish Government Poultry Unit: EIR release

Information requested

The use of tunnels and underpasses approved by the Scottish Government Poultry Unit to allow free range poultry to access ranging areas within the past 20 years.

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.

The Scottish Government Poultry Unit has approved 3 applications which contained tunnels in the last 16 years. We do not have records going back 20 years because we only started collecting this information 16 years ago.

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.