Implementation of Statutory Plant Health Notices (SPHNs) across Scotland: EIR release

Information requested

SPHN response times across the public and private ownership, including the length and stipulations for any extension agreements.

And subsequent clarification seeking:

• All SPHNs issued by Scottish Forestry for the control of Phytophthora ramorum from 2018 up to the end of 2023.
• The length of time in days from SPHN being issued to initial actions completed (First compliance date), split by Private and Public ownership.
• The length of any extension period and reason for extension again split by Private and Public ownership.

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.

Please see attached some of the information we hold in relation to your request.

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance we are unable to provide some of the information you have requested because an exception under regulation 10(4)(b) (Manifestly unreasonable requests) of the EIRs applies to some of the information you have requested. This is because the necessary variables are held in individual records but our computer systems do not allow us to collate them into presentable information, and due to the high number of records covered by your request and therefore the high burden of collating and presenting the information, we consider it would be unreasonable to produce the collation manually.

Please see below for further details of why this exception applies.

• All SPHNs issued by Scottish Forestry for the control of Phytophthora ramorum from 2018 up to the end of 2023.
• The length of time in days from SPHN being issued to initial actions completed (First compliance date), split by Private and Public ownership.

Please see the attached spreadsheet.

• The length of any extension period and reason for extension again split by Private and Public ownership.

We do not currently collate data or report on SPHN extensions nationally, so to summarise the total lengths and reasons for extensions would require a manual review of each case application record.

This would require experienced case managers or similarly knowledgeable staff to undertake such a review. Given there are some 482 extensions indicated in the data, and at an estimate of 20 minutes per application to review each file, determine the extension reason and length of period, we estimate that this would take around 160 hours of staff time. At 37 hours per week, this would represent approximately four and a half weeks of a full-time officer’s working time.

Under regulation 10(4)(b) of the Environmental Information Regulations:
“A Scottish public authority may refuse to make environmental information available to the extent that–
[…]
(b)the request for information is manifestly unreasonable”

The Scottish Information Commissioner has provided guidance that this definition includes requests that:

“would impose a significant burden on the public authority […] where complying with it would require a disproportionate amount of time, and the diversion of an unreasonable proportion of its resources, including financial and human, away from other statutory functions. The authority should be able to demonstrate why other statutory functions take priority over its statutory duties under FOISA. If the public authority does not perform statutory functions, it should demonstrate why its core functions are of a higher priority than the statutory requirement to respond to information requests.”

We consider that the diversion of this amount of experienced officer time would meet these criteria, as it would have a significant negative impact on our ability to deliver our statutory responsibility to promote sustainable forest management and our core functions of supporting and delivering the management and expansion of Scotland’s forests in line with the Scottish Government’s Forestry Strategy.

Under regulation 10(1) of the EIRs:
“A Scottish public authority may refuse a request to make environmental information available if –
(a) there is an exception to disclosure under paragraph (4) or (5); and
(b) in all the circumstances of the case, the public interest in making the information available is outweighed by that in maintaining the exception.”

We consider that the public interest in making the information available is outweighed by the diversion of resources required to make it available and the associated impact on the delivery of our core functions.

While we are not able to provide specific reasons for each individual SPHN extension, typical reasons include:
• To allow felling to be completed around other material constraints at the site such as avoiding bird breeding seasons in sensitive areas.
• Lack of contractor availability where it can be shown that efforts have been made to find a contractor for the felling work.
• Logistical complications particularly with material assets, such as powerlines, that need to be resolved before felling.
• Impossibility of access &/or terrain – for example if a road needs to be built first and the site is too remote for safe hand felling.
• Local access issues, e.g. when felling is near a windfarm with ongoing operations.
• Where a detailed plan is provided to show that the felling will be completed but capacity issues mean this may require an extended compliance deadline, particularly for small land owners that do not typically deal with forestry management such as a golf course.
• Personal circumstances of the landowner or contractor (e.g. illness).
• If there are delays with SF issuing the SPHN, extensions can be given to allow a reasonable period of time for felling to be organised.

Where P. ramorum infection has become endemic across larger forests, SF may seek to arrange a Larch Management Plan which would typically include the removal of all larch across the forest over a longer period of five years. This allows the felling to be planned and managed in a more sustainable way in better accordance with the UK Forestry Standard. This option is available to both publicly (FLS) and privately owned forests.

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.

EIR 202400398525 - Information released - Attachment

File type

Excel document

File size

160.9 kB