Wind farms in Orkney: EIR Review

Information requested

Original request 202400395830

Regarding Wind farms in Orkney - Quanterness, Hoy and Faray.

Can you please provide a list of the Ministers involved in the decision and the minutes of the discussion leading up to them being approved?

Response

Further to my letter of 4 March 2024, I have now completed my review of our response to your request under the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 (EIRs):

Regarding Wind farms in Orkney - Quanterness, Hoy and Faray. "Can you please provide a list of the Ministers involved in the decision and the minutes of the discussion leading up to them being approved?"

I have concluded that a new decision should be substituted.

As set out in our initial response, there are no minutes of discussions recorded leading up to approval of each case, and the Minister involved in the decisions was Tom Arthur MSP, the Minister for Public Finance, Planning and Community Wealth, at that time.

However, as explained in our initial response, in each case, written advice and a recommendation on the application was provided for the Minister in a submission, sent by email by officials to the Minister’s private office. The Minister’s private office responded to officials by email. Due to size, copies of the relevant emails and submissions will issue separately by email for your information.

Please note, however, that an exception under Regulation 11(2) of the EIRs (personal information) applies to some of the information provided because it is personal data of a third party 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.

In addition, to clarify, whilst each Scottish Minister has a portfolio responsibility, Scottish Ministers take a collective approach on behalf of all Scottish Ministers. Mr Arthur had Planning in his portfolio responsibility therefore, he was the correct Minister to make the decisions on the Orkney windfarms cases.

Due to the size of the files we are unable to upload the documents referred to above. If you wish to consider, please contact us at the address below and we will be happy to provide.

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.