New Build Heat Standard and the impact on wood burning stoves: EIR release

Information requested

Any correspondence and briefings between the Scottish Government's Building Standards Division and Councils/Verifiers/Building Standards Officer relating to the New Build Heat Standard and the impact on wood burning stoves between 1 March 2024 and the date of your query (3 May 2024).

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 information you requested is attached.

An exception under regulation 11(2) of the EIRs (personal information) applies to some of the information requested 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.

The introduction of the new standard was also covered by the issue of a standard notification to all local authorities on 'Changes to guidance for April 2024 – Building (Scotland) Act 2003: Sections 4(2) and 4(4) Notice relating to guidance documents' on 25 March 2024. This document will be published shortly at Monitoring performance - Building standards - gov.scot (www.gov.scot).

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 202400412297 - Information released - Attachments

File type

45 page PDF

File size

1.9 MB