Waverley Line Contributions: EIR release

Information requested

I ask to be provided confirmation of the contribution payments sought by the Scottish Government from Scottish Borders Council for Borders Railway Contributions. And or any sums charged by the Scottish Government under 39(7) of the Waverley Railway (Scotland) Act 2006 in relation to interest payments, loan charges and sums payable under or in consequence of any financial support contract.

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.

Whilst we try to provide the information wherever possible, we were not able to locate all of the information you have requested.

Please see below Scottish Borders Council’s contributions agreed between stakeholders as per the Amended And Restated Minute Of Agreement in relation to the implementation of the Waverley Railway (Scotland) Act 2006:
Waverley Railway - Funding

SBC
	£000's	£000's
In Kind Contributions
Land	930.3
Deveg work
Parliamentary Costs	1,293.5
Cycle Paths (some SESTRAN)	827.0
SEB Grant	800.0
Currie Road	3,040.1
Shawfair bridges contribution
Cities Growth Fund (expend incurred)
Cities Growth Fund
Sub total		6,890.9
Cash	8,477.9	8,477.9
S 75 Contributions
Future revenue budgets
Crossrail contribution
Sub total
Total inclusive of inflation		15,368.8

The above information together with some more information which may fall in the scope of your request is also available online via: Item No. 10 - 170117 - Executive - Borders Railway Contributions.pdf (moderngov.co.uk).

After having searched our data base, we were not able to locate any other information related to ‘any sums charged by the Scottish Government under 39(7) of the Waverley Railway (Scotland) Act 2006 in relation to interest payments, loan charges and sums payable under or in consequence of any financial support contract’.

This may be due to the passage of time. According to the Annex 2: retention of financial records of the Scottish Public Finance Manual, the Scottish Government financial records are normally retained for either 6 years or 2 years, depending on the type of record, following the end of the financial year in question.

On balance, we find that your request is formulated in a too general manner to allow us to search our data base in order to provide a definitive response. It would be helpful for you to provide more particular details regarding the payments you are looking to receive information on. Particularly, any time scales would be helpful in defining our searches.

Regulation 10(4)(c) of the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 (the EIRs) allows a Scottish public authority to refuse to provide information if the request is formulated in a too general manner.

This is our notice that your request has been formulated in a too general manner to allow us to identify the information you require.

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.