Meetings between Scottish Government officials and members of the salmon farming industry: EIR release

Information requested

Meeting minutes of the 20 (twenty) most recent meetings between any Scottish Government officials (incl Ministers / MSPs) and any members of the salmon farming industry.

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.

You subsequently clarified your request as “the minutes of the 20 most recent meetings (in total) across all 3 directorates listed below:

• Marine Directorate, including Aquaculture, Marine Science, Marine Conservation, National Marine Plan, Fish Health Inspectorate, Marine Licensing Operations, and recreational fisheries
• Directorate for Environment and Forestry including Environmental Quality
• Directorate for Agriculture and Rural Economy including Animal Health & Welfare

as long as those meetings were held with (a) member/s/representative/s of the salmon farming industry (i.e. not with seaweed farmers, fishers, fishing fleets, manufacturers etc.).”

Clarifications on the information released under your request

The definition of “meetings” is broad, and so I am providing clarification on the meetings for which minutes are released to you.

Firstly, specific areas of the Scottish Government conduct regular operational meetings with representatives of the salmon farming industry. The Inspectors of the Fish Health Inspectorate (FHI), for example, are appointed by the Scottish Ministers to act under the aquaculture and aquatic animal health regulations. This involves regularly undertaking statutory inspection and sampling programmes on fish farm sites, duties which include meeting salmon farming industry workers. The FHI proactively publishes the information it collects, including records of inspections at farm sites and how they are conducted, online: Publication of Fish Health Inspectorate information - gov.scot (www.gov.scot). It is for this reason I have not provided information relating to meetings that are carried out by the Scottish Government in the course of fulfilling its statutory obligations.

For the purposes of your request, I am therefore only providing information on the number of nonoperational meetings between the Scottish Government and representatives of the salmon farming industry.

The meetings provided in this response are reflective of the development of Scottish Government policy in relation to Scotland’s aquaculture industry. Scottish Ministers and officials meet and hear from a range of organisations with a diverse range of views in the course of their duties. This includes those representing industry sectors which stand to be impacted by regulation, as well as those representing community, environmental and other interests.

Importantly, most of the minutes released to you under this information request are draft and have not been agreed/finalised with the participants of those meetings. Therefore, it should be noted that the minutes do not necessarily reflect the final position of the Scottish Government or the participants of the meetings, or the organisations referred to within those meetings.

Finally, not every meeting is formally recorded, and so it may be the case that meetings have taken place between Scottish Government and the salmon farming industry that we have no record of, or have not minuted, and so have not included in the Index of Enclosures provided in Annex B. Please see the section titled “The Scottish Government does not have the information” in Annex A for more information.

ANNEX A - REASONS FOR NOT PROVIDING INFORMATION

The Scottish Government does not have the information

Under the terms of the exception at regulation 10(4)(a) of the EIRs (Information not held), the Scottish Government is not required to provide information which it does not have. The Scottish Government does not have some of the information you have requested because 12 out of the 20 most recent meetings between any Scottish Government officials (including Ministers/MSPs) and any members of the salmon farming industry up to the date of your request were not minuted.

This exception 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 exception. We have found that, on balance, the public interest lies in favour of upholding the exception. While we recognise that there may be some public interest in the minutes of meetings between Scottish Government officials (including Ministers/MSPs) and members of the salmon farming industry, clearly we cannot provide information which we do not hold.

An exception applies

An exception under regulation 11(2) (Personal data of a third party) of the EIRs applies to some of the information you have requested. This exception applies 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.

An exception applies

An exception under regulation 10(5)(e) (Confidentiality of commercial or industrial information) of the EIRs applies to some of the information you have requested. This exception applies because disclosure of this particular information would, or would be likely to, prejudice substantially the confidentiality of commercial information provided by MOWI, Scottish Sea Farms, Bakkafrost and Watermoon Scotland (Eide Fjordbruck Holdings) and thus cause substantial harm to their commercial interests. Disclosing this information would be likely to give competitors to these organisations an advantage, which could significantly harm their commercial business.

This exception 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 exception. We have found that, on balance, the public interest lies in favour of upholding the exception. We recognise that there is a public interest in disclosing information as part of open and transparent government. However, we believe in this particular case there is a greater public interest in not significantly harming commercial business.

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.

FOI - 202400413851 - Information released - Annex B

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16 page PDF

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294.8 kB