Forestry Grant Scheme and Local Authority Woodland Strategies: EIR release

Information requested

In accordance with the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002, I would be grateful if you could provide the following information:

The number of applications to the Forestry Grant Scheme which were

a) accepted and

b) refused in each year of its operation, broken down by the categorisation of the proposed site in the relevant local authority woodland strategy.

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 number of applications to the Forestry Grant Scheme which were a) accepted and b) refused in each year of its operation.

Please see below:

Clearing Financial Year	Number of cases Accepted	Number of Cases Rejected
2015/2016	373	0
2016/2017	774	1
2017/2018	676	6
2018/2019	613	5
2019/2020	622	3
2020/2021	686	4
2021/2022	553	7
2022/2023	552	3
2023/2024	533	1

Please note that:

• Data are correct at 29/5/24.

• Data has been provided for complete financial years only.

• Figures are by financial year (i.e. 1st April – 31st March).

• The Number of Cases Accepted is defined as those cases that have gained Clearing Approval.

• The date used to classify each case into the year is the clearing round date. Please see the Scottish Forestry website for more information: Scoring criteria and clearing process (ruralpayments.org)

• Please note that that the low number of rejected applications is due to the iterative application process: where applications do not meet the minimum standard required by the Forestry Grant Scheme, Scottish Forestry works with applicants to assist them to improve their application so that it meets the scheme rules.

Broken down by the categorisation of the proposed site in the relevant local authority woodland strategy.

Scottish Forestry’s case management system holds this information but it is held at individual case level and cannot be automatically collated. To produce this information would therefore require a manual review of each case application record.

This would require experienced case managers or similarly knowledgeable staff to undertake such a review, and at a conservative estimate of 10 minutes per application to review each of the approximately 1,800 woodland creation applications in scope, determine the consultation status and hectarage, we estimate that this would take around 300 hours of staff time. At 37 hours per week, this would represent approximately 8 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– Page 3 […] (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.

Approved Forestry Grant Scheme cases and some Forest & Woodland Strategy classifications can be interrogated on the Scottish Forestry Map Viewer here: Scottish Forestry - Scottish Forestry Map Viewer. However, please note that the inclusion of Forest & Woodland Strategy classifications is partial as we are dependent on the data having been provided to us by local authorities.

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.