Ineos Grangemouth and Michael Matheson MSP correspondence: EIR release

Information requested

1. Could you supply all correspondence sent and received by the Scottish Government, including internally, all briefings, all analysis, all minutes/notes from briefings, about Ineos Grangemouth, from the last two months?

2. Could you supply all correspondence sent and received by the Scottish Government, including internally, all briefings, all analysis, all minutes/notes from briefings, about Michael Matheson, from the last two months?

If both at too much money reduce it to one month for each.

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.

Question 1

Materials retained on our internal records system relating to question 1 of your request are contained in ANNEX A. Regulation 10(5)(a) and Regulation 10 5(e) of the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 (EIRs) have been applied to these materials.

Question 2
I enclose a copy of correspondence sent and received by the Scottish Government about Michael Matheson from the last two months in ANNEX B.

We consider that a number of redactions apply to the correspondence. The names and email addresses of officials of the Scottish Government have been redacted under Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002, Section 38 (1) (b) exemption. In addition to the redaction of names please note that we have applied the following redactions to some of the information provided in document: Section 30(b)(i) – Free and frank provision of advice, section 30(b)(ii) – free and frank exchange of views.

The reasons why this exemption applies is explained in the annex to this letter.

Some of the information you have requested is due to be published on the Scottish Government website within 12 weeks. Under section 27 of FOISA, we do not have to give you information which will be published within 12 weeks from the date of your request. This is because we have recently responded to FOIs regarding your query which are in a queue to be published on the Scottish Government website. For ease I have referenced the FOI case numbers below and will send you links when these become available.

• 202400411121
• 202400411755
• 202400399025
• 202400407175
• 202400404652

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 202400415721 - Information released - Annex A

File type

2 page PDF

File size

116.1 kB

FOI 202400415721 - Information Released - Annex B

File type

4 page PDF

File size

103.5 kB