Action to Protect Rural Scotland (APRS) funding: EIR release

Information requested

1. Is Action to Protect Rural Scotland (formerly known as The Association for the Protection of Rural Scotland) (APRS) in receipt of funding from the Scottish Government?

2. If this organisation is in receipt of Government funding, please confirm the level of funding since 2017, with a break-down of the funding given to that organisation for each year to 2024.

3. Please confirm whether a condition of funding approval at any time since 2017 is that the organisation must publicly (or otherwise) support the policy of the Deposit Return Scheme (DRS) and where that is the case, please provide the specific wording of the condition(s).

4. During her time as a Scottish Government Minister did Lorna Slater ever meet with APRS? If so, please provide details of where and when these meetings took place, as well as the agenda of what was discussed.

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 exception 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 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, 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 1-3

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the Scottish Government holds no material in relation to your request. This is because the Scottish Government has not provided any funding to Action to Protect Rural Scotland (formerly known as The Association for the Protection of Rural Scotland) (APRS).

Therefore, this is a formal notice under Regulation 10(4)(a) of the EIRs confirming that the Scottish Government does not hold this information.

This exception is subject to the ‘public interest test’. It is important to note that although we do not hold the information and have applied Regulation 10(4)(a) – information not held, it is a requirement that we have to apply the public interest test.

Under regulation 5(1) of the EIRs, a Scottish public authority that holds environmental information must make it available when requested to do so. This duty is not absolute. In some cases, information is excepted from disclosure, under regulations 10 and 11 of the EIRs. However, all of the exceptions in regulation 10 (and parts of regulation 11) are subject to a public interest test. To clarify, even though we do not hold the information, because we are using EIRs Exception 10(4)(a) in response to your request, we are required to apply a public interest test.

Guidance can be found in the Key Concepts section under ‘Information Not Held’ and ‘The Public Interest Test’ in the attached Scottish Information Commissioner Briefings and Guidance document.

Further guidance on the public interest test can also be found on page 8 of the Scottish Information Commissioner guidance.

Question 4

I have included extracts of the information you have requested below in Annex B.

On reviewing materials within scope of your request some exceptions have been applied in line with the EIRs.

You can find information on the exceptions that have been applied to information below in Annex A.

I would note however, that we have been unable to locate some of the information you have requested, which I have noted in the table in Annex B.

It may help if I explain that as part of the response to your request, we have conducted a search of the Scottish Government’s main records filing system and have been unable to locate some of the information requested. I would also note that a search request was submitted to Scottish Government Officials which also resulted in no further documents for the listed meetings being identified that would be in scope of your request.

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 202400420658 - Information released - Annex

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26 page PDF

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339.2 kB