Infected blood scandal and climate compatibility test: FOI release

Information requested

(a) All documentation held by the Scottish Government, including correspondence sent and received, including internally, analysis, minutes and notes from meetings, policy documents, about the infected blood scandal, from the last three months, and

(b) The climate compatibility document/test mentioned repeatedly by Scottish Government Ministers or could you supply exactly what this is, and any documentation surrounding it?

Response

Due to the nature of your requests, please note query (a) will be handled under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA), and query (b) will be handled under Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 (EIRs).

Query (a)

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the costs of locating, retrieving and providing the information requested would exceed the upper cost limit of £600. This is because there is a very broad range of work being carried by both a core blood policy team, but also numerous other teams in the Scottish Government in relation to infected blood and so the Scottish Government has significant amounts of both internal and external correspondence relating to infected blood during the timeframe set out in your request. Therefore, there are a large number of emails – from initial sampling we estimate at least 5200 emails would be within the scope of your request for the three month period - and the required resource to locate, collate, remove duplicate emails, redact and provide all this correspondence would far exceed the upper cost limit of £600 in this instance. Under section 12 of FOISA, public authorities are not required to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying would exceed the upper cost limit, which is currently set at £600 by Regulations made under section 12.

You may, however, wish to consider reducing the scope of your request in order that the costs can be brought below £600. Whilst reducing the time period covered by the request to a one month period would still exceed the cost limit, you may wish instead to specify in more detail which aspects of infected blood you are interested in. For example, you may wish to request correspondence with particular specified organisations about infected blood during a particular time period or correspondence relating to the legislative consent motion on the Victims and Prisoners Bill (now Act) or correspondence relating to specified Infected Blood Inquiry recommendations.

You may find it helpful to look at the Scottish Information Commissioner's 'Tips for requesting information under FOI and the EIRs' on his website at http://www.itspublicknowledge.info/YourRights/Tipsforrequesters.aspx.

Query (b)

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 answer to your question is Offshore Oil & Gas licensing is reserved to the UK Government. The Scottish Government has, through its draft Energy Strategy and Just Transition Plan, called for a robust Climate Compatibility Checkpoint to be applied to new North Sea oil and gas developments. The draft Strategy, published here - Draft Energy Strategy and Just Transition Plan, set out for consultation a range of proposals on aspects of Checkpoint design and application. Independent analysis commissioned by the Scottish Government (published here – Energy system and Just Transition: independent analysis in support of the draft Strategy also included consideration of what tests could potentially make up such a Checkpoint. The Scottish Government has set out the intention to publish a finalised Energy Strategy and Just Transition Plan this summer.

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.