Agri-Environment Climate Scheme (AECS) & Scottish Forestry Forestry Grant Scheme (FGS) grant options: EIR release

Information requested

You asked for information on the uptake of the following grant options (see below) over the past 5 years, how many hectares covered for each, and for FGS which type of woodland was covered.

FGS:-

• Woodlands for water
• Woodlands for riparian benefits (ENFOR or MS?)

AECS:-

• Water margins in arable fields
• Water margins in grassland
• Converting arable at risk of erosion or flooding to low-input grassland
• Management of floodplains
• Restoring (protecting) riverbanks 
• River embankment breaching, lowering or removal (ARE or MS?)

Response

I enclose a copy of some of the information you requested in the spreadsheet attached. This is the information for the AECS part of your request.

The following response is from Scottish Forestry, and relates to the FGS part of your request:

The identified categories (Woodlands for Water and Woodlands for Riparian Benefits) are not FGS grant options. They are target areas which allow a higher payment rate for the grant options delivered within those target areas. All eight target areas qualify for the same uplift in grant support, and there is no management data collected on individual target areas.

To summarise the number of schemes which were eligible for these specific target areas would therefore require:

A manual review of the Schedule of Works for each of approximately 1,500 Forestry Grant Scheme contracts to identify if the target area grant uplift was agreed.

If the uplift was agreed, a subsequent review of each individual Operational Plan to determine which target area was relevant in agreeing the uplift.

This would require experienced case managers or similarly knowledgeable staff to undertake such a review, and at an estimate of 30 minutes per application to review each of the approximately 1,500 woodland creation applications in scope, we estimate that this would take around 750 hours of staff time. At 37 hours per week, this would represent approximately 20 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–

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 Scottish Ministers, special advisers and the Permanent Secretary are covered by the terms of the Lobbying (Scotland) Act 2016.

See (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.

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 202400422952 - Information Released - Spreadsheet

File type

Excel document

File size

16.3 kB