All documents containing advice to Scottish Ministers on the proposal to have policy on Highly Protected Marine Areas: EIR release

Information requested

All documents containing advice to Scottish Ministers on the proposal to have policy on Highly Protected Marine Areas, including the advice from officials, ( whether in Scottish Government or other bodies such as Nature Scot) on the potential risks and difficulties and presentational issues that may arise.

On 23 July 2024, we sought clarification from you on the time period for which you were seeking information applicable to the scope of your request. You responded that day, confirming the date range of interest was “from 6 May 2021 to the date when the oral parliamentary statement was made by Mairi McAllan announcing that the HPMAs would not be going ahead” - 29 June 2023.

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 haveconsidered 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.

I enclose a copy of most of the information you requested which consists of 28 pdfs.

Due to the size of the files we are unable to upload the documents referred to above. If you wish to consider, please contact us at the address below and we will be happy to provide.

Some of the information you have requested is already available online and can be found in Annex A.

Under regulation 6(1)(b) of the EIRs, we do not have to give you information which is already publicly available and easily accessible to you in another form or format.

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance we are unable to provide some of the information you have requested because exceptions under regulations 10(4)(e) (internal communications) and 11(2) (personal data of a third party) of the EIRs applies to that information. The reasons why these exceptions apply are explained in the ANNEX to this letter.

Additional information provided out with the EIRs
Under regulation 9 of the EIRs (our duty to provide advice and assistance) we would like to advise you that a previous EIR response has been published on our website which you may also be interested in our response to: Communications regarding Highly Protected Marine Areas (HPMA): EIR release - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)

The request was submitted on 27 November 2023 and asked for “any communications which relate to decision making around the scrapping of Highly Protected Marine Areas, which was first announced in June 2023, and officially confirmed by the government in November.” We responded on 29 January 2024 under case reference number 202300387073.

Please also see Annex B for a list of related written and oral Parliamentary Questions.

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 202400423108 - Information Released - Annex

File type

5 page PDF

File size

147.1 kB