Home Energy Scotland budget allocation: EIR release

Information requested

When the government expects the Home Energy Scotland Grand [sic] and Loan Scheme budget for the 2024-25 financial year to be agreed through the accountable officer sign off process.

If this has already taken place, please provide a figure for the budget allocated to the scheme for this financial year.

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.

The answer to your question is:

• The Accountable Officer (AO) sign off process has concluded for the allocation of budget to the Home Energy Scotland (HES) Grant and Loan Scheme.
• The allocated capital (CDEL) budget, to the HES Grant and Loan Scheme for 2024-25 is as follows:

2024-25 CDEL Budget Allocation
£44,000,000

• The actual expenditure for the scheme during 2024/2025 will also include Financial Transactions (FT) recycled from the repayment of historic loans. The value of these recycled payments is expected to be in the region of £15,000,000.

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at https://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.