Scottish Parliament’s powers with respect to community benefits from onshore renewable energy developments: EIR release

Information requested

This request concerns the Scottish Parliament’s powers with respect to community benefits from onshore renewable energy developments. The current advice and guidance is available here:

https://www.gov.scot/publications/scottish-government-good-practice-principles-community-benefits-onshore-renewable-energy-developments/pages/3/

The guidance includes the following remark:

"we will continue at a national level to promote a community benefits value of equivalent to £5,000 per installed MW per year"

It is made clear that compliance with this level of community benefit funding is voluntary.

My question is this: would it be within the Scottish Parliament's legislative powers to make compliance at this level (or higher) into a mandatory requirement for onshore renewables developments?

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 that the generation, transmission, distribution and supply of electricity is a reserved matter under the Scotland Act 1998 and accordingly legislation to mandate the provision of community benefits related to electricity generation or transmission projects is not within the legislative competence of the Scottish Parliament.

Despite this, we have made significant progress through our Good Practice Principles framework, with over £26 million worth of benefits offered to communities in the last 12 months. We continue to work with communities, renewable energy developers and wider partners to explore what we can do within our devolved powers to maximise the benefits flowing into communities.

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.