Meetings between COSLA and the Flood Risk Management Working Group: EIR release

Information requested

All minutes of meetings of COSLA and the Scottish Government's flood risk management working group from April 2024 to today’s date.

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.

Since April 2024, there has been two meetings of COSLA and the Scottish Government's flood risk management working group. The first one was held on 23 April 2024. Please find a copy of the minutes to this meeting below in Annex B.

On reviewing the minutes of this meeting, an exception has been applied in line with EIRs. The exception applied in this instance can be found below in Annex A.

The second meeting was held on 05 September 2024. However, the minutes of this meeting were taken by COSLA and we have not been provided with a copy of the minutes taken.

Therefore, this is a formal notice under Regulation 10(4)(a) of the EIRs confirming that the Scottish Government does not hold this information.

This exception is subject to the ‘public interest test’. It is important to note that although we do not hold the information and have applied Regulation 10(4)(a) – information not held, it is a requirement that we have to apply the public interest test.

Wider guidance on the Environmental Information regime can be found in the Key Concepts section under ‘Information Not Held’ and ‘The Public Interest Test’ in the attached Scottish Information Commissioner Briefings and Guidance document. Further guidance on the public interest test can also be found on page 8 of the Scottish Information Commissioner guidance.

You may wish to contact COSLA directly to request the minutes of the meeting held on 5 September 2024. 

You can find information on how to contact COSLA here.

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.

FOI 202400438444 - information released - Annex A and Annex B

File type

PDF

File size

104.1 kB