A90 prospective upgrade at Laurencekirk correspondence: EIR release

Information requested

All correspondence received by or communicated from any of the Scottish Ministers, or their special advisors, from December 1 2023 to date, relating to the Laurencekirk south junction with the A90 and its prospective upgrade, as referenced here.

This includes all forms of communication available, not limited to but including, email, text messages , whatsapp or conventional mail.

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.

Please find enclosed the requested information within Annex A to this letter. Attachments to the emails as noted within Annex A are contained within Annex A.1, this includes Ministerial correspondence and background notes to Parliamentary questions S6W-30042 & S6W-30043.

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 as all answers to written parliamentary questions are available on the Parliament's website. The search facility for which can be found at https://www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/written-questions-and-answers 

An exception under regulation 11(2) of the EIRs (personal information) applies to some of the information requested because it is personal data of a third party and disclosing it would contravene the data protection principles in Schedule 1 to the Data Protection Act 1998. This exception is not subject to the ‘public interest test’, so we are not required to consider if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exception.

The information withheld in the disclosed documents are personal details, addresses and signatures.

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the Scottish Government does not have the information you have requested and therefore an exception under regulation 10(4)(a) of the EIRs applies. Under the terms of the exception at regulation 10(4)(a) of the EIRs (information not held), the Scottish Government is not required to provide information which it does not have. In this case the Scottish Government does not hold any text or WhatsApp messages relating to Laurencekirk south junction.

This exception 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 exception. We have found that, on balance, the public interest lies in favour of upholding the exception. While we recognise that there may be some public interest in the requested information, clearly, we cannot provide information which we do not hold.

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.

EIR 202400442564 - Information released - Annex A

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PDF

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121.1 kB

EIR 202400442564 - Information released - Annex B

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602.2 kB