Effectiveness of UK Forestry Standard (UKFS) and Forestry Grant Scheme: EIR release

Information requested

Any reports or other held materials which have assessed the effectiveness of the UK Forestry Standard (UKFS) and the Forestry Grant Scheme. Please also provide any communications made over the last three years which relate to this.

Please include all communications channels used, including Whatsapp, and please include any attachments, including images.

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 provide any reports or other held materials which have assessed the effectiveness of the UK Forestry Standard (UKFS) and the Forestry Grant Scheme. Please also provide any communications made over the last three years which relate to this.

Please include all communications channels used, including Whatsapp, and please include any attachments, including images.

I enclose a copy of some of the information you have requested:

• The ‘Rumroy Report’ is attached to this release. For context the report it was a standalone piece of work carried out as part of the overall Forestry Grant Scheme (FGS) evaluation and was to look at the outcomes of sampled FGS contracts.
• We also attach two other surveys that were carried out as part of the larger FGS evaluation. The ‘customer experience survey’ was conducted by RESAS on Scottish Forestry’s behalf and the ‘new woodland creation survey’ was an optional survey for contract holders when they responded to a request for stocking density assessments.

In addition Scottish Forestry have in progress an FGS Evaluation report, which we hope to publish in the next 6 months. While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance we are unable to provide most of the information you have requested because exceptions under regulations 10(4)(d) (material in the course of completion) and 11(2) (Personal data relating to third party) of the EIRs applies to that information. Please see Annex A for the reason(s) this/these exception(s) apply.

It may be helpful to know there was nothing in the UKFS Review Project about the effectiveness of the UKFS as it might be applied via a grant system in each or any of the four countries of the UK. This was out of scope for a review of a technical standard that applies to all forest management in the UK, whether or not the activities are supported by a grant.

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 202400445998 - Information released - Annex A

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PDF

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79.4 kB

EIR 202400445998 - Information released - Annex B

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PDF

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5.4 MB