National Islands Plan: EIR release

Information requested

1. Please provide dates of all meetings of the Islands Strategic Group from the date of establishment to March 2023.
2. Please provide dates of all meetings of the National Islands Plan Delivery Group from the date of establishment to March 2023.
3. Please also provide details of how many Island Communities Impact Assessments have been carried out by Scottish Ministers as required under the Islands (Scotland) Act 2018 (the Act).
4. Please indicate how many are full or complete Assessments, or are currently partial or interim.
5. If a list of the Assessments carried out to date is available, indicating policy area and Minister responsible, please provide this.

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.

Response

Question 1:

The answer to your question is:

• 28 September 2016
• 19 December 2016
• 30 March 2017
• 11 July 2017
• 4 October 2018
• 21 August 2019
• 26 May 2020
• 23 June 2020
• 29 October 2020
• 9 December 2020
• 24 March 2021
• 6 July 2021
• 15 September 2021
• 15 December 2021
• 24 March 2022
• 10 November 2022
• 9 March 2023

Question 2:

The answer to your question is:

• 9 June 2021
• 19 August 2021
• 24 November 2021
• 7 February 2022
• 10 March 2022
• 7 November 2022
• 13 March 2023

Questions 3-5:

All Island Communities Impact Assessments carried out by the Scottish Government are published on our website at https://www.gov.scot/publications/. 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. If, however, you do not have internet access to obtain this information from the website(s) listed, then please contact me again and I will send you a paper copy.

About FOI

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