Details of payments made to various estates and rural organisations in the last six years: EIR review

Information requested

Please could the Scottish government provide a detailed breakdown of all rural payments (and the total for each year) for the last six years that was paid to the following organisations:

• Annandale and Lochwood Estates LLP (Company Number SO306319)
• Annandale Estates (owned by the Earl of Annandale and Hartfell)
• Lochwood Estates (a business owned by Lord Johnstone)
• The Raehills Trust (Annandale Estates Office, St Anns, Lockerbie, DG11 1HQ)
• Skairfield Ltd (SC183096)
• Raehills Farms Ltd (SC179395)

In addition, if the Scottish government can identify any further organisations that receive rural payments relating to land comprising the Annandale Estates, supposedly owned by the Earl of Annandale and Hartfell and Trusts, please could you provide a detailed breakdown of all rural payments paid to these further organisations over the last six years.

Response

I have concluded that the original decision should be confirmed without modifications, however, I have tried to clarify some of the information which was originally provided and also amended the format in which the data is presented to match your request.

As stated in the original response dated 23 June 2022, we only hold rural payments data for two of these organisations, Annandale and Lochwood Estates LLP and Skairfield Ltd. I have attached the rural payments data for Annandale and Lochwood Estates LLP and Skairfield Ltd in the format you have requested.

For the avoidance of doubt, the payments listed in the table are separate payments which have been made under each separate scheme. There have been no Agri Environment Climate Scheme (AECS) payments made to these businesses in the last six years.

I have left the payments in respect of loans from the National Basic Payment Support Scheme (NBPSS) and National Less Favoured Area Support Scheme (NLFASS) on a separate tab. These loan payments are issued to a business and then recovered from the subsequent Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) and Less Favoured Area Support Scheme (LFASS) payments that are listed. Including these loan payments in the same table would therefore give a misleading overall payments total for each year.

Please note, that for BPS and Greening payments if a business’s claim is greater than that of the land on the Estate, because their entitlements are not linked to a specific area of land (they are assigned to BPS payment regions) it is not possible to set out the specific amounts paid against specific land parcels. Therefore, although we have provided you with a payment amount, not all of the money can be attributed to the Annandale Estate land.

Details of rural payments made to other businesses were also provided in the original response dated 23 June 2022 as you requested ‘In addition, if the Scottish government can identify any further organisations that receive rural payments relating to land comprising the Annandale Estates, supposedly owned by the Earl of Annandale and Hartfell and Trusts, please could you provide a detailed breakdown of all rural payments paid to these further organisations over the last six years.’ As such, we carried out a search to try and identify all other businesses which use the land comprising Annandale Estates (based on the map of the estate you provided) and included details of the rural payments made to these businesses. In this response, I have not provided these again or amended the format in how those payments are presented as it would appear you do not want these and they have instead caused confusion.

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