Agricultural businesses issued entitlements under Basic Payment Scheme: EIR release

FOI reference: FOI/17/02724
Date received: 8 November 2017
Date responded: 27 November 2017

Information requested

How many other agricultural businesses in Scotland would have been issued entitlements under Basic Payment Scheme (BPS), have had those entitlements withheld because they purchased entitlements in 2014.

Response

As advised in my acknowledgement e-mail of 13 November, 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.

The answer to your question is 14 businesses submitted an application for an allocation of BPS entitlements in 2015 under route 2, but were unsuccessful in obtaining entitlements under that specific route because they failed to meet the requirement of not having held entitlements (bought or leased-in) under the Single Farm Payment Scheme due having held them in Scheme Year 2014.

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