Licences granted to kill ravens to protect livestock: EIR release

FOI reference: FOI/18/01985
Date received: 23 July 2018 
Date responded: 21 August 2018
 
Information requested

Statistics for the number of licences granted to kill ravens to protect livestock in Scotland and the Shetland Islands. The years I’m particularly interested in are 2000, 2008, 2010, 2015, 2017.

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, 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 information you have requested is as follows

Number of licences granted to kill ravens to protect livestock in Scotland and the Shetland Islands

	2000	2008	2010	2015	2017	Total
Shetland	0	0	0	5	4	9
Rest of Scotland	1	87	73	144	152	457

The processing of raven licences was undertaken by the Scottish Government's Rural Payments and Inspections Division (RPID) Area Offices until all species licensing responsibilities transferred to Scottish Natural Heritage on 1 July 2011.

The RPID Area Offices in Oban, Inverness, and Benbecula do not hold any information on raven licences issued in 2000.

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