Information relating to a registered farm holding available to the public: EIR review

Information requested

I have now completed my review of our response to your request under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA) for

1. Can you tell me what, if any, information relating to a registered farm holding is available to the public?
2. Any information as to the exact use of specific land and it's chronology.

Response

I have concluded that a different decision should be substituted and that the information requested should be released to you.

I should explain that 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. Our initial response was provided under FOISA and I apologise for this oversight.

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.

1. In response to your review request, part 1, the original reply indicated that some information related to farms which are registered as farm holdings is available from the Common Agricultural Policy Payments Website http://www.cap-payments.defra.gov.uk/.
This also provides the register of payments made under CAP (and SRDP) published under EU Regulation.

If a member of the public wants specific information concerning a private estate which they cannot access through the website, they can write indicating which exact business they are interested in, and what specific information is wanted.

More general information about farming and rural topic, consultations and publications can be found in the Scottish Government website https://www.gov.scot/

Also you may find useful this link to the Rural and Payments website where you can find more information about agricultural schemes https://www.ruralpayments.org/publicsite/futures/

2. In response to the second part of your request, on review, the information you requested is as follows:
Our records for that specific field on that holding are:

Year	Land type
2000- 2015	Grazing
2016	Grazing
2017	Grazing
2018	Grazing
2019	Information not held

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.