Scottish Forestry transportation of documents: EIR release

Information requested

- Any records you have of taxis or company cars being used to transport documents and or property, broken down by (a) journey, (b) duration and (c) the 2017-18, 2018-19 and 2019-20 financial years.
- Any records you have of taxis or company cars being used to transport documents and or property with no one other than the driver, broken down by (a) journey, (b) duration and (c) the 2017-18, 2018-19 and 2019-20 financial years..

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 (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.

I enclose a copy of some of the information you requested where it is available in Annex 2, in the format you asked for.

ANNEX 1
REASONS FOR NOT PROVIDING INFORMATION
The Scottish Government does not have the information
Under the terms of the exception at regulation 10(4)(a) of the EIRs (information not held), the Scottish Government is not required to provide information which it does not have. Scottish Forestry does not hold all the information/data you have requested relating to vehicles controlled by Scottish Forestry to transport documents, including as part of staff’s day to day business.
This exception 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 exception. We have found that, on balance, the public interest lies in favour of upholding the exception. While we recognise that there may be some public interest in information about the transportation of documents, we cannot provide information which we do not hold.

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.

FOI-202000020107 - Information released - Annex 2

File type

1 page PDF

File size

56.7 kB