Coal Authority Report covering the M8 Baillieston to Newhouse area: EIR release

Information requested

Mineral investigation / coal board reports for land taken from Messrs Sawyers at Junction 6 Newhouse / Chapelhall as part of the M8 /A8 upgrade. There are two separate plots involved.

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.

Whilst we are not able to disclose any personal information relating to specific individuals, we can
however provide the Coal Authority Report covering the M8 Baillieston to Newhouse area which was
collated as part of the M8 M73 M74 Motorway Improvements Project.

Please find attached.

Personal information relating to individual staff members has been redacted within the report; the
reason for this is explained in the exception below.

An exception under regulation 11(2) of the EIRs (personal information) applies to some of the
information requested because it is personal data of a third party and disclosing it would contravene the data protection principles in Article 5(1) of the General Data Protection Regulation and in section 34(1) of the Data Protection Act 2018. This exception is not subject to the ‘public interest test’, so we are not required to consider if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exception.

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 202000072127 - Information released

File type

5 page PDF

File size

2.6 MB