Minutes and agendas for meetings concerning Gourock Harbour Infrastructure & Vessels Project group: EIR review

Information requested

Agenda reports and other times considered by the Gourock Harbour Infrastructure & Vessels Project group, plus minutes all meetings for the last 24 months. If this information is too large, please consider this as several requests, e.g. for Feb-Aug 2020.

Response

Further to our letter of 5 October 2020, I have now completed the review of our response to your request under the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 (EIRs) to supply agenda reports and other times considered by the Gourock Harbour Infrastructure & Vessels Project group, plus minutes all meetings for the last 24 months.

I have concluded that the original decision should be confirmed with modifications, for the following reasons.

You suggest that the original response was incomplete, and give an example of target milestones that were discussed at an Argyll and Bute committee meeting on 1 September 2020. I note however, that the presentation to which you refer was provided by a representative of Caledonian Maritime Assets Limited, which is a separate Scottish public authority to the Scottish Ministers for the purposes of the EIRs. Additionally, your request asked for papers considered by the Gourock Harbour Infrastructure & Vessels Project group. I am content that the target milestones to which you refer were not in the papers considered by the Gourock Harbour Infrastructure & Vessels Project group. Accordingly, they fall outwith the scope of your request and so I uphold the original decision insofar as it did not disclose this information to you.

However, I note your subsequent interest in target milestones and accordingly I have set out in Annex A the indicative infrastructure procurement key milestones. As this information is not in scope of your original request, I am providing it to you outwith the EIRs. I would like to emphasise that this information contains only indicative dates at this stage.

You asked that we review the wider level of information supplied, mentioning background emails and notes of meetings in particular. I have accordingly reviewed the information relating to your original request and I am satisfied that we have correctly identified and disclosed all of the information that is within scope. Your request was for agendas, reports and other items considered by the Project Group: I do not consider that background emails or notes of meetings (for example) would fall within scope of such a request. Accordingly, I uphold our original decision in relation to this point.

You also asked that we review the redactions in the documents disclosed to you. Having checked the redactions, I can confirm that all redactions relate to the personal information of individuals. However, we did not explain this in our original response to you and I apologise for this oversight.

As a result, I am modifying our decision in order to apply an exception under regulation 11(2) of the EIRs (personal information) 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 202000094716 - Annex A

File type

2 page PDF

File size

43.3 kB