Communications regarding ‘pulse fishing’: EIR release

Information requested

To summarise, you asked for communications in the past two years between:

• Marine Scotland and Scottish Ministers
• Marine Scotland and DEFRA
• Marine Scotland the owner of the Scottish vessel

In relation to “electro trawling” or “pulse fishing” and the Scottish vessel permitted to carry out the activity.

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 in the format you asked for.

An exemption under regulation 11(2) (personal information) of the EIRs applies to a small amount of the information requested because it is personal data of a third party, ie names/contact details of individuals, 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-202100135563 - Information released

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37 page PDF

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