European Protected Species (EPS) licence application received: EIR release

Information requested

Please now provide copies of all the licence applications received from fish farmers for EPS licences between October 2020 and March 2021, including any as they existed immediately prior to being withdrawn.

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.

Between October 2020 and March 2021, the Marine Scotland – Licensing Operations Team (MSLOT) received a total of fifteen ADD EPS licence applications from four different aquaculture operators. All of these applications have now been withdrawn.

1. Some of the information you have requested is already available to you as it was released under a previous EIRs request case number FOI/202000114828, which Marine Scotland responded to on 17 December 2020. As this information is already publicly available and easily accessible to you in another format, as per regulation 6(1)(b) of the EIRs, we are not required to provide this information again.

Our response to this request was published on the Scottish Government website on 11 January 2021: Licence applications for the use of Aquatic Deterrent Devices on marine fish farms: EIR release - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)

2. I am providing copies of some of the information you have requested. Due to the large number of documents (49 PDF items) I will separately email you an invitation to a shared Workspace in an online storage facility called “Objective Connect.” This online storage facility is now the Scottish Government’s preferred way to share large and/or numerous files. To access the documents via Objective Connect you will need to click on the link provided in my accompanying email. In order to access the shared Workspace files you will need to enter your email address and a password of your choice. You will then be able to enter the Workspace and click on the zipped folder to download all the documents released.

Some of the information supplied to you continues to be protected by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This includes items 2b, 2d, 3d, 3f, 3h, 4b, 4d and 4f. You are free to use the information for your own purposes, including any non-commercial research you are doing and for the purposes of news reporting. Any other re-use, for example commercial publication, would require the permission of the copyright holder. Most documents supplied by the Scottish Government will have been produced by government officials and will be Crown Copyright. You can find details on the arrangements for re-using Crown Copyright material on the National Archives website at: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/

Information you receive which is not subject to Crown Copyright continues to be protected by the copyright of the person, or organization, from which the information originated. You must ensure that you gain their permission before reproducing any third party (non Crown Copyright information).

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance we are unable to provide some of the information you have requested because an exception under regulation 11(2) (personal information of a third party) of the EIRs applies to some of the information you have requested. The reason why this exception applies is explained in the Annex.

Annex
REASON FOR NOT PROVIDING INFORMATION

An exception under regulation 11(2) (personal information of a third party) of the EIRs applies to some of the information you have requested
Regulation 11(2) – To the extent that environmental information requested includes personal data of which the applicant is not the data subject and in relation to which either the first or second condition set out in paragraphs (3) and (4) is satisfied, a Scottish public authority shall not make the personal data available.

An exception under regulation 11(2) of the EIRs (personal information of a third party) 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.