Payments made to Jacobs and BEAR Scotland: EIR release

Information requested

1. Any documentation, correspondence, notes, emails etc within Transport Scotland and with any external individuals organisations about the compulsory purchase of any land within Glen Croe including the Old Military road.

2. Details of any payments made to Jacobs, or companies in which they are a significant shareholder, and the services which those payments relate to.

On 20 July you clarified that you wished "information on all payments made to Jacobs." On 26 July you further clarified that you would like "information separately for all of the Jacobs variations you list. Appreciate you don't have shareholding information but I understand Jacobs have a major interest in Bear Scotland so please include that company."

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 you request.

Please see the table below response for details of payments made to Jacobs and BEAR between the financial years 2016/17 until 2020/21:

Jacobs Engineering UK Limited	Jacobs UK Limited	Jacobs Consultancy UK Ltd	Bear Scotland Limited (CIS only)	Total
£433,973.06	£109,330,548.10	£176,443.85	£506,098,365.61	£616,039,330.61

These payments are for the following services:
Capital Works
Roads Improvements
Routine and Winter Maintenance
Network Strengthening
Major Public Transport Projects
Rail Franchise

Under the terms of the exception at regulation 10(4)(a) of the EIRs (information not held), Transport Scotland is not required to provide information which it does not have. We do not have the information you have requested as no CPO process was required to purchase land in Glen Croe, including the Old Military Road.

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 Compulsory Purchase Orders, clearly we cannot provide information which we do not hold.

About FOI
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