Ferguson Marine and the Builders Refund Guarantee: EIR release
Information request and response under the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004.
Information requested
1) Any ministerial briefing sent to the First Minister, the then-Finance minister, the then-Infrastructure Minister, and the then Transport Minister on the lack of a full Builders Refund Guarantee connected to the 2015 award of the construction of hulls 801 and 802 to Ferguson Marine, sent or received in the calendar year 2015.
2) Confirmation about whether the ministers named above discussed the risks associated with this lack of a Builders Refund with special advisers or senior civil servants. If so, I request the names of the special advisers or senior civil servants who were either informally or formally asked for their advice by ministers.
If this information has been published before I would request it to be republished in this response as I am wishing for a fresh decision around the public interest of any potential redactions in previous disclosures.
Response
The answer to your question is as follows;
1) Any ministerial briefing sent to the First Minister, the then-Finance minister, the then-Infrastructure Minister, and the then Transport Minister on the lack of a full Builders Refund Guarantee connected to the 2015 award of the construction of hulls 801 and 802 to Ferguson Marine, sent or received in the calendar year 2015.
Documents within scope of your request are attached in Annex A.
2) Confirmation about whether the ministers named above discussed the risks associated with this lack of a Builders Refund with special advisers or senior civil servants. If so, I request the names of the special advisers or senior civil servants who were either informally or formally asked for their advice by ministers.
Discussions related to the ministerial submission dated 8 October, between Ministers and officials regarding the decision to proceed have been made publically available and can be found on the Scottish Government website here.
Under regulation 6(1)(b) of the EIRs, we do not have to give you information which is already publicly available and easily accessible to you in another form or format. If, however, you do not have internet access to obtain this information from the website(s) listed, then please contact me again and I will send you a paper copy.
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.
Reasons for not providing information are detailed in Annex B.
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.
Contact
Please quote the FOI reference
Central Enquiry Unit
Email: ceu@gov.scot
Phone: 0300 244 4000
The Scottish Government
St Andrews House
Regent Road
Edinburgh
EH1 3DG
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