Commercial forestry applications: EIR release

Information requested

Please could you confirm to me

• The number of “Conifer” woodland creation grant applications under the Forestry Grant Scheme received by year for the last 10 years.
• The percentage of those applications that have been refused.
• The percentage of those applications still pending.
• The percentage of those applications consented.

Please provide the above nationally and if possible, by region.

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.

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 10(4)(a) of the EIRs (Information not held) applies to some of the information you have requested:

• As the Forestry Grant Scheme in its current form commenced in 2015, the data does not cover all of the last 10 years.
• As part of our standard Forestry Grant Scheme monitoring we do not routinely monitor the total number of application submissions at the Conifer Option level, so we are not able to provide the total number of applications.

The below figures provide the numbers of consented, pending and rejected applications in the calendar years listed. However, these figures do not represent 100% of applications received, as reportable “Rejected” figures are those rejected at the final case assessment stage. Woodland creation is an iterative process: proposals that do not meet the scheme criteria are filtered out or abandoned at an earlier stage, and we do not routinely monitor numbers of applications withdrawn in this manner.

Number of FGS Conifer Option Applications Consented/Pending/Rejected By Year

Year	Consented	Pending	Rejected
2015	18	0	0
2016	85	2	0
2017	111	0	0
2018	108	0	0
2019	117	0	0
2020	110	0	0
2021	71	0	0
2022	50	6	0

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.