Fisheries management measures within Scottish Offshore Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) consultation costs: EIR release
- Published
- 16 January 2025
- Directorate
- Marine Directorate
- FOI reference
- FOI/202400439174
- Date received
- 4 November 2024
- Date responded
- 2 December 2024
Information request and response under the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004.
Information requested
(i) Please can you tell me the cost of the Scottish Government’s consultation on Fisheries management measures within Scottish Offshore Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), published on August 19?
(ii) Please could you tell me how many responses were received?
(iii) How many of these were for and against?
Response
We have numbered each part of your request to make it easier to refer to in our 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.
Response to your request
We have responded to each part of your request separately below.
(i) Please can you tell me the cost of the Scottish Government’s consultation on Fisheries management measures within Scottish Offshore Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), published on August 19?
As the consultation process is not yet complete, we have interpreted your request to mean you are interested in the total costs of the consultation to date.
The known cost to date of the consultation is £43,998.82. A breakdown of costs can be found below:
- Consultation engagement events: £5,529.14
- Software: £641.90
- Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) newspaper publication: £142.98
- Publication costs: £37,451.04
- Post publication amendment: £233.76
The consultation process is still ongoing so analysis costs have not yet been confirmed and/or paid.
The expected cost for analysis by a designated third party is £33,530 + VAT.
While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the Scottish Government does not have some of the information you have requested. Therefore we are refusing part of your request under the exception at regulation 10(4)(a) of the EIRs. The reasons why that exception applies are explained below.
Under the terms of the exception at regulation 10(4)(a) of the EIRs (information not held), the Scottish Government is not required to provide information which it does not have. Scottish Government officials would be involved throughout the production and analysis stages of the consultation process (in terms of both internal work by officials and engagement with external third parties). However, the Scottish Government cannot provide a figure for the staff costs for a consultation process as it does not hold this information.
The reason is because Scottish Government officials operate flexibly across a range of policies and programmes according to the specific requirements of their work at any given time. They do not, as a matter of course, record the proportion of their time spent working on particular matters. Therefore, it is not possible to determine the internal Scottish Government costs attributed to staff time spent on a consultation, even though this would form part of the total overall cost.
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 the total cost of a consultation, clearly we cannot provide information which we do not hold.
(ii) Please could you tell me how many responses were received?
The answer to your question is 3945 responses. 3745 of these were campaign responses and the remaining responses consist of individual or organisations responses submitted via CitizenSpace or email. These are unofficial numbers as data cleaning to identify duplicate responses or other issues is currently still being undertaken.
(iii) How many of these were for and against?
An exception under regulation 10(4)(d) of the EIRs (unfinished or incomplete information) applies to all of the information you have requested because it is material which is still in the course of completion. The reason for this is that the analysis of consultation responses is as yet incomplete and so we cannot accurately determine the number of responses for and against at this stage.
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. We recognise that there is some public interest in release as part of open, transparent and accountable government, and this will be met by our planned publication of the consultation analysis. However, this is outweighed by the public interest in ensuring that unfinished or incomplete information, which is still in being worked on, is not disclosed when it might misinform the public. The final analysis document is due to be submitted to us by 20 December 2024 and we hope to publish this information on our website by the end of January.
About FOI
The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at https://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.
Contact
Please quote the FOI reference
Central Correspondence Unit
Email: contactus@gov.scot
Phone: 0300 244 4000
The Scottish Government
St Andrew's House
Regent Road
Edinburgh
EH1 3DG
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