Flamingo Land plans for Loch Lomond: EIR release

Information requested

All documentation held by the Scottish Government about Flamingo Land plans for Loch Lomond, including correspondence sent and received (including internal), briefings, minutes/notes from meetings, analysis, from the last three months.

Response

After further communication due to the amount of documents in scope, you have agreed that you do not require the following: undeliverable email bounce backs to interested parties; internal communication relating to procedural matters relating to document uploading issues to and from our IT Team; external communication relating to document uploading issues; master copies (unredacted) of representations and acknowledgements of receipt of representations that have been made.

If I might firstly explain that, because, the information you have requested is ‘environmental information’ for the purposes of the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 (EIR’s), 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.

Due to the large number of documents held, I advised that I would provide a list of documents held on the case management system that has not been published so that you could see that they fall out of scope within the updated request.

Please find attached Appendix A which contains the information (48 documents) that we are able to provide in response to your request. Again due to the size of the documents being released, these will be sent separately, in 6 separate emails, to ensure you are able to open the files.

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) of the EIRs (personal information) applies to some of the information.

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

I also include the link to the DPEA portal, which provides you access to all the published documents relating to the case: Scottish Government - DPEA - Case Details 

*Due to the size of the files we are unable to upload the documents referred to above.

If you wish to consider, please contact us at the address below and we will be happy to provide.

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.