Project Willow correspondence and information: EIR release

Information requested

1. All correspondence (including emails, WhatsApps, meeting minutes, etc.) involving the Scottish Government regarding Project Willow and the Project Willow report.

2. All correspondence (including emails, WhatsApps, meeting minutes, etc.) involving the Grangemouth Future Industry Board regarding Project Willow and the Project Willow report.

3. All correspondence (including emails, WhatsApps, meeting minutes, etc.) involving Petroineos regarding Project Willow and the Project Willow report.

4. A list of all stakeholders who saw the Project Willow report before publication, when they saw the report, for what reason they saw the report, and details of any changes they made to the report.

5. All correspondence (including emails, WhatsApps, meeting minutes, etc.) between the Scottish Government and anyone at STV News (including Colin Mackay) regarding the Project Willow report.

6. Details of when Colin Mackay saw parts of the Project Willow report, who showed those parts of the report to him, and for what reason he was shown the report in advance of its publication.

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 exceptions under regulations 11(2) (third party personal data); 10(5)(e) (substantial prejudice to confidentiality of commercial or industrial information); and 10(4) (b) (manifestly unreasonable) of the EIRs apply to some of the information enclosed in the minute I am releasing as part of this request. The reasons why these exceptions apply are explained in Annex A of this letter.

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.

EIR 202500457610 - Information released - Annex A

File type

PDF

File size

359.3 kB