Agricultural and Farming support payments made by the Scottish Government: EIR release

Information requested

In the last 5 years can you outline:
1. How many agricultural and farming support payments have been paid by the Scottish Government?
2. What is combined value of the support payments, noted in (1)?
3. How many of the payments noted in (1) were delayed? (if possible, can you split that data into years).
4. Of those payments delayed, can you indicate how many of those were delayed by more than a week?
5. What is the total cost of any failures in or repairs to the IT system which supports agricultural and farming payments?

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.

Please see tables below detailing most of the information you have requested.

Number and value of agricultural and farming support payments (requests 1 & 2)

Agricultural and farming support payments are deemed to cover the following schemes:

• Basic Payment Scheme (including Greening & Young Farmer Payments)
• Voluntary Coupled Support Schemes
• Less Favoured Area Support Scheme
• Agri-Environment Climate Scheme
• Forestry Grant Scheme
• Young Farmers Start Up Grant
• Crofting Agricultural Grants Scheme
• Food Processing and Marketing
• Knowledge Transfer and Innovation Fund
• Small Farms Grant Scheme
• Farm Environment Assessment
• Preparing for Sustainable Farming
• Rural Priorities
• Agricultural Floodbank Repair Scheme
• Financial Discipline Reimbursements
• Sustainable Agriculture Capital Grant Scheme
• New Entrants Start-up Grant
• Farm Woodlands Scheme
• Habitat Scheme
• New Entrant Capital Grant
• Beef Efficiency Scheme

All payments made during the last 5 years are on a calendar year basis and cover the years 2020-2024. This information has been externally reported for World Trading Organisation (WTO) purposes and is independently audited, as part of the Scottish Government’s Annual Reporting and Accounts (on a different April to March reporting cycle).

Last 5 (Calendar) Years	Number of Payments*2	Total Value £*3
January 2020 – December 2024*	384,875	3,515,070,166.86

*1 Payment window for 2024 is still open
*2 Source of information taken from reporting for ARE Payment Systems
*3 Source of information taken from SG Financial systems, as reported for WTO purposes

How many payments were delayed and how many were delayed by more than a week (requests 3 & 4)

In answering the question we are only considering schemes which are subject to a regulatory payment window (1 December in the year of claim to 30 June the following year):

• Basic Payment Scheme
• Voluntary Coupled Schemes
• Less Favoured Area Support Scheme
• Agri-Environment Climate Scheme,
• Forestry Grant Scheme
• Rural Priorities

The figures provided relate to payments made after 30 June of the following year.

Scheme Year	Number of payments after 30 June	Number of payments more than 1 week after 30 June
2020	445	410
2021	331	300
2022	210	181
2023	130	126
2024*	NA	NA

*Payment window for 2024 is still open

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the Scottish Government does not hold the information detailed in your 5th request - What is the total cost of any failures in or repairs to the IT system which supports agricultural and farming payments? Therefore we are refusing this 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. The Scottish Government does not have the information you have requested because the total cost of failures or repairs to the IT system which supports agriculture and farming payments is not information we hold or report on directly.

Outages or issues with the system applications and digital services which support agricultural and farming payments are managed by our Digital and Data Division as incidents. This follows best practice for quickly restoring normal service operations after a disruption, minimizing the impact on the business. The cost of managing incidents is not divisible from the overall costs of delivering, maintaining and supporting our digital services overall, as we utilise the same teams and resources for all. We have had no incidents that have required us to procure external resource or expertise specifically to resolve an incident in the last 5 years.

For context, system Uptime in 2024 was 99.92% which relates to both planned and unplanned downtime. When we undertake maintenance to resolve incidents, we will often undertake other planned activities alongside this, such as releasing new functionality, to maximise the greatest benefit from the maintenance window and reduce the number of maintenance windows required overall, therefore reducing the potential impact on service users.

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 publicintere st 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 IT system, clearly we cannot provide information which we do not hold.

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.