Cockplay woodland scheme Environmental Impact Assessments: EIR release

Information requested

I am requesting information under FOI legislation from Scottish Forestry in respect of the Cockplay woodland scheme which was designed by landowner Buccleuch Estates together with their agent Tilhill in 2016 and would like all information that relates to Environmental Impact Assessments from 1 January 2010 to the EIA assessment made in 2016. This includes, inter alia, all discussion, internal or external, regarding prescreening and screening decisions and communications with the landowner and its agents and other government agencies.

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.

The EIA development and the report predates Scottish Forestry and none of the staff who worked on this scheme are still with the agency. However, we have extracted the EIA into electronic format and this is now published on our EIA pages here.

In your request, you also asked for any information in our files relating to the EIA. No electronic files exist for this scheme due to its age and hence we have scanned the original paper file to respond to this 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 11(2) of the EIRs (personal information of a third party) applies to some of the information you have requested and this data has been redacted.

Please see Annex A for the reason this exception applies.

ANNEX A

REASONS FOR NOT PROVIDING INFORMATION

Personal data relating to third party

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. This exception is not subject to the ‘public interest test’, so we are not required to consider if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exception.

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 202500460870 - Information released - Annex

File type

PDF

File size

17.3 MB