Pelamis Wave Power Limited grant funding: EIR release

Information requested

Please can you provide all correspondences between Scottish Government and FirstStage, Bob Last or Jason Connery including details of all funding requests and funding offers including any offer of access to facilities. Please include any funding through Scottish Enterprise, SNIB or other Scottish taxpayer funded bodies. Also please include details as to whether funding was provided as grants or as a loan and what conditions or returns were assured.

Please can you also provide details of whether the Studio which is a converted wave energy warehouse previously had any funding through Scottish Government for the purposes of supporting wave energy in Scotland who the previous tenant in the warehouse was.

Response

As your request relates to information from more than one area, your requests for information are being treated separately. I am responding to your second query relating to Scottish Government funding provided to the previous tenant of the building which now forms FirstStage Studios.
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 building which now forms FirstStage Studios was previously occupied by Pelamis Wave Power Limited (Pelamis), a company which developed wave energy technology. Pelamis received total grant funding of £4 million from the Scottish Government through the Marine Renewables Commercialisation Fund and the Wave and Tidal Energy Support Scheme.

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.