Marine Fund grant for Empowering Communities for Marine Environment Restoration project: EIR release

Information requested

“Please could you provide a breakdown of expenditure for a grant from the Marine Fund 2024-25 cycle, for a project entitled "Empowering Communities for Marine Environment Restoration". Please provide both the full profiled expenditure submitted with the grant application, as well as any reported actual expenditure to date during the run of the project or after it had concluded. Where there were any additional documents or correspondence submitted by the grantee (for example justifying any change to estimated expenditure during or after the project), please include that also.”

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.

Response to your request

I enclose a copy of most of the information you requested. Please find enclosed:

• Annex A: a table with breakdown of expenditure showing full profiled expenditure submitted with the grant application, as well as any reported actual expenditure to date during the run of the project or after it had concluded.
• Document 1: copies of the screenshots of two notifications of change received. This is a screenshot taken from our internal Marine Fund Scotland (MFS) online system.
• Document 2: copy of an email exchange between MFS and the applicant.

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 202500470997 - Information Released - Annex A

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PDF

File size

35.9 kB

EIR 202500470997 - Information Released - Annex B - Document 1 and 2

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PDF

File size

299.8 kB