Forestry Grant Scheme (FGS) Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) screening opinion for Colmslie: EIR release

Information requested

The provisional, or final contract for Colmslie (24FGS83039), and the screening opinion for this project.

If the contract does not yet contain the total costs, what is the total cost to the taxpayer through the FGS if this project is approved?

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.

1. The provisional, or final contract for Colmslie (24FGS83039), and the screening opinion for this project.

This project is not yet concluded and so there is no contract in place. The project has been reviewed by Scottish Forestry and published on the public register but has not yet progressed to final contract stage. Whilst there was an initial grant request submission, this is being withdrawn by the applicant, and we expect that there may be a new grant application made in the future for this development proposal. As such there no contract or provisional contract to supply in response to your request.

As part of the initial assessment of the Forestry Grant Scheme (FGS) application, Scottish Forestry completed an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) screening opinion for this project, and this has been attached as requested.

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) applies to some of the information you have requested and this information has been redacted. Also, regulation 10(4)(a) of the EIRs (Information not held) applies to the contract for Colmslie (24FGS83039).

Please see Annex A for the reasons these exceptions apply.

2. If the contract does not yet contain the total costs, what is the total cost to the taxpayer through the FGS if this project is approved?

As this application has not progressed to contract, there is no total grant figure available. However, should the application in its current form be resubmitted for further assessment, the likely value of this application would be around £587,251 based on the current FGS standard capital item costs.

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 202500474833 - Information released - Annex

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