Weight labelling of fish landings: EIR release

Information requested

You asked for "why the French vessels and Belgian vessels do not have to put weight labelling on their fish landings."

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 answer to your question is that the traceability of fisheries products is covered by Art 58 of (EC) No 1224/2009 , which states:

1. Without prejudice to Regulation (EC) No 178/2002, all lots of fisheries and aquaculture products shall be traceable at all stages of production, processing and distribution, from catching or harvesting to retail stage.

2. Fisheries and aquaculture products placed on the market or likely to be placed on the market in the United Kingdom shall be adequately labelled to ensure the traceability of each lot.

Because French and Belgium vessels are not regularly placing their lots of fish on UK markets there is currently no requirement to label them prior to export. As explained previously, vessels exporting their catches outside the UK are required to comply with the rules laid down in 2008/1005 Art 12 which compels them to provide catch certificates. These detail the contents of the export and therefore provides traceability.

Additional information provided out with the EIRs

Under regulation 9 of the EIRs (our duty to provide advice and assistance) we would like to advise you that whilst EIR and FOISA legislation provide a right to ask for any information from a Scottish public authority, they only apply to recorded information and so do not cover thoughts or opinions (unless they've been recorded in some way). More explanation about your rights to access information, and what you can ask for, can be found on the Scottish Information Commissioner website at: Your Rights | Scottish Information Commissioner

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.