Scottish Government funding to environmental organisations: EIR release

Information requested

You asked for confirmation on if the Scottish Government has provided or provides funding the following organisations:

• Soil Association Scotland
• Nature Friendly Farm Network
• Scottish Crofting Federation
• Landworkers Alliance
• Propagate
• Food, Farming and Countryside Commission
• Pasture for Life
• Nourish Scotland

In addition, you asked to confirm how much funding and which financial year over the last five years the Scottish Government provided.

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.

In order to answer your request, we have searched Scottish Government payment systems for the relevant years. For the period from October 2024, data was in the Oracle financial system, and we completed a search for these organisations and noted any payments made. For earlier years, data was in the SEAS financial system, and we reviewed all Agriculture and Rural Economy Directorate (ARE) cost centres on SEAS that we considered it likely that payments to these organisations could have been made.

The data found is summarised in the below table, setting out any funding received by the requested organisations from the Agriculture and Rural Economy Directorate (ARE) over the last 5 financial years.

	Financial year (£'000)
Organisation	20/21	21/22	22/23	23/24	24/25	25/26	Total
Soil Association Scotland	-	-	-	-	245	102	347
Nature Friendly Farm Network	N/A						-
Scottish Crofting Federation	-	16	33	-	10	-	59
Landworkers Alliance	N/A						-
Propagate	N/A						-
Food, Farming and Countryside Commission	N/A						-
Pasture for Life	N/A						-
Nourish Scotland	-	-	47	-	118	-	165

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.