Vessel monitoring system (VMS) and surveillance sightings data for all fishing vessels in Scottish waters: EIR release

Information requested

• VMS data for all fishing vessels (i.e. including non-UK vessels) in Scottish waters, and
• surveillance sightings data for all vessels (i.e. including non-UK vessels) in Scottish waters.

Ideally this data should cover Jan 2020 - Dec 2024 inclusive, but if this is not available, please provide data for Jan 2019 – Dec 2023.

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.

All of the information you have requested has already been released for previous EIR requests. However, as the number of documents and their file sizes are too large to publish on the FOI pages of the Scottish Government website, it is not currently publicly accessible.

Due to the size of the files we are unable to upload the documents referred to above.

If you wish to consider, please contact us at the address below and we will be happy to provide.

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.