Environmental Impact Assessment updated guidance: EIR release

Information requested

I write further to the attached letter, sent in response to our letter of 22 May 2025 (also attached for ease of reference). Your letter states that “we will shortly be updating our internal EIA guidance”. Please can you advise if this guidance has now been updated? If it has, please could you provide a copy of the updated guidance, along with any documents disclosed to us under our FOI/EIR request that have since been updated?

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.

I write further to the attached letter, sent in response to our letter of 22 May 2025 (also attached for ease of reference). Your letter states that “we will shortly be updating our internal EIA guidance”. Please can you advise if this guidance has now been updated? If it has, please could you provide a copy of the updated guidance, along with any documents disclosed to us under our FOI/EIR request that have since been updated?

Further to your letter of 22 May 2025 which we responded to under EIR 202500468185, Scottish Forestry’s internal guidance ‘Environmental Impact Assessment Staff Procedure’ has been updated and we are providing this document along with the updated versions of four other documents previously disclosed under this request.

Please find attached the information we hold in relation to your request.

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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 202500478490 - Information released - Annex

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