Deer fence subsidies and deer management data: EIR release

Information requested

1. Please share data detailing the subsidies awarded to all companies relating to erecting and maintaining deer fences, and any other subsidies relating to deer management from 2023/24 to 2024/25.

2. Please also advise how many of these businesses were inspected during this timeframe, detailing any breaches discovered in relation to deer fence subsidies or deer management.

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.

We have responded to your request as numbered above.

1. Please share data detailing the subsidies awarded to all companies relating to erecting and maintaining deer fences, and any other subsidies relating to deer management from 2023/24 to 2024/25.

For capital works (agroforestry, woodland creation and woodland improvement grants) we can report on the inspection date, type, inspecting officer and whether the inspection was deferred.

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

For information:

The Scottish Forestry view on sharing staff names in these reports has evolved since we last provided this information and as a result the inspecting officer field in the report has been removed. This is to not disclose the names of individuals who are below senior Civil Service level, or equivalent to below this level in the instance of private sector individuals, as it is in the public interest to protect the personal information of junior civil servants and equivalent private sector actors.

2. Please also advise how many of these businesses were inspected during this timeframe, detailing any breaches discovered in relation to deer fence subsidies or deer management.

We do not hold any inspection information in our Case Management System for grants paid annually through the Single Application Form (SAF), as a result there is no inspection information on the Sustainable Management of Forests (SMF), Species Conservation (SC), Reducing Deer Impact (as shown on the tab named as ‘SMF SC Reducing deer impact’) within the report we are providing for request 1 above.

Inspection information on Breaches and Penalties, including those discovered in relation to deer fence subsidies or deer management, is only held within the case file for each project, and is therefore not reportable from the Case Management System and we do not collate this information or report on our inspections nationally, so to summarise the total number of inspections or the number of breaches identified would require a manual review of each case application record.

This manual review of each case application record would require the skill and complex judgement of experienced case managers or similarly knowledgeable staff to undertake such a review and prepare any such national report. At an estimate of 1 hour per application to review each of the approximately 315 woodland creation applications in scope, determine the investigation status and whether any breaches were discovered in relation to deer fence subsidies or deer management. we estimate this would take around 315 hours of staff time. At 35 hours per week, this would represent approximately 9 weeks of a full-time officer’s working time.

Whilst our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance we are unable to provide the information you have requested because an exception under regulation 10(4)(b) (Manifestly unreasonable requests) of the EIRs applies to the information you have requested, due to the high number of records covered by your request and therefore the high burden of collating and presenting the information for publication.

Please see Annex A for the reason this exception applies.

Under regulation 9 of the EIRs (our duty to provide advice and assistance) we would like to provide further information which may be of interest:

• Guidance on our inspections programme is published here: Claims and payments
• It was agreed within Decision 105/2025 | Scottish Information Commissioner that it would be unreasonable for Scottish Forestry to pull the individual site inspection reports and collate this information for this previous similar request.
• If you wished to submit a further EIR request, it would be helpful if you could consider narrowing the scope significantly from the whole of Scotland, to an individual project or much more limited number of projects you are particularly interested in.

ANNEX A

REASONS FOR NOT PROVIDING INFORMATION

Regulation 10(4)(b) - Manifestly unreasonable requests

Under regulation 10(4)(b) of the Environmental Information Regulations:

“A Scottish public authority may refuse to make environmental information available to the extent that the request for information is manifestly unreasonable”

The Scottish Information Commissioner has provided guidance that this definition includes requests that:

“would impose a significant burden on the public authority where complying with it would require a disproportionate amount of time, and the diversion of an unreasonable proportion of its resources, including financial and human, away from other statutory functions. The authority should be able to demonstrate why other statutory functions take priority over its statutory duties under FOISA. If the public authority does not perform statutory functions, it should demonstrate why its core functions are of a higher priority than the statutory requirement to respond to information requests.”

We consider that the diversion of the amount of experienced staff time (which would in this instance represent approximately 9 weeks of a full-time officer’s working time) to meet all aspects requested would meet these criteria, as it would have a significant negative impact on our ability to deliver our statutory responsibility to promote sustainable forest management and our core functions of supporting and delivering the management and expansion of Scotland’s forests in line with the Scottish Government’s Forestry Strategy.

Under regulation 10(1) of the EIRs:

“A Scottish public authority may refuse a request to make environmental information available if –
(a) there is an exception to disclosure under paragraph (4) or (5); and
(b) in all the circumstances of the case, the public interest in making the information available is outweighed by that in maintaining the exception.”

We consider that the public interest in making the information available is outweighed by the diversion of resources required to make it available and the associated impact this would have on the delivery of our core functions.

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 202500490546 Information Released - Annex

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