Future Farm Investment Scheme: EIR release

Information requested

You asked for:

1. How many individual farmers have been successful in their application?

2. How many individual farmers who made an application have not been successful?

3. What is the average payment to each of these farmers who were successful?

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.

Response to your request

Number of individual farmers who were successful

A total of 1,550 farmers received a grant offer under the Future Farming Investment Scheme.

Number of individual farmers who were not successful

A total of 3,571 applications from farmers were unsuccessful.

This figure includes applications which did not meet the scheme’s eligibility requirements, where the information provided in their application did match records held by RPID or did not score sufficiently to receive an offer of grant.

Average value of grant offers

No payments have been made at this stage, however, grant offers have been issued.The total value of grant offers issued to farmers was £20,449,073.70.

With 1,550 grant offers made to farmers, this gives an average grant offer £12,793.39

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.