Scottish Forestry - Griffin Forest long term forest plan public consultation and public register query: EIR release

Information requested

We wish to know who was notified of the Griffin Forest LTFP public consultation when it first appeared on the public register 8/10/25 to 5/11/25 and how many other stakeholders were contacted during the second round of 27/11/25 to 8/1/26.

How were local Community Councils and other community ‘stakeholders’ informed of the public register and how would they be given access?

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 wish to know who was notified of the Griffin Forest LTFP public consultation when it first appeared on the public register 8/10/25 to 5/11/25 and how many other stakeholders were contacted during the second round of 27/11/25 to 8/1/26.

How were local Community Councils and other community ‘stakeholders’ informed of the public register and how would they be given access?

For Griffin Forest LTFP Consultation, we notified the following stakeholders on 8 October 2025:

Perth and Kinross Council
NatureScot
Perth and Kinross Outdoor Access Forum
SEPA
Historic Environment Scotland
Aberfeldy Community Council
Mid Atholl, Strathtay and Grandtully Community Council
Dunkeld and Birnam Community Council
Scottish Water

The public consultation for this scheme was also put on Scottish Forestry’s Public Register of long term forest plans on 8 October 2025. On the website beside this register, there is an explanation of how to get more details of an application, which is to contact your local office with the application reference number (as show in the screenshot below).

• How to get details of an application
• Contact your local office with the application reference number to get more details of cases on this register.
• Contact your local Scottish Forestry office

From the above list of stakeholders for Griffin Forest LTFP Consultation, three local Community Councils were included in our first round of PR/consultation for this long term forest plan.

Other interested parties could have viewed it on Scottish Forestry’s Public Register of long term forest plans until the closing date and requested more information (as per the advice our website) to which we would have responded with advice on them having been added to the Objective Connect list to allow access to the information.

Normally, in parallel with the LTFP being published on the public register, the Scottish Forestry case officer notifies the forestry agent of the consultation dates. In turn the forestry agent will inform anyone who has interacted with them during their development of the plan. Due to unfortunate staffing issues arising at this time this step was missed, therefore a second round of consultation was put in place and details circulated to the email addresses of four further stakeholders on 27 November 2025.

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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.