Marine Directorate commercial contract documents describing fees paid and services provided: EIR release

Information requested

Copies of the latest contracts your Marine Directorate holds with the Scottish Fishermen's Federation (and its subsidiaries SFF Services and Marine Environmental Solutions) or any other company for routine surveys of fishing catches, bycatch and discards.

Please include commercial contract documents, as well as grant contracts or other documents describing fees paid and services provided.

Please provide all of these documents in their original formats. That is, do not aggregate or summarise, but provide full and original documents.

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.

In relation to the part of your request asking for ‘copies of the latest contracts your Marine Directorate holds with the Scottish Fishermen's Federation (and its subsidiaries SFF Services and Marine Environmental Solutions) or any other company for routine surveys of fishing catches, bycatch and discards’.

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the Scottish Government does not have the information you have requested. Therefore we are refusing your request under the exception at Regulation 10(4)(a) of the EIRs. The reasons why that exception applies are explained below.

Under the terms of the exception at Regulation 10(4)(a) of the EIRs (information not held), the Scottish Government is not required to provide information which it does not have. The Scottish Government does not have the information you have requested because the Marine Directorate has no live contracts with the Scottish Fishermen's Federation and its affiliated organisations.

This exception 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 exception. We have found that, on balance, the public interest lies in favour of upholding the exception.

While we recognise that there may be some public interest in the contracts held between the Marine Directorate and the Scottish Fishermen's Federation (and its subsidiaries SFF Services and Marine Environmental Solutions), we cannot provide information which we do not hold.

However, I have included some information below that you may find useful and relates to the part of your request asking for information relating to grants.

The information is an award letter sent to Marine Environmental Solutions relating to a grant provided under the Independent Fisheries Science Support Scheme (IFSSS) 2025/26. This letter can be found below in Annex B.

While reviewing this letter some exceptions have been applied in line with the EIRs. The exceptions applied can be found in Annex A.

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 202600505088 - Information released - Annex A and Annex B

File type

PDF

File size

266.8 kB