Cleaner fish movements to aquaculture facilities: EIR release

Information requested

In January, I received data from the Marine Directorate on cleaner fish transfers to fish farms relating to the period 2020 to end 2024, obtained by inspections between 2 October 2025 to 1 January 2026 (EIR 202600500241).

Please provide the data from inspections from 2 January to 1 April 2026.

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.

Your request is a follow up to previous EIRs 202400427045, 202500453654, 202500473912, 202500487043 and 202600500241. You have now asked for cleaner fish transfers to fish farms, relating to the time period 2020 to 2024, obtained through inspections conducted between 02 January 2026 to 01 April 2026.

In our previous communications with you on 23 October 2025, we reiterated the fact that the surveillance programme applied to fish farm sites in Scotland, takes place over a three-year time period.

Under the current programme a complete set of movement records covering 2024 may not be available until late 2027.

Consequently, we have identified sites which have been inspected 02 January 2026 to 01 April 2026 and include any relevant records relating to these, going back to the beginning of 2020, or the date of the last inspection, and up to the end of 2024.

Please find attached, in Annex A, a copy of extracted information from the movement records collected through the Marine Directorate’s aquatic animal health surveillance programme, relevant to sites inspected between 02 January 2026 to 02 April 2026.

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 202600513492 - Information Released - Annex A

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