Lorna Slater IMA exemption briefings: EIR release

Information requested

Under Freedom of Information legislation I would be grateful to receive a copy of all briefings received by the First Minister and/or the Minister for Green Skills, Circular Economy and Biodiversity on the process and application for an internal market act exemption between January 2022 and the present day.

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

Firstly, It is important to note that there is no formal application process for exclusions to the Internal Market (IMA) 2020.In February 2023, the Scottish Government published the process for securing an Internal Market Act exclusion and the steps that the Scottish Government had followed up to the date of the publication. This can be found on the Scottish Government website:

• Internal Market Act: correspondence - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)

In addition, I have included extracts of the briefings received by the First Minister and/or the Minister for Green Skills, Circular Economy and Biodiversity for engagements they attended where the process for an Internal Market Act exclusion has been referenced. These documents can be found in Annex B.

On reviewing materials within the scope of your request, 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 http://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.

EIR - 202300358559 - Annexes

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