Deer Management Grants: EIR release

Information requested

Please can you share data detailing the subsidies awarded to all companies relating to erecting and maintaining deer fences, and any other subsidies relating to deer management from 2018/19 to 2022/23?

Please also advise how many of these businesses were inspected during this timeframe, detailing any breaches discovered in relation to deer fence subsidies or deer management.

Please ensure the names of all recipients (excluding registered sole traders and small partnerships) are included. The Scottish Government recently decided that all businesses other than sole traders and small partnerships should be named in the FOI request 202300377826.

I'm interested in monies awarded to fund the cost of deer fences, the culling of deer to keep down numbers, or any other mitigation numbers to prevent damage caused by excessive deer numbers.

I think that any inspections which may have occurred would have been as a result of requested or awarded subsidies from the government's rural payments division.

Response

Please see below and attached for some of the information we hold in relation to your request. While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance we are unable to provide some of the information you have requested because:

• An exception under regulation 10(4)(a) (Information not held at time of request) of the EIRs applies to some of the information you have requested, because the necessary variables are held in individual records but our computer systems do not allow us to collate them into presentable information.
• An exception under regulation 10(4)(b) (Manifestly unreasonable requests) of the EIRs applies to some of the information you have requested, due to the high number of records covered by your request and therefore the high burden of collating and presenting the information. Please see below for details of where this exception applies.
• An exception under regulation 11(2) (Personal data relating to third party) of the EIRs applies to some of the information you have requested, as noted in individual responses below.

Response to your request

Please can you share data detailing the subsidies awarded to all companies relating to erecting and maintaining deer fences, and any other subsidies relating to deer management from 2018/19 to 2022/23?

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance we are unable to provide some of the information you have requested because an exception under regulation 11(2) (Personal data relating to third party) of the EIRs applies to some of the information you have requested.

This exception applies because grant recipients may be individuals or sole traders in addition to community groups, businesses, etc., and names of individuals and sole traders are considered personal data under regulation 11(2).

Additionally, our computer systems do not currently collate in summary form applicants as individuals/sole traders versus community groups/businesses/etc., so this categorisation is considered as information not held by Scottish Forestry.

Therefore, please find attached summary tables for contract commitment values, by year, for:-

• all deer fencing, including the erection of the fence, marking to prevent bird strikes, upgrading stock to deer fence, and gates.
• tree shelters.
• deer control funded through the WIG Species Conservation – Reducing Deer Impact option.

Please note that this information represents all relevant grants made by Scottish Forestry. Other public bodies, for example NatureScot, may award grants and or subsidies in relation to deer management.

Please also advise how many of these businesses were inspected during this timeframe, detailing any breaches discovered in relation to deer fence subsidies or deer management.

FGS inspection information is held in our case management system at the case level to assist contract managers to manage grant contracts. We do not currently collate data or report on our inspections nationally, so to summarise the total number of inspections or the number of breaches identified would require a manual review of each case application record.

This would require experienced case managers or similarly knowledgeable staff to undertake such a review, and at an estimate of an hour per application to review each of the approximately 1,870 woodland creation applications in scope, determine the investigation status and whether any breaches were discovered in relation to deer fence subsidies or deer management, we estimate that this would take around 1,900 hours of staff time. At 37 hours per week, this would represent approximately 51 weeks of a full-time officer’s working time.

Under regulation 10(4)(b) of the Environmental Information Regulations:
“A Scottish public authority may refuse to make environmental information available to the extent that–[…]
(b) the request for information is manifestly unreasonable”

The Scottish Information Commissioner has provided guidance that this definition includes requests that: “would impose a significant burden on the public authority […] where complying with it would require a disproportionate amount of time, and the diversion of an unreasonable proportion of its resources, including financial and human, away from other statutory functions. The authority should be able to demonstrate why other statutory functions take priority over its statutory duties under FOISA. If the public authority does not perform statutory functions, it should demonstrate why its core functions are of a higher priority than the statutory requirement to respond to information requests.”

We consider that the diversion of this amount of experienced officer time would meet these criteria, as it would have a significant negative impact on our ability to deliver our statutory responsibility to promote sustainable forest management and our core functions of supporting and delivering the management and expansion of Scotland’s forests in line with the Scottish Government’s Forestry Strategy.

Under regulation 10(1) of the EIRs:
“A Scottish public authority may refuse a request to make environmental information available if –
(a) there is an exception to disclosure under paragraph (4) or (5); and
(b) in all the circumstances of the case, the public interest in making the information available is outweighed by that in maintaining the exception.”

We consider that the public interest in making the information available is outweighed by the diversion of resources required to make it available and the associated impact on the delivery of our core functions.

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 202400396085 - Information Released - Annex

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Excel document

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19.3 kB