· FOI · cost limit
Sheds funded by Agricultural Grant Schemes: FOI release
Information requested
Information relating to sheds funded by schemes, in particular the amounts spent and different schemes and types/sizes of sheds broken down by area.
Response
While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the costs of locating, retrieving and providing the information requested would exceed the upper cost limit of £600. The Crofting Agricultural Grant Scheme (CAGS), Crofting Counties Agricultural Grant Scheme (CCAGS), New Entrants Capital Grant Scheme (NECGS) and Small Farms Grant Scheme (SFGS) are wholly manual schemes and any data maintained in spreadsheets is not held at the level requested. The number of claims involved means that meeting the request for those schemes alone would involve a considerable amount of manual work which would cost well in excess of the upper cost limit.
Under section 12 of FOISA public authorities are not required to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying would exceed the upper cost limit, which is currently set at £600 by Regulations made under section 12.
You may, however, wish to consider reducing the scope of your request in order that the costs can be brought below £600. The request could be limited to the number and value of claims paid to date for CAGS, NECGS and SFGS, under the 2014 – 2020 Scottish Rural Development Programme (SRDP), which includes option 1, i.e. agricultural buildings. This data is set out in the table in Annex 1. These claims may include other options but we record only the main option per claim and this would generally be option 1. This is the level at which we record data in the spreadsheets for these manual schemes and providing more detailed information would involve co-ordinating, country-wide, individual file scrutiny. For each claim that included additional options, we would need to recalculate the claim value manually and carry out sub-analysis of the types of agricultural building, which would add further time. We do not have the statistics to say with precision the size of the subset, but we believe that even limiting the original request to a single year would still exceed the upper cost limit.
You may also find it helpful to look at the Scottish Information Commissioner's 'Tips for requesting information under FOI and the EIRs' on her website at: http://www.itspublicknowledge.info/YourRights/Tipsforrequesters.aspx.
ANNEX 1
Total number of claims which include Option 1 that resulted in a payment over the period January 2014 to July 2017, (please note that some of these claims will include other items in addition to Agricultural Buildings).
Area Office Option 1 - number of claims Option 1 - total paid Ayr 12 191,400.23 Benbecula 44 350,666.68 Dumfries 18 337,604.51 Elgin c c Galashiels c c Golspie 31 221,618.57 Hamilton 5 101,294.94 Inverness 59 532,985.24 Inverurie 7 150,284.91 Kirkwall 24 247,101.20 Lerwick 38 340,333.15 Oban 19 94,749.72 Perth c c Portree 39 255,444.43 Stornoway 56 333,716.92 Thurso 65 555,510.36 Total 420 3,779,142.46
Detected exemption language
Under section 12 of FOISA public authorities are not required to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying would exceed the upper cost limit, which is currently set at £600 by Regulations made under section 12.
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