EIR/202500472022 · FOI/EIR · partially withheld
Housing developer appeal data: EIR release
Information requested
Under an FOI request can you confirm the following please.
Since 2015 and upto the current date;
How many appeals have been brought to the reporter (DPEA) involving Housing Developers across Scotland. How many of those appeals been upheld. How many of those appeals have been reversed.
This was further clarified to ascertain the time frames you wished the information, namely financial year or calendar year; and the classification of a housing development as being either 2 or more houses or 10 or more houses.
This was clarified as:
1. calendar year is fine 2. 10 or more is fine.
Response
If I might firstly explain that, because, the information you have requested is ‘environmental information’ for the purposes of the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 (EIR’s), 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 response to your request I attach a table which details the number of cases we have had for housing developments where there has been 10 or more houses, and also provides a breakdown per year the number of appeals we had each year. In total there has been 444 cases for housing developments of 10 or more houses. Of which 194 were either allowed or allowed in part, and 211 refused.
About FOI
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Detected exemption language
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.