FOI/202400410494 · FOI/EIR · partially withheld
Renewable Heat Scheme for Homeowners: EIR release
Information requested
In November 2020, the Scottish Government made available up to £4.5m cashback incentive to help people install renewable systems in their homes. Can you advise how much of this fund has been claimed by homeowners, and how much has already been granted or made available to homeowners?
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 on the outcome of your request.
Response to your request
Under the HES Loan and Cashback scheme, from receipt of legally committed offer of funding, successful applicants had several months to claim funding for their installed measures. Due to this time lag, funding is not always claimed by applicants in the same financial year that it is allocated to them, and therefore it is not possible – in terms of funding paid out - to separate the initial £4.5m of cashback made available in November 2020 from the further cashback funding that was subsequently made available in financial year 2021-22.
Therefore the tables below outline both legally committed funding offers and the total value of funds paid (both Cashback and Loan) during 2020-21 and 2021-22.
Table 1: Value of legally committed funding offers made to applicants
2020-21 2021-22 Total Committed Loans 11,172,023 13,859,498 25,031,520 Committed Grants (Cashback) 3,190,670 14,334,358 17,525,028 TOTAL 14,362,693 28,193,855 42,556,548
Table 2: Total Value of funding paid to applicants
2020-21 2021-22 Total Loans 8,695,460 11,067,400 19,762,860 Grants (Cashback) 606,477 9,633,716 10,240,193 TOTAL 9,301,936 20,701,116 30,003,052
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Contact Please quote the FOI reference Central Enquiry Unit Email: ceu@gov.scot Phone: 0300 244 4000 The Scottish Government St Andrews House Regent Road Edinburgh EH1 3DG
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.
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