What is Environmental Information?
To deal with requests appropriately, it is important for Scottish public authorities to understand the distinction between:
- Environmental information, which is subject to the EIRs;
- Personal data of the requester, which would fall under the Data Protection Act 1998;
- All other information, which would fall under the scope of FOISA.
Public authorities should guard against interpreting 'environmental information' too narrowly - definition may go beyond what is observably environmental. No types of information are excluded from the potential ambit of environmental information, and it may be found contained within information which is not specifically related to an environmental topic. Some areas where the Commissioner has found authorities have had particular difficulty are where:
- the request itself does not specifically make reference to the environment;
- the request itself does not specifically make reference to the EIRs or makes reference to FOISA instead;
- information relevant to a request is not exclusively environmental;
- information is found to be environmental by virtue of being 'policies, plans and programmes relating to the environment'.
The examples provided in the Commissioner's guidance and decisions will help authorities to understand the wide application of the EIRs. The Commissioner's guidance on the definition of environmental information can be viewed here:
