Ms Mary Gurrie:

Since 2018, there has been a requirement that anyone abstracting more than 25 cu. m of water a day needs to register with the EPA. That process has been under way since 2018 and we maintain the register. The legislation specifically prevents us from publishing personal details. An access to information on the environment, AIE, request was made for the register to be published. We decided to publish it in recent months. To balance the requirement to provide public access to information with the general data protection regulation, GDPR, and data protection rules, we redacted any information that was considered to be personal. We are looking at it again to see whether there is more information we could put out, but the information on the registration, location, the volume being abstracted and the purpose of the abstraction is all available. It was not the case that the EPA was put under pressure not to release it. That was perhaps incorrectly reported or someone took something out of context. It was not the case that the EPA was put under any pressure by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine in relation to that.