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The lease arrangements are structured to provide income to Forestry Commission Scotland (FCS) based on a share of the gross income generated by specific projects or a share of net income where FCS is joint venture partner or a combination of both. Therefore if income rises due to increasing energy costs FCS will benefit.

Where Forestry Commission Scotland (FCS) was aware of community schemes that had started doing some preparatory work before the renewables contracts were announcement on 22 February, FCS built that knowledge into the arrangements by withholding the relevant forest blocks from the process. This has happened in the case of Dalavich, Strathyre and Mull.

Forestry Commission Scotland split the geographical areas of the national forest estate into five lots.

In four of the five lots there are two companies given exclusivity for the eight month period, one dealing with schemes under 5MW site potential and the other over 5MW. In the fifth lot both development segments are dealt with by the same company. It is not intended that exclusive options will be granted on all of the forest estate in each lot at the end of the exclusivity period, instead a select list of potential sites will be taken forward and the rest of the land can be open to communities or others to take forward if possible.

In March 2010 I announced £100,000 in support of the Community Wellbeing Champions Initiative. So far the Initiative has been piloted in five areas across Scotland: Fife; Shetland; North Lanarkshire; South Lanarkshire, and Stirling.

Evaluation of these pilots is currently taking place, and a full report of the Initiative will be included in the second annual report to Parliament.

Forestry Commission Scotland (FCS) has responsibility for the development of the national forest estate and it would not have been appropriate to directly involve communities in the commercial process. However, FCS did discuss with representative community bodies such as Community Energy Scotland, the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations, Scottish Community Woodlands and others during the process and endeavoured to obtain a good outcome for communities.

Yes, and the deals announced provide for Forestry Commission Scotland to become a joint venture partner in specific schemes should they chose to do so.

The project Forestry Commission Scotland (FCS) undertook with Atkins Consultants had the main objective to build a GIS based analytical model to enable FCS to assess potential wind resource on the national forest estate. This objective was achieved and FCS routinely uses this to assess the potential of various forest blocks for different reasons. Atkins also ran the model as a part of the exercise and produced a report covering the NFE as part of the deliverables of the project. This, along with the analytical model was handed over to FCS in September 2008. Any report like this has its limitations and the main project output was the working model however, the report did provide the necessary confidence that there remained a reasonably significant wind energy resource on the NFE and that therefore it would be worth pursuing its development strategically. FCS has had no requests to release the report but would be happy to publish it on their website if required.

It will only be possible to say which communities will benefit once the developers have identified potential sites on the national forest estate. It is expected that this process will take up to eight month to complete.

A series of options were modelled ranging from the current leasing arrangement through joint ventures to Forestry Commission Scotland (FCS) self development. Given FCS cannot borrow funding for such purposes the lease/joint version option was seen to be the best route to follow.

Communities are welcome to flag up their interest during the eight month period if they want to pursue a renewables project under the National Forest Land Scheme (NFLS) prior to the list of sites being finalised by the developer. Once that list is established communities will have another opportunity to take forward sites via the NFLS scheme for non allocated sites. They will be able to engage with the developers to avail of the negotiated Forestry Commission Scotland deal for a longer period after the exclusivity period prior to a planning application being made.