Winter maintenance policy and gritting operations for M74: EIR release

We should be obliged if you could provide records for the winter maintenance policy and details of all gritting operations on the week prior to and after the 25th January 2018.

We acknowledge that this is a follow up request in relation to FOI/18/02155 in which you confirmed the location of your request as the M74, southbound, near Junction 9.

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.

The 2017 / 2018 winter maintenance policy for the South West of Scotland can be found at Annex A of this request. An exception under regulation 11(2) of the EIRs (personal information) applies to some of the information requested because it is personal data of a third party and disclosing it would contravene the data protection principles in Article 5(1) of the General Data Protection Regulation and in section 34(1) of the Data Protection Act 2018. This exception is not subject to the ‘public interest test’, so we are not required to consider if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exception.

Please refer to Annex B of this request which is the Daily Winter Action Plans for the dates requested. We have also applied regulation 11(2) of the EIRs (personal information) to some of the information requested in this annex as it is personal data of a third party and disclosing it would contravene the data protection principles in Article 5(1) of the General Data Protection Regulation and in section 34(1) of the Data Protection Act 2018. This exception is not subject to the ‘public interest test’, so we are not required to consider if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exception.

Annex C of this request is the masternaught data from the gritters that serviced the M74 southbound near Junction 9. Masternaught data tracks the location, speed and level of salt distributed on the road surface.